Andor's Tony Gilroy says streaming data secrecy is "close to ruining this amazing industry"

Disney+ streaming series Andor picked up multiple Emmy nominations today, setting a new critical benchmark for Star Wars on TV in the process. All told, the Rogue One prequel series brought in eight nominations this morning, including for writing, directing, visual effects, sound editing, music, and cinematography—as well as an overall nomination for Best Drama Series. It was enough to bring series creator Tony Gilroy out of WGA strike seclusion to do a few interviews—although not enough to keep him from bringing up reasons why the writers strike continues to be important.

Gilroy, a writer-producer on the series, initially faced some critique for continuing on with the producer side of his multi-hyphenate after the strike broke out—but then issued a statement saying he’d be ceasing all duties on the series’s second season after a massive meeting with WGA leadership about a week in to the labor action. Since then, he’s been maintaining radio silence on the show due to strike-related prohibitions on promoting the series. (As he told IndieWire today, “I’m not in contact with the show at the moment…I’m doing this today to say thank you, and I’m hoping this doesn’t come off as a promotional idea.”)

But when the question of the show’s ratings was raised, Gilroy didn’t hesitate to pivot the conversation to one of the bugbears of the ongoing WGA-studio conflict: Streaming’s near-total secrecy about viewership numbers, which means that, among other things, Gilroy has no actual idea how many people have seen his (now highly decorated) show.

Here’s Gilroy, talking to IndieWire:

One of the central issues of this entire labor experience is that I don’t have any idea what the audience is. We don’t know what that is, and I think that the obscurity of data doesn’t help anyone. Really. I think it looks like low-hanging fruit and easy profitability for certain corporations, but in the end it just crushes any kind of free market. It crushes the economics of the business, it means people are being overpaid and underpaid and never properly paid. It means that productions are overloaded with expenses up top because what used to be commonly residuals and royalties now have to be front loaded. I think it’s distorted and warped and is close to ruining this amazing industry. So I wish I knew how many people watched, I wish I knew who they were, and I’m not sure that that’s possible.

The upshot of this is something that’s been a cornerstone of the conversations about the ways streaming has forced the industry to evolve (or possibly devolve) in recent years—and which is already a major talking point as SAG-AFTRA prepares to go on strike later tonight, too. I.e., that the streaming industry’s resistance to releasing viewership numbers (except when they make them look really good, of course) isn’t just about not giving up data to the competition: It also makes it exceedingly difficult for things like royalties and pay structures to be linked to a show’s performance, or for showrunners to know if they have a hit show at all. Given how much of the current conversation is about the ways streaming has altered, and, more often than not, shriveled, the ways writers and actors get paid for their work, it’s definitely, as Gilroy notes, one of those topics that’s not going away any time soon.