The Writers' Strike and the Ratings Impact

Some concerns brought up by the Writers Guild strike were the questions of whether some viewers, deprived of their favorite shows, would start watching less of the tube, and whether veteran shows unaffected by the strike would also feel the brunt.

The evidence is mixed. Most shows bleed viewers over time even without labor disruption. Also, the impact of the strike was uneven for different shows and different networks -- some series, particularly sitcoms, have now been off the air for nearly four months, the same length as a summer hiatus. Scripted shows like Lost and One Tree Hill began their runs in January as they had been scheduled to do all along, and reality shows went on as usual. And most important for comparison purposes, we're still two weeks away from the return of the first shows that had their production stopped by the strike (the CBS Monday comedy lineup).

A lot has been made of the audience erosion for the top-rated show on television, American Idol, but that can be easy to overstate. While ratings for the show will likely never again reach the heights they did in 2006, Idol airings are virtually always the highest rated shows of their week unless there's a special event like the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. This seems to be a case of normal attrition for a veteran show, and perhaps some exhaustion with the "bad auditions" format. It's also possible that ratings will rebound if one or more performers catches the public eye, as was not the case for the relatively buzz-free 2007 season.

One pattern that has been noted in the last couple of months is that ratings for some debuting or returning series have started out quite high, as if viewers have decided to eagerly sample increasingly rare examples of something new on the air, but then have slowly declined. Celebrity Apprentice began with numbers that were noticeably higher than those for the ill-fated Los Angeles season last winter, although the better time period (9 PM Thursday as opposed to 10 PM Sunday) certainly had a lot to do with that. But its ratings for last week were its lowest of the season. Lost, which airs opposite Celebrity Apprentice, has also seen much of the hoopla surrounding its return dissipate, as it has lost about two million viewers since its return and suffered the ignominy of being beaten last week by Don't Forget the Lyrics!, which rode the American Idol wave.

Most new series have also tailed off substantially since their debuts, the big exception being Moment of Truth, which has developed a good deal of scandal-related buzz. Eli Stone, which follows Lost for ABC on Thursdays, has lost over one-third of its audience since its January 31 debut. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles lost about 20% of the audience it had for its first Monday airing. Dance War and American Gladiators likewise saw some erosion. Some of this is par for the course, but what's noteworthy in many of these cases is the lack of substantial competition. Eli Stone has been facing reruns of Without a Trace and the similarly new Lipstick Jungle, and has still not been able to stop the bleeding. Ratings were extremely high for the premiere of Oprah's Big Give on Sunday, so that will represent the latest test.

What everyone is waiting to see are the ratings for returning series, particularly series like the NBC Thursday comedies, none of which were lighting up the Nielsens at the time they were shut down, or for a new show like The Big Bang Theory, one of a small number of new fall series that are shooting new post-strike episodes for airing in April and May (others include Gossip Girl, Moonlight, and Reaper). For other newcomers from fall 2007 that have been set aside till next fall, a category that includes Private Practice, Pushing Daisies, Dirty Sexy Money, Life, and Chuck, the question of whether the strike fatally wounded any momentum they had built up won't be answered for another six months at the earliest. The thinking is that procedurals like CSI and its CBS imitators will fare well due to their relatively self-contained plots, while series like Desperate Housewives may take more time to get up to speed. As for Heroes, which had already been struggling to recapture its buzz prior to the strike, it will return in the fall having aired only 11 episodes since May 2007, many of which were not well received. This won't be easy to overcome.

So while the afterglow of the strike settlement is still fresh in Hollywood, we might not get solid answers about the dispute's ultimate impact on scripted programming until the fall.

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