Ellen Gray | McElhenney: No pact, no 'Philly'

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Not everything's sunny these days in southern California, where the possibility of a writers' strike has nearly everyone in the television industry talking.

For St. Joe's Prep grad Rob McElhenney, the creator and one of the stars of FX's "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," a strike would hit home.

Though he's running the show on "It's Always Sunny," McElhenney's considered labor, not management.

"I would not be going to work" in the event of a writers' strike, he said Monday during an FX cocktail party at the Television Critics Association's summer meetings.

"I'm in [several] unions - the Screen Actors Guild, AFTRA, the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild - so if a strike happens, production will shut down," he said.

And though the work he does as an actor, writer and producer might be a far cry from what many of the people he grew up with at Moyamensing and Dickinson consider labor, McElhenney's pretty sure his extended family back home will understand if he finds himself sidelined by a strike.

"On my mother's side, all of my uncles are carpenters, so they're all in the local . . . and also electricians, so they're in the electricians' union as well," he said.

"And then on my father's side, they're all roofers, or a number of them are roofers. I'm [from] a union family. My grandfather was a longshoreman. I'm born and bred union and have been all the way through," he said.

So if there's a strike, "they're going to get it."

The issues, though, remain complicated to most outside the industry.

"It's the downloading and residuals [payments that actors and writers get when their shows are rerun] . . . which is something that the WGA [Writers Guild of America] doesn't want to open up again, but the corporations do," McElhenney said.

If you've ever watched a TV show on your computer through a network Web site or downloaded one from a site like iTunes, you've participated in a part of the industry that networks, studios and the unions are all still trying to come to grips with.

As Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, told reporters here earlier this month, "we need to be able to experiment" with new forms of distribution and programming.

"We need to be able to do so without being subject to a lot of the old legacy contractual restrictions that, frankly, a lot of our competitors such as YouTube that are competing for the advertising dollar are not subject to.

"It's frustrating, and I can see their side of it as well," McElhenney said. "It's a fragmented audience now, and it's very difficult to account for a lot of the money that's coming in, so I think they're working on a system to ameliorate that."

Meanwhile, however, the first two seasons of "It's Always Sunny" are available on iTunes for $1.99 per episode, and "we haven't seen any of that," he said. "In fact, we don't know how much they're selling."

McElhenney, who recently attended a show-runners' dinner to discuss the strike (where he sat next to "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof and lobbied for another appearance on the show, where he played an "Other" last February), said he hasn't yet been asked, as some producers reportedly have, to move up production on his show or to bank episodes for a strike.

"We won't know until probably about September if we're coming back again" for a fourth season. "So if we were to find out we were coming back in September, that would give us enough time to do another season," he said.

"The contract for the Writers Guild is up Oct. 31," he said. "However, it's my understanding that we might be doing [any strike] with the Screen Actors Guild, which would be in June," meaning that if an agreement's not reached, the writers would be "working without a contract until June, and then the strikes would be together."

Based on what he's hearing, a strike looks "likely," McElhenney said, though it's still early. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that everything gets worked out, but you never know."

If the worst happens, the writer/actor, whose original pilot for "It's Always Sunny" cost $200, is at least in better shape financially than he was the last time he was involved in a strike.

"I've been through it once, years ago, [when] the Screen Actors Guild went on strike, just the commercial actors went on strike. For six months," he said, recalling the 2000 SAG job action.

Before the strike, "I was in a Burger King commercial, a Mitsubishi commercial, a 1-800-Collect commercial, and then all of the sudden it just stopped, because we were striking," he said.

So he waited tables, "which, you know, maybe I'll have to go back to again, I don't know."

Still, this time, he admitted, "I got a little bit of money in the bank." *

Daily News TV critic Ellen Gray (graye@phillynews.com) is covering the Television Critics Association's summer meetings in Beverly Hills. For more, see her blog at go.philly.com/ellengray or join her at 11 a.m today on philly.com, when she and Inquirer TV critic Jonathan Storm will be hosting another online chat.