In the wake of a new direction for Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel Studios has announced a wider change for all of its TV shows. As per reports from The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel shows will now have proper showrunners that write pilots and show bibles. The studio will also prefer to focus on multiseason serialized TV, rather than limited series like WandaVision, Loki, and so on.
However, although Marvel has dressed this up as a studio decision made by corporate genius Kevin Feige, TV writer Kelechi Urama, known for Run the World, Check Yes or No, and The Incredible Cases of Zara Gordon has taken to X to clarify that it’s not Feige and studio execs who should be getting credit for this (wise) decision.
“We didn’t strike for nearly 5 months for companies to take credit for this,” she wrote. “These companies aren’t doing this simply bc they realized the process wasn’t working, but because writers struck to require that Showrunners be writers and not non-writing execs/directors—and we WON!”
Indeed, Marvel Studios and others like them clearly had no intention of putting such changes into action until the strikes. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have lasted 148 days overall, with writers striking for months to get these hard-earned wins.
Moving forward, it’s important to remember that many seemingly studio-led brainwaves aren’t going to be stemming from production executives like Kevin Feige. If studios come out with commitments about not using AI for writing, remember that those statements were also won from the strikes. If writers stay on shows for the long term, in bigger and more diverse writing rooms, that’s also going to be due to the deals struck around writers’ length of employment and the size of writing teams.
Even the very quality if the shows over the next few years will partially be done to those 148 days of striking. We’ll never know what future TV shows might have had if the writers hadn’t gone on strike, but creative, writer-driven shows were likely not to be at the fore, given that many writers were working in simply unliveable conditions.
Instead of being quick to applaud studios for any more changes of direction that are sure to come in the next few months, we need to remember who actually sacrificed their time, energy, and money in order to win us those shifts. Not only is it going to hopefully be better for the writers themselves, but they’ve also won us as fans an environment for better and more in-depth entertainment—and that cannot be forgotten.
(featured image: Disney+)
