It’s Monday, and I, too, contemplated a strike when my alarm went off.

Hello from Los Angeles, where we’re bracing for a W.G.A. strike vote, resenting Netflix’s free-spending ways, and recovering from PaleyFest.

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W.G.A.: STRIKE ONE

On Friday evening, after two weeks of contract talks, the W.G.A. leadership sent an e-mail asking its 12,000 members for the authority to call a strike. The W.G.A. says it’s still bargaining with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television producers, but has made little progress on issues like streaming media residuals, changes to pension and health plans, and TV writers’ salaries. The e-mail set no date for the strike vote, but in raising the issue, the W.G.A. reminds the studios of the one real piece of leverage the writers have—they can always close their laptops.

Many writers I talk to seem inclined to vote yes to authorize a strike—but that doesn’t mean they believe there will actually be one. “There was such a bad feeling left from the last strike that there will be a huge resistance,” one screenwriter told me. During the 100-day 2007–2008 strike, scripted shows like ER and 30 Rock aired with shortened seasons, talk shows rolled on without their writers, and reality shows like American Idol churned on unaffected. Film studios rushed screenwriters to finish scripts before the W.G.A. contract ended, and we’ll never know if affected movies like Transformers 2 and Confessions of a Shopaholic would have been the Citizen Kanes of their genres with a little more time for a polish.

Hollywood writers walk a picket line near the CBS Radford Studios during the 100-day 2007-2008 strike in Los Angeles, November 5, 2007. By David McNew/Getty Images.

It seems worth noting that the strike talk is unfolding as a newly introduced National Right to Work law sits in a Republican-controlled Congress, with the potential to cut unions of all kinds off at the knees. As Deadline’s David Robb writes, all six W.G.A. strikes since the 1960s have occurred during Republican presidential administrations, perhaps because union members feel more embattled or because the studios feel more emboldened.

IT’S OFFICIAL

After weeks of talking, Paramount and Jim Gianopulos have sealed the deal, and the former Fox exec will be named chairman and C.E.O of the Melrose Ave. studio, multiple trades reported Monday morning. Good luck, Jim G!

NETFLIX ENVY

Netflix is expected to spend more than $6 billion this year on original and acquired programming, The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Flint and Shalini Ramachandran report, and that’s ticking some people off. The streaming service is driving up costs industrywide by stealing competing execs, inspiring actors to demand ever higher salaries, and straining crew bases with its ravenous appetite for production. “You just can’t compete with someone coming in with fresh money, low overhead and a lot less baggage than you,” Darrell Miller, an entertainment lawyer at Fox Rothschild LLP, tells the Journal.