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Disputes, delays, and more, oh my!
There’s a lot of disputes going around in Hollywood at the moment. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are both in the midst of a heated battle with studios like Disney over proper pay and reasonable protections. Meanwhile, Disney itself is in the midst of a heated battle, this one with cable TV provider Charter Spectrum.
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The dispute began last Friday with Disney pulling over two dozen channels and stations off the air, impacting over 15 million subscribers in densely populated cities like Los Angeles and New York City. The dispute doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon, and The View was the first major show to feel the effects of it during its season 27 premiere today. In fact, if you can believe it, Disney is going out of its way to urge people to ditch cable TV entirely, which sure, is as modern as a company can get, but it doesn’t exactly smell right coming from a company that owns ABC.
Elsewhere, concerns over Star Wars joining the MCU in the worst way possible are running rampant after yet another calendar shuffle impacted half a dozen Marvel projects last weekend.
Whoopi Goldberg wasn’t the only person to miss out on the season 27 premiere of The View
If The View is one of your favorite daytime talk shows and you’re a paying customer of Spectrum Cable, you’d be perfectly within your right to be miffed about the ongoing Spectrum Cable Disney dispute. After all, you completely missed the season 27 premiere, which kind of sucks if you’re a fan. In fact, over 15 million people who pay for Spectrum, many of whom reside in The View’s hometown New York City, missed the premiere. Upon flipping the channel to ABC, Deadline reports that viewers were met with this message: “The Walt Disney Company, owner of this channel, has removed their programming from Spectrum. We offered Disney a fair deal, and yet they continue to demand an excessive increase.”
My grandmother may have passed away, but she was an avid watcher of The View, and if she was easing into her comfy sofa on a Tuesday morning excited to tune in to her favorite “program,” as she liked to call it, I can tell you right now she would not only be confused by that message, but also upset. This leads us to our next point, which I can’t help but view through the eyes of a 94-year-old Sicilian lady born in 1928, and I urge you to do the same.
Cable-shmable — Disney says to heck with negotiations and urges people to pay for streaming instead
Labor Day weekend is a three-day weekend for millions of people in the U.S., but this year it was also “frustrating” (Dinsey’s words, not mine) thanks to the ongoing Spectrum Cable Disney dispute. Millions of Spectrum customers were barred from watching their favorite sports and daytime talk shows like The View. Disney recognizes this and said in a statement that the ball is in Charter Spectrum’s court to revisit Disney’s offer (we have a feeling Charter Spectrum is saying the same thing).
“Instead of enjoying major sporting events such as the return of college football and the US Open, ESPN and other Disney-owned channels like ABC were blacked out due to a dispute between Spectrum’s parent company—Charter Communications—and Disney Entertainment. Unfortunately, the dispute is still ongoing.
Again, I can’t help but imagine my 94-year-old Sicilian grandma being met with this statement. I can hear her now shouting “What the heck is Hulu plus live TV? Why can’t I just have my cable?”
Yeah, Disney. Why can’t she just have her cable?
Schooch over Marvel, Star Wars could be joining you on that new calendar schedule
As you may have heard over the weekend, Disney made significant changes to seven of Marvel’s TV shows, even renaming Agatha: Coven of Chaos to Agatha: Darkhold Diaries in the process. Understandably, there’s now concern that the Mouse House might do the same thing to Star Wars, and it just so happens that Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is at the center of the conversation. Nothing has been confirmed yet, but it’s not hard to imagine Disney ripping off the galactic bandaid eventually, especially as it aims to scale back its serialized content.
That’s all we have for you today. If you are one of the millions of paying Spectrum customers lost at sea with nothing to watch today, know that you have a Sicilian guardian angel in your corner, furiously wagging her finger at Disney. See you back here tomorrow.
