Industry frets over its future as strike strangles TV season

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," one network official said. "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.

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," said Josh Felser, the former Fox executive who founded Crackle. Adds Jim Louderback, chief executive officer at Revision3.com, another video-sharing Web site 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," said Tom Bierbaum, the network's research boss. "Viewers are hungering for alternatives" to the steadily increasing numbers of reruns on network schedules, he added.

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 said. "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 said 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 added 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," said 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.