Will Your TV Go on Strike?

Good primer in today's Variety about the impact of a possible Hollywood writers' strike after the Guild contract expires at the end of the month. (In an extremely small nutshell, the writers are looking for a bigger share of revenue from all those non-TV ways in which you've been watching TV--downloads, DVDs and so on.) Says Variety, it's looking more like a matter of when than if, but the when involves several possibilities, each of which would hit the networks in a different way. Should writers walk out in November, crippling February sweeps? Wait until January, which would hurt spring TV and pilot season? Or hold off until June, when the actors' and directors' contracts run out? (Unlikely, says Variety.)

The strike would affect movies as well as TV, but no one watches them anymore, right? When and if there's a strike, the likely TV effects include:

* Late night will be among the earliest genres hit. The last strike, in 1988, took Carson and Letterman off the air, and of course today there are all the more shows on the line. Then...

* Scripted shows would peter out, though not immediately--with a strike in mind, networks and studios have tried to cram in as much production as possible. Still, a November strike should deplete the networks' stores by very early next year. Hence...

* American Idol will be even more of a steamroller than it already was. The 1988 strike launched a wave of primetime newsmagazines; this time, the space-fillers will probably be reality shows, both those already in the works and others being ordered up in case of emergency. And, hey, why not a fourth or fifth night of audition shows? Conversely...

* The cancellation guillotine may start choppin' early. It could be more cost-effective to shut down marginal series altogether than to bring them back again. But...

* There's always outsourcing! There is talk that networks may strike deals to air foreign shows to air during the strike gap, which may not be a bad thing. Why have NBC remake The IT Crowd when we can go to the source? Finally...

* Things could get hairy for shows like 24 and Lost, which don't have much margin for error in a schedule that crams them into the last half of the season without weeks off. Let's hope the Smoke Monster can write.