For TV networks, the moment of truth is on its way.
The writers' strike is over. Original episodes of comedies and dramas are due to return in March and April. But how many viewers will come back, too, remains an open question. And it's clear that, over the course of the three-month strike, many were lost.
In January and February, when most original scripted series were gone, network viewership dropped 15 to 20 percent, said Rick Kissell, who tracks Nielsen ratings for the trade magazine Variety. Among the 18-to-49 demographic that advertisers covet, Kissell said, ratings were down about 20 percent.
During a normal season, shows that are in reruns for a couple of weeks tend to lose a portion of their audience, said Preston Beckman, Fox Broadcasting's executive vice president for strategic program planning and research.
It's not a given that "just because you put those originals on in April or May, the audience just flocks back to them," Beckman said. "They will, but I think you're going to see some diminishment."
Beckman hopes Fox will be insulated from that trend, partly because of top-rated "American Idol," and partly because the network saw a strike looming in the fall and stored up a cache of new midseason dramas and comedies. One new entry, "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," is faring respectably on Mondays. A few more new shows, including "New Amsterdam" and "The Return of Jezebel James," are due to premiere next month.
And if the strike proved one thing, Beckman said, it's that networks still need to provide a stream of hit comedies and dramas.
A few network executives - notably, NBC president and CEO Jeff Zucker - had predicted that viewers would be equally drawn to a lineup packed with relatively cheap, quick-to-produce reality shows. A few more new reality series are still on the way, including ABC's "Oprah's Big Give," which hits the airwaves March 2, and NBC's "My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad," which premieres Monday.
And a couple of reality shows became legitimate hits during the strike. Fox's "Moment of Truth," which hooks its contestants to lie detectors, fares well in its post-"Idol" time slot, though its ratings have been slipping. NBC's redone "American Gladiators" got better ratings than the scripted series "Chuck" on Mondays at 9.
But other reality shows fared poorly. ABC's "Dance War," for instance, drew less than half the audience of the series that inspired it, "Dancing With the Stars."
And there are economic reasons why the networks - which charge a premium for advertising space - can't overstock with reality, said Jonathan Taplin, a communications professor at the University of Southern California. "Then their distinction from cable, which is filled with reality, becomes harder to make with the advertiser," he said. "If I can watch 'Flavor of Love' and I'm an advertiser and can buy that really cheap, why would I want to pay twice as much for a version of it on the networks?"
If scripted shows remain central to network TV, though, some of the economic ground rules will change. Taplin notes that the networks have signaled an end to a "Hollywood welfare system," in which they handed out lucrative development deals and ordered far more costly pilots than they could put on the air.
The strike," Taplin said, "was a great excuse to clean house."
It was also a wake-up call, he said, convincing networks that more and more viewers - particularly those coveted younger viewers - are looking for their content online. ComScore, a Virginia company that tracks online trends, found that Americans viewed more than 10 billion videos online in December, nearly a third of them from YouTube. Sixty percent of online viewers, ComScore found, are between the ages of 18 and 49.
While online viewership has been growing anyway, the strike probably sped up the trend, said ComScore senior analyst Andrew Lipsman.
"YouTube is a natural place to go online to get content," he said, "if you're not finding it on TV."
Once original episodes of new comedies and dramas are posted back online, Lipsman believes, viewers might flock to them as well. Indeed, for younger viewers, streaming online video is becoming another accepted way of watching TV.
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Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net
