R.I.P., fall season? Well, not quite yet

Anybody want to buy a TV season?

It's slightly used. And, with the looming threat of a writers strike, it could soon be feeling the effects of a fuel shortage.

Just five weeks in, the fall 2007 TV season isn't performing so well. Viva Laughlin, CBS's musical whodunit, was yanked after only two airings.

And while ABC's Pushing Daisies got a warm welcome from critics and viewers alike, and a full-season order from the network, this mystical crime romance will have to prove that its exotic formula (and eye-popping look) can be sustained week after week.

Gossip Girl, the CW's adolescent soap, is a certified success by its own peculiar standard, with a full-season pickup. Sure, the audience is tiny - about 2.5 million viewers. But they're an elite gathering of the young, eager-to-spend demographic targeted by the CW.

NBC's Bionic Woman premiered with all the promising power of its heroine. But in five weeks, its drawing power has ebbed from 13.9 million to 7.8 million viewers.

The premiere of ABC's Samantha Who? cracked the Nielsen top 10, and it nearly equaled its viewership with 13.7 million in week two. But before declaring Samantha a breakout hit, remember this: It follows the huge hit Dancing With the Stars. And Dancing stops dancing in a month.

So, this fall there's no breakout hit like last fall's Heroes.

With viewers harder than ever to snag, no wonder the meter readers at Nielsen are hard at work searching for new ways to quantify the audience. This fall, Nielsen introduced a much-anticipated method that doesn't bother counting who's watching the shows. It counts who's watching the commercials.

Called C3, it measures the average audience for all commercials within a given show - and not just while they're aired, but also when they're replayed on digital video recorders anytime during the next three days.

But why are you still watching TV shows on television anyway? Why watch The Office on television Thursday night, when you can watch it at your office on a PC the next day?

While they voice concern about audience erosion, the networks keep giving viewers reasons not to watch television by offering them more shows on other devices. (Just this week, NBC and Fox are starting a test version of an online video site called Hulu.com.)

With all sorts of new outlets being cultivated for what used to be known as a "TV show," the people still known as "TV writers" want their cut of this potential new windfall.

Their thus-far-unmet demand to share in expanding "digital revenues" is one of the issues driving a wedge between the writers and the media bosses they write for. The Writers Guild contract expires at midnight tonight, with a strike possible anytime after that.

Conventional wisdom says a strike would be a bad thing. But recently, L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke reported that some network bosses not only don't care if there's a strike, but welcome it, having already given up the season for dead.