As strike strangles TV season, industry frets over its future

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Like mutilated corpses on “CSI” or “Law & Order,” the victims of a television writers strike are starting to pile up: Last week’s People’s Choice Awards. Sunday night’s Golden Globes ceremony. The rest of this TV season—and very soon, Hollywood insiders say, next season as well.

Although the increasingly bitter strike is in its third month, a stockpile of completed shows kept it largely invisible to TV viewers until the replacement of Sunday’s glitzy Golden Globes ceremony with a dry, celebrity-free press conference. (Things aren’t looking so hot for the Globes’ big brother, the Oscars ceremony, either.)

But the backlog of finished programs is about to run dry. And industry players say the refusal of writers to produce scripts has made it impossible not only to resume this TV season, but to plan the next one.

The strike, they say, has quietly strangled the pilot season, when network executives order sample episodes of proposed new shows for next fall. Even if the work stoppage were to be resolved tomorrow—and nobody expects that—the TV networks would have trouble stitching together a fall season.

“I don’t think it’s going to end anytime soon,” says one network official. “I don’t know what the worst-case scenario is, but none of it’s good.”

The strike has inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, thrown thousands of stage hands, technicians, teamsters and production personnel out of work, and sent economic ripples through every segment of Hollywood, hurting everyone from caterers to agents.

And throughout the industry, worries fester that the strike may do permanent damage to television. “We’re funneling viewers right off TV and onto YouTube,” fumes veteran screenwriter Rafael Lima, whose deal for a drama about DEA agents on the Mexican border was scuttled by the strike.

“Do you remember the alligator and the boa constrictor that died in each other’s arms in the Everglades a couple of years ago while they were eating one another?” asks Lima, who teaches in the University of Miami’s film department. “That’s what I think is happening—a murder-suicide pact on the part of the producers and the writers. It’s so counterproductive and polarizing, I don’t see how it will end well.”

Because the backlog of original programs kept network schedules relatively normal through December—and Nielsen ratings typically dip during the Christmas season anyway—there is no evidence yet of a massive desertion by the TV audience. But there are signs that viewers are restless:

_The Internet video site YouTube’s audience has jumped 18 percent in the past two months. Crackle.com, a Web site that offers short scripted shows, more than doubled its hits in November and December.

“If the television viewing experience is altered negatively by the strike, it makes sense that people are going to try another platform,” says Josh Felser, the former Fox executive who founded Crackle. Adds Jim Louderback, chief executive officer at Revision3.com, another video-sharing website with a billowing audience: “Once they’ve seen us, will those people spend as much time watching TV? Not if we do our jobs right—they’ll find some of our shows addictive.”

_ABC’s fading news show “Nightline,” competing only against reruns of late-night talk shows, scored its best ratings in years and finished ahead of David Letterman’s “Late Show” in one key demographic group in the quarterly Nielsens. Letterman promptly reached a side deal with the union that allowed him to go back to work with his writers (“I know what you’re thinking,” Letterman cracked during his first monologue. “You’re thinking: This crap is written?”), and Jay Leno and others returned to the air with makeshift shows.

_Ratings also have surged for new reality shows, which are not affected by the strike because they are produced without scripts. NBC, battered all season in the Nielsens, racked up big numbers three times in a week this month with the debuts of “American Gladiator,” “The Biggest Loser 5” and “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

“NBC has had a real hot streak with our reality shows since the new year,” says Tom Bierbaum, the network’s research boss. “Viewers are hungering for alternatives” to the steadily increasing numbers of reruns on network schedules, he adds.

The worry among some writers is that viewers who immerse themselves in reality programs during the strike may decide to stick with them—and the networks, enchanted by the cheaper costs, would be only too happy to accommodate them, putting more writers out of business.

Their fears got chilling support from the news that MyNetworkTV, the smallest of the broadcast networks, scored the highest ratings in its history last week with the debut of two reality shows, “Street Patrol” and “Jail.” Both are co-produced by John Langley, who invented TV’s reality genre with his Fox show “Cops”—which debuted during the previous TV writers strike in 1989.

“‘Cops’ didn’t come about because of the strike—it was in the works long before it started—but our timing was very good,” Langley admits. “The networks were looking for strike-proof entertainment, and `Cops’ had no writers and no scripts. There’s no question that the strike lubricated the sale environment.”

Anyone who finds that a worrisome portent of things to come, he says bluntly, is absolutely right: “I expect a plethora of bad reality series on the air next fall. ... As we all know, a lot of that is pure crap.” (“Of course,” he adds quickly, “I don’t include my own shows in that.”)

There may still be time to avert that, but not much—especially since the writers and studios broke off negotiations a month ago and haven’t even sat at the same table since. And the networks show little interest in resuming last fall’s season, which generated mediocre ratings without a single breakout hit.

“I think the fall season is dead,” says Cynthia Cidre, creator of the CBS Cuban-American family drama “Cane,” which aired the last of its 13 completed episodes early last month. “Nobody’s going to scramble around to make three or four new episodes of a show that hasn’t aired since December.”

The pilot season may be salvageable if there’s a quick settlement, but just barely. Ordinarily, networks read scores of prospective scripts in December, order dozens of pilots in January, and spend March and April winnowing them down to the five or six they’ll present to advertisers in May as additions to their fall lineups.

But when the writers went on strike Nov. 5, a month before pilot scripts were due, it wrecked the timetable.

“It’s screwed up, but not necessarily lost,” says Shawn Ryan, producer of CBS’ “The Unit” and FX’s “The Shield” (which may not appear at all this year because the striking Ryan has refused to edit the last three episodes). “They still have some time to pick pilots and make some—though not as many as usual—before the May (meetings with advertisers). In the end, though, I think they’re likely to do something different this year.”

The only thing that might put some scripted dramas and comedies on the fall schedule is if writers who are walking picket lines at the studios by day have been secretly working on pilot scripts at night and have them ready to go the minute it’s over—which, a lot of writers say, is exactly what has been happening.

“That’s just life and human nature,” one writer observes dryly. “You’ll see, two weeks after the strike ends—it’ll be like a dam bursting, a fount of creativity, with all these scripts coming in.”