Nothing holds back progress like a union mentality.
One of the driving reasons TV is so bad today and is hemorrhaging viewers and spawning cord cutters is the writer’s strike in the ‘90’s. During that strike we got “reality” TV, supposedly unscripted. It was horrible. But the Writer’s Guild “won” thus keeping prices so high and benefits and restrictions so outrageous that whole genres died. No more variety shows, for example. Too expensive.
The production costs are so high that film makers can’t afford to take a chance. That’s why we get only remakes and sequels; too afraid to risk the money on a potential failure. Thus, they are more or less guaranteed to fail.
Well, more power to the actors. Ironically, the more successful they are in their negotiations, the less work there will be.
The last three writer's strikes were in 1960, 1988, and 2007. The 1988 strike didn't kill the variety show. It had been dead long before. And saying that variety shows were too expensive is absurd. They were famously inexpensive. All you needed was a TV studio. Most of the crew worked one day. It's the same model as all of the talent shows now. A stage, a studio audience, a series of acts and a few cameras to give you enough coverage to cut between. That's why there were so many variety shows back in the 1970s. Especially as summer replacements. Then people got burned out on them and by the late 1970s they were dead. It had nothing to do with writers' wages.
Here's WIkipedia's take: "Variety shows began to fade from popularity during the 1970s, when research began to show that variety shows appealed to an older audience that was less appealing to advertisers; over the course of the so-called "rural purge", several of the early era variety shows were canceled, though newer ones (fewer in number nonetheless, and generally stripped down to music and comedy) continued to be created and broadcast for several years after. By the late 1970s, even these generally celebrity-driven variety shows had mostly ended production, in part because of audience burnout;[3] the highest-rated variety show of 1975, Cher, was only the 22nd-most watched show of the year."