The Aftermath : Now That the Dust Has Settled, Anyone for a Viewer Picket Line?

Whew! Talk about your close calls. For a while there I thought I’d never get to see another first-run episode of “Mr. Belvedere.”

Never again to see a fresh “Matlock” would have been unbearable. Never to have known if Blake found Krystle on “Dynasty” would have been torture.

Yes, that’s right: No more Mr. Nice Guy here. No more sympathy and compassion. It’s time to resume the pre-writers strike vicious cheap shots and nasty sarcasm that some of us professional TV observers live for.

Now that the strike has apparently ended--pending Sunday’s membership vote on the tentative agreement with producers--it’s permissible to stop feeling sorry for the formerly unemployed writers and return to the more pressing task of ridiculing their work. Some of it, anyway.

The fact remains that even with the conclusion of the long strike, the networks’ traditional fall season will still be a small season at best, with the premieres of most first-run shows likely delayed until at least late October. Some predict an even longer delay.

Producer Stephen Cannell estimated in a TV interview Thursday that new shows could begin surfacing in mid-November “if you have a good hurry-up offense.” That sports analogy--equating producing TV programs to producing a quick touchdown with the clock running out--gives you some idea of what to expect even when the first-run shows arrive.

“With the strike over, are the networks going to be able to get people to come back?” host Harry Smith asked Cannell on “CBS This Morning,” referring to the erosion of network audience that was occurring even before the strike.

Come back to what? Post-Civil War Tara? Hiroshima?

Yes, NBC will have the Seoul Olympics in mid-September and a few series whose producers had signed interim deals with writers prior to Wednesday’s tentative settlement. And yes, ABC will unfurl 18 hours of “War and Remembrance” in November.

Nonetheless, America is about to have its determination to watch TV--especially network TV--severely tested, at least for the time being.

The TV industry is unoriginal enough even in the best of times, turning the small screen into a cracked mirror of multiple identical images. But there are limits. Is America really desperate enough to spend evenings watching quickie fill-ins or writerless variety shows or so-called news programs that whistle like the wind? Desperate enough to watch old, already-broadcast scripts reshot with new casts?

Are you sitting on pins and needles waiting for another crack at “Mission: Impossible” and “The Hardy Boys”? If you are, then television abuse is as rampant as alcohol and substance abuse.

With the strike apparently over, it remains to be seen if any of these previously announced strike programming options will be evoked as a stopgap until the bulk of first-run shows begin arriving in another three months.

If they are, pity the network viewer. And if they aren’t, what will the networks do to stop further viewer defections?

Meanwhile, the strike’s crippling effect on the entertainment industry and those who depend on the industry for their living has been well documented. For them, it’s been a horror story.

The torture was surely less intense for the rest of the nation, although you wouldn’t have always known that from the strike coverage.

Some of it on local TV has been framed in epic, judgment-day-is-coming, everything-or-nothing terms, almost as if all of TV would go black if there were no network fall season.

As one reporter overstated the issue last week when things looked particularly grim: “What we may be watching is not only the death of the fall season, but the death of an entire industry.” Just an industry? Why not the death of an entire nation? Of humanity?

The notion, even implied, that the severe economic fallout from a fall-seasonless ABC, CBS and NBC would somehow deprive viewers of all TV is contradicted by the growing smorgasbord of non-network TV options. Not all of them are great, certainly, but they are available.

That may become increasingly obvious to viewers as the network road to November grows rocky and barren.