MONDAY

First, the good news: it looks like the strike may be coming to an end. Now, the bad news: even in the most hopeful scenario, new episodes of popular shows, like Grey’s Anatomy, won’t hit the airwaves until April or March, if at all before the fall. Jeff Zucker may have found a silver lining in all of this—at least publicly—but what does the rest of America have to show for it except for a newly acquired taste for reality programming?

Tonight, CBS injects a little life into its Monday night line-up with the debut of Welcome to the Captain (CBS, 8:30 p.m.), a comedy about a wannabe director (Fran Kranz) returning to L.A. to give his young career one last shot. Written by the guy behind the Meet the Parents movies, it also stars Chris Klein (Election, American Pie, pre-Tom paramour of Katie Holmes) and Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development). Meanwhile, the third season of New Adventures of Christine (CBS, 9:30 p.m.) kicks off with Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) fretting over relations with Blair Underwood. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

If older ladies chasing around African-American men is your thing, you need look no further than the Hallmark channel tonight, as Hillary Clinton has purchased an hour of the channel’s time to broadcast a “town hall” meeting out of New York (9:00 p.m.). Anthony Weiner sure can’t get enough of the symbolism …

Fashion Week bonus: golden boy Marc Jacobs documentary, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, airs on the Sundance Channel (8 p.m.). It’s totes the new black. (That’s how fashion people talk, right? Unfortunately, Bruno is my only reference point … )

TUESDAY

Maybe it’s the candidates. Maybe it’s the strike. But primaries have meant ratings gold for both networks and cable news channels. Last week’s Democratic debate brought in the highest audience for a debate, by a large margin, in CNN’s history with 8.32 total viewers. (CNN and MSNBC are both up close to 40 percent in January from last year.) And the debates preceding the New Hampshire contest on Jan. 5 were seen by 8.6 million people on ABC. But tonight, everyone’s hands are going to be in the cookie jar—everyone’s covering Super Tuesday. Expect a lot of synergy! (And few mistakes, they’ve been rehearsing.)

WEDNESDAY

Gossip Girl may be gone from Wednesday nights, but that doesn’t mean CW is going to go down without a fight. Tonight, it’s the first half of a highlight reel from the previous seasons of America’s Next Top Model (8 p.m.), which promises better acting than found in last week’s Gossip Girl: Revealed special. Reading from cue cards, lots of nervous laughter, worst blooper montage ever … awkward!

The WE channel, in its attempt to stay up with only the most progressive feminist programming, offers Lingerie Secrets Revealed (10 p.m.) with host, Rachel Zalis, former West Coast Editor of Glamour. Red flag: lingerie, by its very nature, keeps few secrets.

Saving grace: a new Project Runway (Bravo, 10 p.m.)

THURSDAY

No surprise here: the Lost (9 p.m.) premiere gave a much needed boost to the script-heavy ABC. But, like the survivors of Oceanic flight 815, it is now no longer alone. The others: NBC launches Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle (10 p.m.), which promises to be like Sex and the City, but more matoor. And CBS dredges out its old stalwart Survivor (8 p.m.), this time pitting uber-fans against past contestants. It’s in Micronesia—wherever the hell that is. And of course, there’s Celebrity Apprentice (9 p.m.), which just got re-upped for another season. A little hasty, no? Probably should have waited to see how well the novelty of Gene Simmons bantering with the Donald would hold up against some real competition. Oh, well. They didn’t promise to return it to Thursdays.

FRIDAY

Who knew, but Friday nights to Animal Planet are like Thursday nights to the networks. At 8 p.m., the cabler debuts Lemur Kingdom (we all know how this one is going to end), following it up with Oragutan Island (9 p.m.) and Escape to Chimp Eden (9:30 p.m.), which for anyone whose showed up for a movie early at a Regal Cinemas theater should sound familiar. The only thing missing from this line-up is a showing of Matthew Broderick in Project X.

At The Los Angeles Times, the strike’s decimating effect on awards season, normally a topic of banner coverage, was described by one editor as “apocalyptic.” Though advertising numbers are still being sorted out, this editor estimated that the cancellation of the Golden Globes fete meant the loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for its awards-related Web site, The Envelope. (A spokeswoman for the paper said that this figure was “completely inaccurate.” She acknowledged that traffic on the day of the Globes was “way off” compared to last year, but said that page views in general were up 40 percent from 2006 to 2007.)

Over at The New York Times, reporter-cum-entertainment blogger David Carr, a.k.a. “the Carpetbagger,” couldn’t help but notice that enthusiasm and volume in the comments section had shrunk from last year. Sniff!

And the content shortage doesn’t stop at the rolled-up red carpets. “My anxiety is increasing with each passing day,” said Michael Ausiello, the wunderkind blogger for TV Guide. “Three months from now, Lost will be gone and all those shows that are on the air will run out of original episodes. It’s going to be a scary landscape soon. I hope it doesn’t come to the point that I’m giving spoilers on Big Brother.”

Perhaps the hardest-hit publication is Entertainment Weekly, the popular version of an industry bible. “It would be nice for the strike to end soon,” said an editor there. “There are things we normally cover that are diminished. It’s tougher to do trend pieces when there’s so little in development, especially where TV is concerned, with all these shows running out. You find yourself scrambling to cover what’s actually on TV.”

The WGA conflict only has so much juice in it, he said. “It’s not a sexy story. Nothing about it is sexy. Stories about unions aren’t a big sell for anyone.”

But EW managing editor Rick Tetzeli said that the situation was merely forcing his staff to think more creatively. “The cover we’re closing tonight is a strike survival guide, with Conan on the cover,” Mr. Tetzeli said on Tuesday, Jan. 15. “It’s the short opening, and it’s very, very funny. We’ve got about 35 tips for surviving the strike. We tell people to go read books and telling them what books to read, and why this is the time to watch Rachael Ray.” Yum-o!

And there are those who insist the strike is a fascinating story to cover. “Interesting news makes newspapers more important,” said Peter Bart, the editor of Variety. “The impact of the strike is terrible, but selfishly, in terms of impact to the paper, it hasn’t been terrible.” He added that the business side was doing just fine. “I just happened to pass the advertising guy coming back from lunch and he said the studios are still taking out big congratulations ads after the Golden Globes.”

Mr. Carr of The Times agreed: “I’m a newsman so I find this strike fantastically interesting.”

But everyone interviewed for this item said that if there is no resolution by spring, it’s going to get ugly. Indeed, material is already getting so scarce that Mr. Ausiello recently wrote about an Al Roker-produced show on the Spike network about the Drug Enforcement Agency. “It’s a story I generally wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole,” he said. “I had to apologize to my readers.”

No one has ever accused Nikki Finke—the contentious journalist who has worked for the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, this newspaper and the New York Post, which fired her after she wrote negative stories about Disney (she sued and settled for an undisclosed amount)—of being a wallflower, and in her decades-long career, which started after her years as a debutante and Plaza habitué (followed by a 1980 marriage to, and soon afterward, divorce from, the millionaire businessman Jeffrey Greenberg), more people have probably been pissed off by her than have invited her to dinner.

But in her latest journalistic incarnation, the Web site Deadline Hollywood Daily, which she started in March 2006, she has taken on the notoriously cliquish, catty and backbiting world of Hollywood—alone. And when the Writers Guild of America called a strike on Nov. 5, her keyboard was ready.

The biggest entertainment story of the year has also turned into the biggest story of Ms. Finke’s career, and, possibly, the vehicle of her redemption for those who had written her off as merely a loudly buzzing fly in Hollywood’s ointment. She’s demonstrated that one determined reporter—with none of the support or backing of a media outfit, but also none of the entangling alliances—can, in fact, beat the big guys at their own game. She’s broken the news of almost all of the significant strike developments since the beginning and has offered insight into the inner workings of the negotiations that the more slow-footed publications on the strike beat—primarily, Variety, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times—simply can’t match. In hundreds of posts and thousands of contributors’ comments, she’s turned her site into not only a must-read, but a kind of online kaffe klatsch for information and discussion about the strike.

“I did not know I cared about Hollywood as much as I did,” Ms. Finke, who is 54, told The Observer the other day by telephone from her home in a Los Angeles suburb. “Everyone has always criticized me over the years—‘You hate Hollywood, you hate all the movies, you hate everybody.’ And I was O.K. being in that curmudgeon role!”

But with the strike, Ms. Finke said, everything changed.

“People came to me and said, ‘You have to bring you into this. You have to state your opinions.’ As a student of Hollywood, I don’t see the glamour. I don’t see any of that. That’s always been false to me. I understand the way Hollywood works. This is a town, the only place in the world, where conflicts of interest are not only allowed, but prized, at law firms. It’s a crazy system, but it works. There’s a lot that needs to be changed about it, but you don’t throw it all away. This is why the strike is so frightening.

“I didn’t know I cared.”

In some ways, Ms. Finke represents a new form of advocacy journalism. Though she says she just tries to “write the truth,” it’s not hard to pick up on a distinct effort to right what she sees as the wrongs visited upon the writers by mainstream news outlets and Hollywood’s trade papers, most egregiously, Variety. “There is not a Variety headline that doesn’t blame the writers for something. It’s just outrageous,” Ms. Finke said. “And the L.A. Times—everybody they interview, they only take the negative stuff and print that.”

“It’s definitely the kind of bible for writers,” said TV writer Tom Smuts, who sells strike-related T-shirts on his Web site, Writers Strike Swag. “I think people see her not as a partisan, but someone whose judgment is that the writers have a more legitimate argument than the producers, and she’s called bullshit on the producers.”

That’s not to say that Ms. Finke thinks that the writers can do no wrong. For one thing, she sees them, as a whole, to be somewhat deluded as to the intentions of the studios. “The writers don’t get that the studios don’t care,” she said. “They think that the shareholders would care or the bosses would care or Wall Street would care or the government or Congress or the viewers—they don’t care.”

But it all comes down, Ms. Finke argues, to the relentless march of media consolidation, a trend that only accelerated in 2007.

“Thanks to the F.C.C. and the Republican-controlled Congress never meeting a merger they didn’t like, these media companies have morphed into huge corporations which determine everything we see and hear in infotainment,” she said. “This is not really a Hollywood strike—this is a strike about megacorporations.

“We allowed this to happen over two decades,” she continued. “And now the writers think they’re going to control these guys? Big media own too much. They’re too powerful and too rich.”

“Nikki proves that [the studios’] attempts to very piggishly own everything are pointless,” said Laeta Kalogridis, a writer and executive producer of NBC’s Bionic Woman. Ms. Kalogridis contributes to a pro-writers’ blog called United Hollywood, which was founded a week before the strike. “The one news outlet they can’t exert influence on is her.”

Indeed, Ms. Finke is emphatic that at the heart of the missteps by other media outlets are ownership issues. “The worst at covering media consolidation are the papers owned by media conglomerates,” she said. “This has always been a big bête noire of mine. If you go to the Web site of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), it claims 350 production entities are members. But the moguls own almost all of them. It’s eight guys. This is it. This is beyond collusion. This is a country club. And it’s wrong that eight guys are controlling everything.”

Ms. Finke may see herself as a one-woman crusade, but hers is not a lonely voice echoing in the wilderness; her site, which she says got around 350,000 page views a week before the strike, now gets between 650,000 and 850,000 every couple of days. (It was briefly up to a million in the first weeks of the strike, but has since calmed down.) While her pay is not tied to page views, she says LA Weekly, which hosts Deadline Hollywood and sells advertising for it (Ms. Finke owns the Deadline Hollywood name), gave her “a little bonus money,” though it “wasn’t even enough money to let me shop at Target,” she says. (She is somewhat prickly about this because in the early days of the strike she was accused by commenters of cynically attempting to inflate her page views.)

“I’m not owned by anybody,” she said. “I’ll take on big media one minute and the next minute I’m praising the studios because they put out a movie that actually made money. I play it straight. I think people like that. I think people like that I’m not owned.”

The other day, The New York Times pointed out that many Hollywood writers and producers are inextricably connected, noting that “in a one-degree-of-separation town, a lot of Hatfields and McCoys are married, dating or related.” But Ms. Finke has very consciously extricated herself from this web, staying removed from the socializing and conflicts of interest that, in many ways, define Hollywood culture. “I don’t want to have dinner with these people,” she said. “I don’t want to be a part of their social life.” She’s the ultimate in uncompromised reporting; on her site, you never see the now journalistically ubiquitous, and always deflating, “full disclosure” clause, as in, “full disclosure: I play tennis with [so-and-so’s] husband in the Hamptons every summer.”

Writer John Aboud, who founded the Web site Modern Humorist and is now a panelist on Best Week Ever and various I Love the … shows on VH1, also blogs for United Hollywood. “It’s clear from reading Nikki Finke that she is appalled by hypocrisy,” Mr. Aboud told The Observer. “She is appalled by anyone’s hypocrisy. She’s appalled by people mindlessly parroting the party line. She calls people on it. She calls out bullshit. I think everyone respects that on both sides.”

Of course, this kind of lone wolfness can also breed a dangerous sense of infallibility or inflated sense of self. An AMPTP spokesman declined comment, but one studio executive told The Observer, “When an item comes up and she writes that it’s ‘more bullshit from the AMPTP’—well, at that point I kind of thought she lost her credibility.” This executive continued, “I think that she is helping to fuel an unhelpful rhetoric that has taken over this entire thing.”

Ms. Finke dismissed this executive’s criticism, telling The Observer, “I write things the writers hate me for. I write things the producers hate me for. They read it because they know they’re getting the truth. I’m not a propagandist.”

A marketing executive at a major studio, who did not wish to be named, told The Observer via e-mail that Deadline Hollywood had become an indispensable source of strike news—and implied that Ms. Finke’s power, already formidable in Hollywood, has only increased thanks to the strike.

“She is incredibly well sourced,” the marketing exec explained. “And she has no sacred cows—meaning she gives equal treatment (or mistreatment) to everyone from the owners to the lowly rank and file. She gets very little wrong. And if she is wrong, she will correct it immediately--good luck getting that from the New York Times. She is completely unafraid. Because the numbers at her blog have grown so much over the past six months, she is in a position to get anyone on the phone. She lives and breathes for her column and has managed to successfully create a one of a kind Web site that other media pick up.”

In the early days of the strike, when it seemed like a quick settlement was a distinct possibility, Ms. Finke published endless updates and inside information about the negotiations; as both sides have settled in for what everyone seems to think will be a long haul (“The moguls see this as a way to start fresh in terms of the way they develop entertainment product,” Ms. Finke said. “I reported this before the strike and nobody believed me. They couldn’t believe they would do this”), Ms. Finke has continued to publish the most comprehensive strike coverage of any media outlet. She’s long had high-level sources at all the major studios, but now she’s cultivated a willing stable of well-placed writers who are more than eager to tell her their side of things. (At the beginning of the strike, she was getting 4,000 e-mails a day; it’s now at around 2,000, she says.)

“This is a big deal. It’s the biggest story,” she said. “I’ve let a lot of other news stuff slide because it’s a huge story—everything else pales in comparison.”

On that note, congratulations, Nikki Finke! You are The New York Observer’s 2007 Media Mensch of the Year, for stubbornly refusing to let this story die and reminding us all that a world populated solely by American Gladiator Idol Big Brother Makeover would be a very sad one indeed, and we congratulate you! And we thank you for reminding us that all good journalism comes, first and foremost, from obsession.

Your prize? A DVD three-pack: All the Presidents’ Men, Norma Rae and Billy Wilder’s classic Ace in the Hole. Enjoy!

Crowned, the second episode of which aired on Wednesday night, features 11 mother-daughter teams competing for a joint pageant title and a $100,000 cash prize. Ms. Moakler judges these self-titled teams, ranging from “Blonde Bombshells” to “Tomboy Queens,” alongside Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley and “television personality” Cynthia Garrett.

To be sure, Mr. Kressley’s witty off-the-cuff remarks, an odd mix of Michael Kors on Project Runway and Miss J. Alexander on America’s Next Top Model, keep the show watchable—if not downright addicting. Another asset arguably comes from the sense one gets that the three judges are definitely in on the joke.

“Oh, my god! He’s so fun,” Ms. Moakler said of Mr. Kressley. “It was so much fun to go to work. We would literally just go in and laugh for hours. Carson is so witty and he’d have these great one-liners,” she continued, “The producers had to tell us to stop laughing and tell us to take it more seriously, because we were having such a great time.”

In the premiere episode, one mother-daughter team stinks up the joint when they reveal their team name, meant to embody their best qualities: “Silent But Deadly.”

And while its lowbrow antics, cringe-inducing performances and shocking contestant interviews put the show squarely in the TV programming basement, it has also managed to take on some unexpected heft these days.

After all, the real impact of the seemingly endless W.G.A. strike won’t be felt until 2008. As a recent unflattering Washington Post article, "CW’s ‘Crowned,’ Missing Congeniality," points out, the series may indicate what kind of TV shows viewers can expect to see a lot of in the coming year.

“The teams there are so different,” Ms. Moakler said. “We really tried to give each one their own bar. We really tried to listen to what they had to say, and watch their body language, and see if their mothers support their daughters. There are some teams there where they finish each other’s sentences and they get along great. And then there are some mother-daughter teams that don’t really like each other or know each other very well.”

Ms. Moakler calls herself a “huge advocate” of beauty pageants. For one thing, she said, being able to compete in them during her youth in Rhode Island allowed her to launch her career.

“[Pageants] give girls in small towns a lot of opportunities that they wouldn’t normally have,” she told us. “Yeah, they can only have one winner, but they’re fun. They’re not supposed to have pepper spray and things flying. They’re supposed to help young girls. Miss America put a lot of girls through college.”

But what about the horror stories one hears about brutal “stage moms” and all the pressure put on young girls to look like sexy, well, blonde bombshells?

“You hear a lot of bad stuff, like about JonBenét Ramsay—[our show] was something entirely different. When it comes to children’s pageants, like everything else with parents and their children—whether it’s in sports, or pageants, or education—everything can be taken overboard. If you take it with a grain of salt, it can be really enjoyable and you can learn a lot,” she said.

Ms. Moakler, who has two children with Mr. Barker and another with champion boxer Oscar De La Hoya, told us that working on Crowned was a lot more enjoyable than shooting Meet the Barkers. “That was a little more documentary style,” she said of the MTV series. “Even though it was a reality show, there were literally cameras following us around twenty-four-seven. Back then our show wasn’t as scripted as some of the reality shows are now. So it wasn’t really something we wanted. What you see is what you’re getting,” added Ms. Moakler, whose separation from her drummer husband has been peppered with occasional reunions, leading to much speculation in the gossip pages of a reconciliation. In the end, though, it seems the couple has separated for good, while apparently remaining good friends and coparents.

“This time the cameras aren’t in my home—there aren’t microphones in my bedroom!” she laughed. “So I can kind of just go and enjoy myself.”

“I was on the phone today with an executive,” said Amy Retzinger of the Gersh Agency. “I said to her, ‘Hey, have you looked at the material I sent you yet, and she’s like, ‘No but I’ve been playing a lot of Scrabulous!’ And she’s somebody that I didn’t have a particularly good relationship with, so I thought it was very funny that we wound up talking about Facebook for 15 minutes and became friends on Facebook.”

Ms Retzinger said she has consciously not befriended any of her clients on Facebook, but has roughly 30 executive “friends.”

She added that she’s aware that other agents have been using the site to communicate with clients and in some cases search for new ones. “There’s one agent in particular over at Endeavor—Ari Greenberg.” (Not to be confused with the now-legendary Ari Emanuel, also at Endeavor, who is not—yet?—on the site.) “A writer friend of mine who’s not a client of Ari—Ari, like, ‘friended’ him on Facebook and you know how you can say, ‘How do you know this person?’ He wrote, like, ‘We’ll work together soon?’ Which is a little funny and presumptuous.”

Mr. Greenberg had no comment, but another TV writer told the Transom that Mr. Greenberg had in fact created a “friend group” for all his clients.

“You can create individual groups,” Mr. Erlij said enthusiastically. “You can ‘post’ on people’s ‘walls,’ you can post on your own wall. If I wanted to do something that I just wanted people to see, I could post it on my wall.” Though, he admitted, “quite frankly if it’s something that’s that significant, that’s not the way I’m going to communicate to clients.”

Mr. Erlij insisted his interest was more professional than recreational. “For me it’s much more about keeping in touch with clients and keeping in touch with executives,” he said. “It’s amazing how many people you can continue to locate and talk to. It’s kind of interesting, during the strike right now people are really hungry for information, and to have a network, a group of people that you can respond to in a very quick organic way—it’s another tool.”

But of course Facebook is also, you know, fun.

“There’s all sorts of immature behavior,” Mr. Erlij said. “People are sending each other ‘vampire hugs’ or ‘zombie hugs,’ there’s dominos—I’m not going to sit here and say it’s purely a business tool. There is a positive business aspect to it but there’s also part of it that’s just social networking too.”

“I’m not a fan of the ‘poke,”’ remarked Ms. Retzinger, referring to the Facebook term for expressing interest in a potential acquaintance without committing to further contact. “It seems unseemly.”

Variety is reporting that the union is now facing the prospect that the studios will grow impatient with the molasses movement of negotiations and make a "take-it-or-leave-it offer" as early as next week.

Variety reports:

TV critics!

"The TV Critics Association and the Cable Television Association for Marketing said that if the Writers Guild of America strike is not settled by Dec. 14, the winter press tour will be canceled," TV Week reported today.

"Usually held in January, the winter press tour is used by broadcast and cable networks to introduce mid-season shows to television writers at newspapers, magazines and other media."

“I was delighted to finally have Jesse Jackson on my side,” said the captain, who writes for TV, of the reverend, who joined the picket line outside the Fox Plaza building on Nov. 10. “I figured that statistically the chances were good that one day we’d end up on the same side of things, and we did.”

“Everyone was so sort of grateful to have him there, but then sort of baffled at his references to Martin Luther King Jr. That made me feel a little tacky.”

The strike captain was also glad to suddenly find himself in the company of the Teamsters, presidential candidate John Edwards (“great hair!”) and the singer Alicia Keys, “whose music I was never that into, but now I adore.”

He reported that tons of food and beverages are piling up in the hallways at the W.G.A. building on Third and Fairfax, because the organization had gotten so many donations from people who want their products to appear on future television shows. “There’s too much of it, and it’s starting to clog the hallways,” the captain said. “My car is filled with it; it’s getting a little embarrassing.”

Another problem: People trying to steal the signs to keep as souvenirs. After the march down Hollywood Boulevard on Nov. 20, the strike captain, somewhat like a hall monitor, was busy collecting placards.

The writers’ hatred for talk-show host and strikebreaker Ellen DeGeneres is very real, he said. “I mean really vicious hatred and anger for her. She’s about as popular as Mel Gibson right now.”

The captain has begun to weary of the mostly male visages of his jean-and-hoodie–clad, occasionally hygiene-challenged comrades. “For every 30 ugly, pasty guys, there’s one attractive woman, who’s probably an actress,” he said despairingly. “Watching a writer try to pick up a girl is like watching a penguin in a footrace—it’s just a lot of flopping around, really pretty horrifying.”

He estimated that 95 percent of his colleagues were still totally committed to the strike, even though sometimes they like to joke around and chant, “Two, four, six, eight—let’s just cave.”

Somebody give this guy a raise!

"We're in this together," Mr. Edwards said, according to Variety.

"Stay strong, stay together," Mr. Edwards added according to the Associated Press. "It's about making sure these big corporations, these big media conglomerates don't step on your rights — that you have a real opportunity to share in the work that you've been producing."

Brian Stelter of the New York Times reported that the crowd of several hundred people was smaller than the organizers had anticipated. That said, the crowd did include such luminaries as David Chase, the creator of "The Sopranos" and comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

How did Mr. Edwards' populist rhetoric go over?

"The problem for Edwards is that when the 'working people' are stars of stage and screen--or snarky New York scribes--it's hard to make much of an impact," writes Andrew Romano on Newsweek.com. "I stood with two comedy writers, one from the Colbert Report and one from SNL. They weren't impressed. To put it mildly."

Afterwards, Mr. Edwards spoke with reporters.

"He used his post-rally avail to roll out his plan to more heavily regulate the credit card industry," reports Politico's Ben Smith. "One thing he didn't do -- as he hasn't lately -- was go out of his way to criticize Hillary Clinton. He hasn't backed off his earlier shots at her, but he seems content at the moment to let Clinton and Obama go at it."

Although, neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama were in attendance, both reportedly submitted letters in support of the guild's cause.