The Hollywood actors’ strike is finally ending.

Late in the evening on November 8 — 118 days after walking off set — SAG-AFTRA, the union for actors and performers, and the AMPTP, an association of Hollywood’s largest studios and production companies, announced that they’d reached a deal.

The Hollywood writers strike officially ended on Tuesday, October 10, when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted to ratify its contract with the AMPTP (the organization that represents Hollywood’s major studios and production companies). But the actors are still very much on the picket line — and there’s no clear end in sight.

SAG-AFTRA — the 160,000-member union that represents Hollywood’s actors and performers — has been in talks with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) since October 2. But late in the evening on October 11, the AMPTP released a statement announcing that talks had been suspended, illuminating the first of two major sticking points in the negotiations.

Hollywood’s long, contentious writers’ strike has ended.

Late in the day on Sunday, September 24 — after 146 days of labor stoppage, the second-longest strike in Hollywood history — the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents Hollywood’s writers, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), an association of Hollywood’s largest studios and production companies, announced that an agreement had been reached. On Tuesday, September 26, the union’s leadership announced that they’d voted to end the strike and recommended the membership vote in favor of ratifying the contract.

After facing widespread disgust over her decision to bring back her show in the midst of an entertainment industry writers’ strike, Drew Barrymore will keep The Drew Barrymore Show off the air indefinitely. Well, at least until the strike ends.

A week ago, America’s talk show sweetheart was at the center of the biggest flare-up (so far) of the four-month, ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike. On September 10, Barrymore announced on social media that her show was coming back, despite being struck by the Writers Guild of America.

Trying to figure out what’s going on with the Hollywood double strike — both writers and actors are still on the picket lines — can feel like peering into a particularly muddled crystal ball. On the one hand, the unions have exhibited extraordinary solidarity; on the other, the AMPTP fired one crisis PR firm and hired another, and has denied rumors of division in its ranks.

But onlookers are likely to have plenty of questions. Here are four of the most relevant, with what we know about the answers.

A lot has been said, written, and chanted about what actors and writers in Hollywood want from their dual strikes currently underway, but what exactly is it that the studios and streamers want in all this? After all, they’re putting a lot of money on the line here. While in the short term, many of them are doing okay, in the long term, this could spell trouble for the very bottom lines they’re seeking to protect by playing such hardball in the first place.

The exception here is maybe Netflix, which benefits from having a slate of reality and foreign-made programming and viewers’ love of shows they’ve already watched a hundred times. But that will get old eventually, too, and Netflix’s viewers will need something fresh to chew on.

There’s a special kind of torture to events with no end in sight. “In a lot of ways, it feels like the pandemic, round two,” says Meghan Pleticha, a Los Angeles-based writer, of the current writers’ and actors’ strikes that have much of the entertainment industry at a standstill. She doesn’t mean the illness-and-death part, but rather the will-this-ever-end part. Momentum ebbs and flows, and every day feels like a haze.

The past several years have taught Pleticha, who previously wrote for HBO’s Silicon Valley, how to scramble to get by — and those rough years are part of how writers were pushed to this point in the first place. That doesn’t make any of this particularly pleasant. She had been picking up work as a script coordinator, which is not a writers’ union job, to cover her bills as of late. The shutdown has taken that off the table, too. “I totally support the strike, it’s just interesting that it has also affected my backup,” she says. “I do have the benefit of also understanding how it affects crew. It’s rough, because they didn’t ask for this fight.”

Editor’s note, July 13: SAG-AFTRA — the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — has voted to order their own strike, joining the Writers Guild of America on the picket line. You can read more about Hollywood’s first double strike in 63 years here. Our story on the WGA strike, originally published on April 25 and last updated on May 2, follows.

Hollywood’s writers are on strike.

For the first time in 63 years, Hollywood has a double strike on its hands.

The contract between SAG-AFTRA (the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, two guilds that merged in 2012) and AMPTP (American Motion Picture and Television Producers), which represents Hollywood’s studios and production companies, expired at midnight on Wednesday, July 12. SAG-AFTRA’s national board unanimously voted today to order a strike; membership had previously authorized the strike, with nearly 98 percent of voters in favor. Meanwhile, the WGA (Writers Guild of America) has been on strike since May 2.

Editor’s note, June 30, 10:57 pm ET: On June 30, the day the SAG-AFTRA contract was set to expire, the guild announced that the negotiation had been extended to July 12. On June 23, the DGA voted to approve its contract with AMPTP; 41 percent of the guild’s membership voted, and 87 percent of voters ratified. WGA remains on strike.

Editor’s note, June 6, 10:30 am ET: On June 3, DGA leadership announced it had reached a tentative contract agreement, which has not yet been ratified by the guild’s membership. On June 5, two days ahead of the start of bargaining, SAG-AFTRA membership voted by an overwhelming 97.91 percent margin to authorize a strike, a move designed to give them leverage at the bargaining table. WGA remains on strike.

Thousands of television and film writers who are part of the Writers Guild of America are in the middle of a historic strike. They’re forming picket lines in front of studios and productions in New York and Los Angeles and shutting down active sets. The last time they went on strike was 15 years ago — when streaming’s impact on the film and television industry was only just taking shape. This time around, they are striking for better residuals and rights against the looming threat of AI, among other concerns.

At the core of this dispute is streaming and how it has revolutionized the industry. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don’t have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, it has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid.

“Beating up on screenwriters,” John Gregory Dunne wrote in 1996, “is a Hollywood blood sport; everyone in the business thinks he or she can write, if only time could be found.” To put it another way, everybody in show business thinks they could do what writers do, given a little uninterrupted headspace. “That writers find the time is evidence of their inferior position in the food chain,” Dunne quipped. He knew the territory; by 1996, he and his wife, Joan Didion, had been working as Hollywood screenwriters for about 30 years. In those decades, they’d also participated in four writers strikes, labor stoppages by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the union that bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s many working writers.

All these years later, Dunne’s words read prophetically in the face of yet another Hollywood writers strike. The idea that screenwriting is easy stuff, that anyone can do it, that writers are dispensable — this is all old news. But the attitude takes on a new dimension when you’re presented with a tool that could enable the studios to crop writers right out of the picture, or at least minimize the need to pay them, and an entertainment landscape that might not mind the results.