Industry frets over its future as strike strangles TV season
Glenn Garvin | McClatchy Newspapers
Issue date: 1/17/08 Section: Lifestyles
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.
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.
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