Guess How Much Drew Carey Spent on Burgers for Striking Writers Without Going Over
Welcome to the end of the writers’ strike, where all the burgers are comped and the final tab doesn’t matter.
The WGA strike officially ended yesterday as the AMPTP finally made concessions to many of the union’s hardline demands regarding staffing practices and the role of artificial intelligence in screenwriting. The strike was the second longest in union history at 148 days, falling short to the 1988 strike by only five days, and the writers whom producers had previously hoped would return to work only when they began to lose their houses and apartments will resume work at various shows not reliant on the work of SAG actors as soon as next month.
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The AMPTP had hoped to starve out their adversaries in the WGA, but after hemorrhaging money for five months straight, the bosses ended up hungry for a compromise. As it turns out, some of the biggest names in entertainment were busy keeping food on writers’ tables, with few making contributions larger than former Whose Line Is It Anyway? host and the current face of The Price Is Right Drew Carey, who covered all picketing writers’ tabs at two restaurants in Toluca Lake and Los Angeles, racking up an estimated $710,000 in donated meals. I’d like to bid $710,001.
“If the strike is officially over tomorrow you’ll have til midnight to have one last meal at Bob’s Big Boy or Swingers!” Carey announced on Twitter this past Tuesday to the wonderfully well-fed writers who have been doing their best to get him to hit bankrupt for the past half-year. “GO CELEBRATE!” One grateful writer even organized a guest book at the aforementioned Big Boy for every grateful picketer to write their thanks to Carey for his costly support.
Though the math here is based on estimates and rumors, the Bob’s Big Boy tab is likely at least $500,000 if the information received by editor Lesley Goldberg is accurate, while the Swingers tab was reported to tally roughly $10,000 in meal tickets per week over the 21-week effort. That places the damage around three quarters of a million dollars — or roughly the total combined paychecks of all the Whose Line improvisers over 20 seasons.
