So we all know that the writers’ strike has shut down some of your favorite shows and that it’s cost the jobs of numerous below-the-line workers in the TV business. (The writers are making a counteroffer as negotiations resume today.) But it may claim a bigger casualty: TV critics may not have an excuse to go to L.A. in the middle of winter!
The New York Times’ TV Decoder blog reports that as a result of the strike, so many networks are bailing on the scheduled January TV Critics’ Association press tour that it may not happen. I kid the TCA, but even though I only go to press tour occasionally–I went for a couple days last winter while in L.A. to interview Sarah Silverman–this is a big deal to newspaper reporters around the country who rely on the tour for access to producers and stars. And if the January tour is canceled, many of their editors may take that as a reason to cut costs by not sending their critics to future tours.
But that’s just one of the many unintended consequences the strike may have. For instance, TV Week postulates that if the strike is resolved this winter, the networks may extend the seasons for at least some shows–cough! Lost! cough!–into the summer. With that move may come the end of the arbitrary September-to-May Nielsen TV season, which–with the scads of viewers cable has been able to draw in the summer–looks more and more like a dinosaur.
There are a lot of things that, at this point, the TV business does simply because they’ve always been done that way. To take another: the May “upfronts” presentations, in which the networks persuade advertisers to pay billions of dollars based on their anticipated performance of shows that will not air for another four months or more. Why? Because the networks had leverage to get advertisers to do it. But more and more advertisers have grown tired of the practice, and if there’s no fall season to announce come May, they may have an excuse to drop it.
It’s not so much that a long strike will radically change TV so much as it may accelerate changes that were likely to happen in the next five or ten years anyway. The boundaries between network and cable are becoming more porous too, what with NBC signing up with the producer of Deadliest Catch, and calling take-backsies on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, which returns to NBC from USA Network in January. And we’ve seen the first Internet show, quarterlife, migrate to TV–a move in the works before the strike, apparently, but certainly given urgency by it.
Whatever the deal the studios and writers reach may end up being relatively tiny in the big picture. The TV business they return to could be different in far bigger ways that neither of them can control.