With strike ending, TV will still be on 'pause'

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming

.

Not.

With all indications that striking Hollywood writers would go back to work today, after three months, TV fans may be expecting their favorite shows to return in a trice.

They'll be back, all right, but you'll have to wait. At least a month, more likely two, and in some cases, until fall, or even 2009.

"It's messy and complicated," said Steve Battaglio, senior correspondent for TV Guide. "I'm sure the business affairs offices at the studios and the networks are hard at work figuring out what can be done with each show."

The strike was like a brick through a picture window in the mansion that is the television business. Boards, in the form of quick-fill reality shows and previously shelved short-run series, got nailed up fast to keep out the elements as bigwigs pondered whether to replace the glass or take the whole structure down and rebuild from scratch.

Some made provocative pronouncements that the strike would power radical change ("our industry's version of a forest fire," said NBC-Universal boss Jeff Zucker). But most observers and participants believe that technological forces long in place, and not the strike, will continue, with increasing pressure, to move the industry.

"The TV business has been changing significantly for the last 10 years, just the way the newspaper and record business, even the movies, have been changing," said Hal Vogel, author of the textbook

Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis

.

The seventh edition of his book, published in May, mentioned many of the structural changes in promotion, series development, and production and presentation schedules that some executives have touted as the latest news in the heat of the strike.

For the writers, however, the strike was a frantic dash to grab a seat before the train got too far down the track, to get paid for their shows no matter who promotes them when they're finished, or how they're delivered - backed by multimillion-dollar commercials on a 53-inch HD flat screen, downloaded for 99 cents onto a shoe phone, or beamed straight to the brain by some gizmo that's yet to be invented.

They reached a tentative agreement that, according a variety of reports, doubles what they are paid for movie and TV shows sold online, and for the first time addresses streaming content. In the first two years of the three-year contract, writers would get a flat fee of up to $1,200 when their work was streamed digitally on the Internet. In the third year, the fee would move to 2 percent of a distributor's gross receipts from advertising. The bigger the new delivery system becomes, the bigger the payment to writers. If it were to reach current television levels, it could exceed $50,000 per episode.

"The strike was about one thing: sharing in the profits of the new media," said Marc Guggenheim, producer of ABC's

Eli Stone

. "Everyone is trying to keep up with the march of technology."

"Anybody who tells you they know how it will look long term is deluding themselves or lying," said William Fordes, co-executive producer of NBC's

Law & Order

. The next battle will come, he suggested, when writers start finding ways to bypass studios and networks altogether.

But what's happening now?

Each current show has a different story, and TVGuide.com maintains a running update:

» READ MORE: http://tinyurl.com/ytldet

.

There are generalities.

Saturday Night Live

should be back with new episodes Feb. 23. Sitcoms will come next, some as soon as mid-March. "We'll be working seven days a week for the next 12 weeks," said veteran Chuck Lorre, executive producer of CBS's

Two and a Half Men

and

The Big Bang Theory

. "I can't tell you how grateful everyone is about that."

Besides Lorre's, other comedies that should have new episodes up by April include

30 Rock

,

The Office

and

My Name Is Earl

on NBC, and CBS's

How I Met Your Mother

.

Dramas, generally, take longer to manufacture. There's not a lot of pressure for more episodes of successful freshman shows this season. Only the CW's

Reaper

should be back in spring, with ABC's

Pushing Daisies

,

Private Practice

and

Dirty Sexy Money

all set to return in late summer or fall, along with NBC's

Chuck

and

Life

.

The strike has put the brakes on new series, many of which would already be in development, increasing the odds that marginally successful shows will also return in the fall. But with work resuming this week, there should also be a reasonable complement of fresh material across all the networks.

Established drama hits, in the loose sense of the word, should almost all have new episodes by late April. The roster ranges from NBC's

Medium

, whose fresh episodes made before the strike return next week, to ABC's

Boston Legal

to all the CBS mystery shows.

Big hits like

Lost

and

Desperate Housewives

at ABC and Fox's

House

will be making more episodes for this spring, too, though NBC's

Heroes

(too complicated) won't be back until fall and Fox won't raise the curtain on

24

's next day until next year.

Everybody in TV agrees that the strike was a concrete acknowledgment of the importance of "the new media."

Law & Order

's Fordes compared it to the time when vaudevillians first contemplated film. Ian Sander, executive producer of CBS's

Ghost Whisperer

, cited the introduction of TV - when before there had been only movies.

But as all the showbiz hustlers wait breathlessly to reap new profits in the challenging tomorrow, it's nice to know back home that the engine is chugging again, bringing most of your old friends back before summer, to comfort you and keep you warm.