NBC results look good

Here's another reality check for Writers Guild members: NBC Universal's 10 percent increase in fourth-quarter operating profit and 8 percent increase in revenue. Now it's true that aside from late night programming the strike wasn't having much of an impact on the October-December reporting period - scripted series were still being seen – but how do you explain NBC's ratings increase for the first 10 days of this year or the surprising success of silly shows like "American Gladiators"? "We've run out of some of the lowly rated scripted programming and we've replaced it with much more highly rated unscripted programming," said NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker in an interview with Reuters.

It's not that your typical TV viewer will always prefer crap over substance - it's just that, with all respect to members of the WGA, there's a lot of substantive crap that's made it into primetime. As easy as it is to vilify guys like Zucker, it's nothing personal – the guy could care less what NBC airs, so long as it’s economically viable. C’mon, don’t give me that – this is TV, for crying out loud. He'd be perfectly happy to air pretentious stuff like "Studio 60" if it had found a big enough audience and was cheap enough to produce. But it didn't and it wasn't. Longtime ad industry watcher Jack Myers puts it this way: "The new programs the networks are bringing in to fill the gaps — reality and variety series — are easily accessible across multiple platforms, play well on both the large HD and small screen, lend themselves to short clips and have a large base of followers who watch them digitally." Here's more:

As CBS’ David Poltrack and NBC’s Alan Wurtzel have observed, alternative distribution appears to drive larger audiences back to the original broadcast airings. Especially for reality programming, when there is active participation on discussion boards and immediacy of results, audiences who watch online come back home to the networks. Distribution across multiple outlets drives greater reach. The rising tide raises all ships, especially the mother ship. Even if the strike is settled, the die is cast. Network television will focus its programming investment dollars on series that generate the greatest reach opportunities across multiple platforms and succeed in building ratings for the originals.

BTW, a survey conducted for Entertainment Weekly found that two-thirds of Americans say they are aware of the strike but not following it very closely (of all the survey results getting bandied about, that’s one of the few numbers that rings true). There’s also this: one-third of those surveyed correctly identified WGA as an acronym for the Writers Guild of America, while 20 percent thought it was a women’s golf association.