The revolution probably won’t be televised. If anything, the recent writer’s strike is a sign of larger problems looming in the entertainment industry that don’t appear to be going away any time soon.

On Nov. 5th, the Writer’s Guild of America, which represents more than 12,000 workers in film and television, walked out of negotiations that started in July with AMPTP, the organization that represents film and TV producers.

On the bargaining table were residuals for DVD sales, which the WGA had requested an increase for writers to a rate of eight cents per unit sold (the previous rate was four cents). The union argued that much of a writer’s income is dependent on residuals, especially during a TV show’s off-season.

But what’s really at stake are writer residuals for new media: the Internet downloads, streaming technology, smart-phone programming and other forms of online distribution that have grown to unfathomable proportions in recent years. Writers usually get paid nothing for this.The entertainment bigwigs have a pretty good idea where their money will come from in the future. If NBC’s recent break from iTunes can seen as indicative of a larger shift in the entertainment industry, we can probably expect to see the media congloms continue to meld golden calves in the virtual domain.

And that’s all good and fine.

The only problem is that if history is any indicator (and it usually is), we know that quality takes a hit when artists and executives fight. If anything, an empty house that puts producers in the default creative seat will result in a disaster for entertainment and the arts.

We know this because it’s happened before. One only has to look at the last writer’s strike in 1988, which lasted five months and cost the industry an estimated $500 million. Ironically, while the event temporarily reduced TV to a wasteland of re-runs (films can rely on writers’ backlogs for years), the 1988 strike ended up revolutionizing television — and not in a good way.With a need for new programming, producers went to the drawing board without writers and devised the unscripted, voyeuristic, pseudo cinema-vérité slices of life that we now know of as the first generation of reality TV. Lowbrow offerings like COPS, which made its debut in the spring of 1989, can be directly traced to the 1988 walkout. Cashing in on its popularity, similar programs like MTV’s “The Real World” followed suite. The rest is history. Today, producers know they can keep churning out rapid-fire reality montage because even though scripted dramas still make up most of the Nielsen Top 30, industry figures show Americans will watch reality TV if it’s on.

And that’s why the 2007 strike is important. One only has to look at Mike Darnell, the mastermind behind Fox’s reality TV roster and typically considered a master of the genre. He brought us “Joe Millionaire,” “The Simple Life,” and thought-provoking epics like “When Animals Attack.”

When writers strike, programs like Darnell’s only get stronger. Reality-based programming will stay on and flourish indefinitely with or without writers at the helm. Rumor has it that Darnell still hasn’t renewed his contract at Fox that ends this year and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a coincidence. He’s a hot ticket and I’m sure he knows it.

The 2007 WGA strike has eerily familiar similarities to its 1988 predecessor. The main arguing point of the 1988 strike involved residuals on VHS sales. The industry pooh-poohed these worries as needless fretting over a technology that still hadn’t proven itself in the market, and eventually the creative arm of Hollywood acquiesced. Twenty years later, I’m sure many writers still feel the burn from that deal, and it’s understandable why artists would be leery of an industry that doesn’t want to share in the profits of today’s new media technology.

It’s been said that entertainment is our biggest export. Good television still exists, but there was a brief period in history when much of our programming had quality and artistic merit. World-class writers like Rod Serling and Tennessee Williams belonged to that first golden-age of TV dramas, writing well-crafted stories for broadcasts like Fireside Theater, Kraft Television Theatre and Studio One, which gave a short-lived hope that television was the next logical step from Broadway. Producers eventually felt that writers were given too much power in the new medium, however, and began butchering scripts in order to please sponsors. The decades since have relied on much the same power structure. It’s no mistake that the first writer-based shows to resume programming during the 2007 strike are the ones with the lowest quality (Carson Daly’s show was the first to cross the picket line – I rest my case). But this all begs a larger question: what’s more important for entertainment, those who create the content or those who broadcast it?

With any hope, producers and writers will be able work together to create quality programming that makes money and has artistic merit. Until then, history will remain on re-run.

- Jon Gingerich