Thanks to the Writer’s Guild strike:
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8 — Each year television viewers emerge in January from the traditional December blizzard of holiday specials and college football bowl games seeking new comforts from their favorite comedies and dramas, shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Two and a Half Men” and “House.”
Come January, however, they are more likely to be left to joust with the real-life “American Gladiators.”
As a result of the now monthlong strike by the Writers Guild of America, almost none of the most popular shows on prime time television will be offering new episodes to viewers after the first of the year, or for the foreseeable future.
In their place on the networks’ schedules will be repeats or reality programs, some of them returning but many of them new — shows like “The Moment of Truth,” a Fox offering in which contestants are strapped to a lie detector and asked about their most intimate secrets on a national stage.
The flood of reality programming will be the first repercussion that many Americans will see in prime time from the writers’ strike, an event that has drawn relatively little concern beyond Hollywood and Manhattan. But the strike looks likely to continue; talks between the writers and Hollywood studios collapsed Friday, with the sides still deeply divided.
And just as the last writer’s strike changed the face of television, this one is likely to have lasting implications as well:
The strike-fueled growth in reality programming also has the potential to change the face of prime-time television for years to come. Reality programs generally do not employ union-represented writers. While the most popular dramas and comedies will resume production of new episodes once the strike ends, the strike could mean the end for several new series, like “Bionic Woman” on NBC or “K-Ville” on Fox, that have struggled to gain a regular audience this fall. Just as the last writers’ strike, in 1988, helped to spawn a new form of vérité entertainment epitomized by programs like “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted,” the current writers’ strike will witness the debut of a number of new reality concepts.
“The Moment of Truth” is but one of as many as 27 hours a week of reality programming that the broadcast networks are planning for the first quarter of 2008, according to schedules released in recent weeks and interviews with network officials.
Just great.
