As the red-shirted rabble-rousers take over every studio lot in Hollywood and Rockefeller Center in New York—including one memorable protest featuring a giant inflatable rat outside this morning's Today show—you may be wondering what this all means for you, the average viewer. As it turns out the predictions I relayed in my totally paranoid post from last week have pretty much all been proven right, meaning the TV landscape is due for a drastic change should this thing drag on (the last WGA protest, you'll remember, lasted around 22 weeks). Here are some of the finer points:
– Late-night shows (Letterman, Leno, what's-his-name, Scottish what's-his-name, and the guy who's dating Sarah Silverman) are going into repeats immediately. That also goes for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.
– Saturday Night Live is—as Amy Poehler predicted—also probably finished for now, with this week's show (which was to feature the SNL debut of Amy Winehouse) all but officially canned.
– Speaking of SNL, former head writer and 30 Rock svengali Tina Fey is actually out walking the picket lines herself and talking about her show shutting down production immediately. That's a casualty most of us at The A.V. Club can't live with, much like…
– …The Office, whose various multi-hyphened writer-producer-actors are facing a conundrum over whether one part of themselves should be out protesting the other parts. Nevertheless, they have all been ordered to show up to work and fulfill their acting duties, so look for future episodes composed entirely of Ed Helms singing acapella while John Krasinski looks on with a bemused smirk.
– The Office and all other single-camera comedies and dramas have about a month of production left to go on episodes that don't need significant rewrites—the scariest scenario, of course, being that "if only minor tweaks are needed, studio execs could potentially make the changes themselves—ultimately, they own the scripts, after all."
– From that same fascinating, sky-is-falling Variety piece: Only a handful of new series are getting picked up for a full season, and when it comes to next year's pilot season, many execs believe it will "grind to a halt," meaning we might be looking at a fall dominated by Ow My Balls!