Behind-the-scenes "shuttle diplomacy" involving Guild negotiators, studio heads, and emissaries began on July 31 in an effort to revive talks.
In the interim, the networks had to rely on a hodgepodge of programming, including reruns, movies, entertainment and news specials, program-length political advertising, and unscripted original series (e.g. CBS' High Risk).
Networks also benefited from sports programming, including NBC, which relied on the Summer Olympics in September and the World Series in October, and ABC, which in addition to its postseason baseball coverage, moved up the start time for the early weeks of Monday Night Football from 9 p.m.
NBC took a similar approach with its new sitcom Dear John, using some reworked episodes that were from the original version that aired on Britain's BBC.
CBS revived The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, nearly 20 years after throwing the duo off the air for poor taste, and gave them carte blanche to perform their own existing material.
At first most stories were dragged out for as long as possible, then plots lurched forward that did not leave shows in the best of shape, including Santa Barbara, which was already struggling in ratings as a result of Bridget and Jerome Dobson being fired.
The strike did not, as some later claimed, lead to the advent of reality television (which did not rise to its current level of popularity until over a decade later), mainly due to the fact that it began in the traditional summer "offseason" when little new scripted programming was being produced anyway.
The cancellation of Moonlighting[9] was attributed in part to audience loss stemming from the shows' long hiatuses due to the writers' strike.
[11] According to the Ultimate James Bond DVD Collection, the movie Licence to Kill, starring Timothy Dalton, lost one of its co-writers, Richard Maibaum, so his partner Michael G. Wilson elected to finish the screenplay on his own.
[12] Sam Hamm turned in his script for 1989's Batman just days before the writer's strike began, and was unable to write further drafts due to his involvement.
[19] The 1988 work stoppage laid the foundation for the next decade's "spec-script boom," as documented by Thom Taylor in The Big Deal: Hollywood's Million-Dollar Spec Script Market (HarperCollins, 1999).