Assume, for the moment, that the actors weren’t also on strike. If the two sides hashed out their differences tomorrow, would The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon be back with new episodes the following night? How long before new episodes of Ghosts and Bob Hearts Abishola (prime-time, scripted shows, for those not familar)?
I’ll use the last strike of 2007 as a guideline. Supernatural was a show that normally produced 22 episodes per year, but in their third season the strike paused them and reduced their order to 16.
The gap between episodes was extended a bit and it looked like about a 3 month delay or “lost time” that was not regained.
I’d estimate 3 months from now for shows that are absolutely ready to film and were planning to go ahead.
The 2007 strike ended on February 12, 2008. Picking The Office as a random sitcom example, the first episode after the strike ended aired on April 10. For 60-minute dramas, I looked at Grey’s Anatomy, which resumed airing on April 24. Roughly two to two and one-half months overall.
David Letterman’s production company owned his Late Show and struck a separate deal with the Writer’s Guild on December 28 (a Friday) and returned to same day shows on Wednesday, January 2. Since that period covered a weekend and New Year’s Day, two working days is probably about as fast as you could get everyone back into the office.
Just saw that Drew Barrymore has announced today she’s resuming production on her show, just in time for the new season to start on September 18.
What I find kind of intriguing is: imagine that, before the strike, you were writing episodes for, as you say, Ghosts or Bob — and imagine that, during the strike, you just kept plugging away at writing Ghosts or Bob episodes.
You maybe wouldn’t talk about that, figuring that it’d weaken your position during said strike — but could you have a stack of ready-to-go scripts just sitting there on Day One, when you’re ostensibly just now getting back to work, once the strike ends?
That might work if you were a staff writer for series, but most series need a lot of scripts to be done in a relatively short time, so they hire free-lancers to write them. Since you mentioned Ghosts I looked it up. IMDB lists 11 writers with between one and five scripts each, totaling 34 episodes, out of 41 produced.
Unless you have a firm contract to write X number of episodes for a show, you (and the other ten writers who’ve sold scripts to Ghost) would essentially be writing scripts on spec during the strike, and then hoping the show will buy them when the strike ends.