We can look forward to more episodes of “Lost” than the eight already shot for this season. “Gossip Girl” will return ASAP and may run fresh episodes into the summer.
It will take at least a couple of weeks to ramp up production of “Desperate Housewives,” which hopes to have seven new episodes before this bizarre season’s over. “30 Rock,” “Big Bang Theory,” “Boston Legal,” “Brothers & Sisters,” “Cold Case,” “Criminal Minds,” the “CSIs,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “House,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “My Name Is Earl,” “The Office,” “Smallville,” “Supernatural,” “Two and a Half Men,” “Ugly Betty” and “Without a Trace” each should have a handful of new episodes for April-May.
And poor Bill Lawrence is still trying to get the finale of “Scrubs” on the air at NBC.
Those are a few of the updates announced since the writers strike was declared virtually over.
Hollywood writers are expected to return to work Wednesday after a more than three-month strike that threw the season into chaos and which may have wide-ranging effects for how TV does business.
A vote scheduled for tonight is expected to approve the tentative settlement reached Sunday.
That means more than 10,000 writers will be back to work and viewers’ favorite scripted shows will resume production.
On the upside, writers gained the residuals they were seeking for their work streamed online and digitally, and jurisdiction over product created for the Internet.
A concession: Writers who work in animation and reality TV are still not covered by the guild contract.
The immediate result is to put late-night writing staffs back to work, and making the Academy Awards’ Feb. 24 date with destiny a sure thing.
The three-year deal with producers should also mean less short-term reliance on cheap “reality” shows to plug holes on the network schedules. Relief from that trashy, titillating filler couldn’t come too soon.
But we still won’t see “24” until 2009.
The bigger picture has yet to come into focus, but industry insiders say a foreshortened development season for next year’s shows may cause major changes in how the industry’s production calendar works.
In the past, May meant lavish “upfront” selling spectacles in New York, during which advertisers committed the bulk of their budgets to specific networks for the coming season.
This May, several networks have vowed to scale back, perhaps presenting bare-bones explanations of their plans to the press and advertising community, and more quietly pursuing face-to-face meetings with key advertisers.
NBC, in particular, has suggested the strike will help change things that may already seem outdated.
The strike has highlighted the need for “a re-engineering of our businesses from top to bottom,” according to NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker. “We’ve needed to do this for quite a few years now, but there was no real sense of urgency behind it.”
The strike changed all that, Zucker told the industry.
For starters, the traditional pilot season is a thing of the past at NBC, he stressed. The tradition of spending “tens of millions of dollars every year creating dozens of pilots that will never see the light of day” is history.
According to Variety, NBC could lead the way in changing the broadcast model to look more like the cable and British ways of doing business.
The shift would mean spending more time on fewer projects; skipping the September avalanche of new series and investing in year- round premieres instead, and ordering more shows straight to series in small batches, say six episodes, rather than spending huge sums on splashy pilot episodes.
Viewers will notice this TV season extends into June, with as many original episodes as possible given a place on the schedule once the shows are back in production.
While late-night springs back into action with writers immediately, it may take hour-long dramas several weeks to crank up production.
With the strike finally over, score one for the writing community, which with the approval of this contract enters the digital future with a deserved piece of the action.
Joanne Ostrow’s column appears Tuesday, Friday and Sunday: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
