Joe Queenanhad no great affection for the screenwriters currently on strike. Then he sat through a week of US network TV to see its effects on viewing habits.
When one of America's top networks lost the right to broadcast professional football games in the 1990s, it responded with a blizzard of ice-skating events. These proved so popular, with men as well as women, that ice-skating has now become a fixture of US television, often showcasing gimpy, long-in-the-tooth, scantily clad ex-Olympians posing as gunslingers, Carmen, or that feisty, acrobatic welder from Flashdance.
This is a classic case of the Law of Unintended Effects: what seemed to be a disaster for a panicky network proved to be a blessing in disguise. Because of the unexpected appeal of ice-skating - viewed by non-purists as the Victoria's Secret Ex-Lingerie Models Runway Show on Ice - sprightly, thick-thighed ex-Olympians will still be cavorting on glacial surfaces well into their 70s. This is going to be one great century.
When the writers' strike erupted three months ago, many Americans began wondering how the Law of Unintended Effects would play out this time around. Mindful that reality TV grew out of a desire to slash production costs, in part by freezing out writers, a lot of us were curious to see who would be the surprise beneficiary of the work stoppage, and what enticing new programming it would spawn.
Well, I have just finished watching US television for a solid week and the answer seems to be clear. No revolutionary new programming has grown out of the strike yet; downmarket reality TV, including the exhumed corpse of American Gladiators, continues to rule the airwaves; reruns can be found everywhere; and the US's obsession with klutzy amateur dancers and inept singers is continuing apace. Americans may be watching less TV, but they are mostly watching the same kind of TV.
THE ONLY PLACE where the strike does seem to be changing viewers' habits is in the world of politics. In January, Hillary Clinton, written off as dead and buried in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, slithered out of the crypt and edged out Barack Obama. At the time, there was widespread belief that angry middle-aged women had trundled off to the hustings in record numbers to support the embattled candidate, rendering all the polls and pundits' predictions wrong.
This is a lovely theory, and it says something reassuring about the current health of American democracy. But if anyone had actually gone out and interviewed the New Hampshire electorate, they would probably have found that many of them turned out to vote because there was nothing to watch on television except reruns of House, and they were sick of watching over-the-hill hoofers battle it out on shows such as Dance War: Bruno Vs Carrie Ann (that's Bruno as in Tonioli, a man already familiar to British and Irish audiences for his barely intelligible outbursts on the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing).
Both network TV and cable are experiencing record ratings for political talk shows as more and more people tune in to hear the same experts who were wrong about South Carolina on Friday explain why they will be right about Louisiana today.
Given that, before the withdrawals began, there was an unusually large number of zany candidates - the evangelical bassist Mike Huckabee; the thrice-divorced comb-over crimestopper Rudy Giuliani; Bruce Willis's jowly, sleepwalking co-star from Die Hard 2, Fred Thompson; the Mormon in the grey flannel suit, Mitt Romney; the UFO-spotting rabble-rouser, Dennis Kucinich; the populist hedge fund consultant, John Edwards; and the mysterious Ron Paul, some of the ratings increase can be explained by the presence of a more enthralling field than in 2004, when an unchallenged George W Bush faced off against the cataleptic John Kerry in a campaign that excited nobody.
BUT WHAT MAKES the current ratings climb so interesting and unexpected is that TV viewers are not only watching the pompous talking heads and glib pundits running off their mouths every night, they are actually tuning in to watch the debates.
This hasn't happened in decades. Even more incredibly, they are actually watching the Republican debates - a bunch of rich, ageing, pasty-faced white men discussing whether they need to build a wall across the Mexican border.
What this means is that instead of watching reality TV - which is contrived, phony and has nothing to do with real people - many Americans are watching its political equivalent: real-life phonies debating real-life issues.
Given that the Republican debates are a staged confrontation between a cabal of self-centred, interchangeable millionaires well past their youth, the TV debates are just a little bit like prime-time ice-skating. With thicker thighs, but less lingerie.
Despite this renewed viewer interest in the political process, which could evaporate the moment new episodes of "CSI: Da Bronx" hit the screen, it would be inaccurate to suggest that the great unwashed are turning away from mainstream TV.
They are still watching generic game shows, still sucking up spin-offs such as The Celebrity Apprentice, and still gazing at inane novelties such as Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Moreover, the networks have presciently stockpiled new episodes of popular series such as Lost, and the Fox network, which has its own weird schedule and makes its own rules, is introducing a number of new mid-season shows, including a ballyhooed spin-off of the Terminator film series.
So it's not as if there's nothing new on TV. It's just that there's not all that much that's new. However, given that three-year-old episodes of House are better than new episodes of just about anything, maybe the networks should show reruns for ever.
Happily, for those of us who have grown weary of all the Michael Bolton clones and off-brand Beyonces that reality TV ceaselessly foists upon us, there do seem to be cracks in this empire's facade. American Idol is not doing as well as it has in the past, as a level of fatigue with the monotony and idiocy of the genre may be setting in.
One problem with reality TV is that new programmes are starting to look just like the old ones, and spin-offs from the most successful shows lack whatever spice the originals had. For example, VH1's Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew, which features nine bargain-basement celebrities trying to deal with addictions that are the only thing that makes them interesting, sounds like the same voyeuristic slop the channel has been peddling for years.
One reason no revolutionary programming trends have grown out of the strike is that the networks can't scrape the bottom of the barrel with cheesy new reality shows this time round because they've reached the bottom of the barrel.
Amazingly, America is fast running out of third-rate amateurs and is now starting to rely on eighth-rate ones. For example, while I cede to no man in my affection for doomed wannabes - dental school students who secretly dream of being Justin Timberlake, people named Charity who wish they were people named Cher - there is something unnecessarily cruel about programmes such as Dance War. With its inept hoofers, incompetent crooners, faux Backstreet Boys and bogus Pointer Sisters, this is a show that is not only mean to the contestants, it is mean to the public.
It is a programme whose very existence suggests not only that all the gifted writers have gone out on strike but that the 87.6 million Americans who can do a halfway-decent moonwalk have gone out on strike as well, leaving only a skeleton crew of self-deluding dental students to entertain us.
SPEAKING PERSONALLY, AS a freelance writer who holds no great affection for unionised scribes who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year writing jokes for Charlie Sheen and David Spade, let me admit that, when push comes to shove, I miss the writers. True, I would be eternally grateful if the strike taught the US that the sitcom genre is played out, extraneous, stylistically petrified, and hasn't evolved since I Love Lucy.
But if there were any one thing I would like to see come out of the strike, it is the realisation by the American public that a society where people have nothing better to do with their free time than watch pudgy white girls try to pass themselves off as Janet Jackson while some duplicitous zero named Bruno assures them, "Believe me, Vespasia, that time, you really nailed out," may be a society on its last legs.
Last legs that can't dance and definitely can't ice-skate.
(- Guardian service)