Winter Hiatus Haunts the Many Ghosts of TV Future

It’s a scary time in the television business. The air is filled with ghouls, goblins and ghosts. A few don’t even know they’re dead yet.

No, that spooky music growing ever louder isn’t a sign that Halloween is just around the corner but rather the November rating sweeps.

Soon, low-rated programs will start disappearing into a murky realm programming necromancers call “hiatus.” Some shows will be back once sweeps are over, but others will fade from view, never to return.

The fact that networks spend millions producing and promoting shows, only to relegate them to this limbo, is indicative of the myopia that makes television a bizarre and frightening place. At the point when some viewers just might be getting attached to a new series, if it fails to hold its lead-in or deliver enough adults ages 18 to 49, it’s dispatched faster than a teenager in a “Halloween” movie.

Small wonder that people who work in the TV business operate in a near-constant state of panic, scurrying about like characters in “The Blair Witch Project” minus the herky-jerky camera work. Moreover, thanks to the breakneck pace of new technology, no one has a clue exactly what they will be doing 10 years from now.

Will the Internet devour television? Will digital TV spawn more channels than anyone can afford to program? Do couch potatoes actually want to interact with TV or just be able to order a pizza without getting up? Will the major networks fade to insignificance as TV turns into radio with pictures, offering channels narrowly targeted to every conceivable taste?

Could the personal video recorders marketed by TiVo and Replay gain popularity and undermine commercial television by phasing out ads as we know them? Will mergers leave behind only three companies that control everything? Will voters grow so cynical that Jerry Springer becomes the next entertainment luminary to mount a presidential campaign, running on the platform “He’ll Put the Fight Back in America”?

The truth is that nobody knows, though further consolidation of the industry--thanks to the government gutting rules that once prevented some mergers--appears inevitable, along with the elimination of numerous middle-management jobs.

All this uncertainty is scary for those in the business, but there’s a lot TV viewers should fear as well. Increasingly desperate to grab attention, networks are not only pushing the envelope in terms of language and sexuality but toying with ever more elaborate stunts--often using people--to titillate audiences.

What might wind up on the air as programmers fill more channels with fewer scruples as to how they go about it? Here are some ghastly specters of what may await us--the ghosts, as it were, of TV seasons yet to come:

* The producers of ABC’s “Once and Again” join with Psychology Today to create a cable network on which self-absorbed people talk directly to the camera about their feelings.

* NBC, the only major network not currently airing a series created by David E. Kelley, offers the producer of “Ally McBeal,” “Chicago Hope” and “The Practice” a sight-unseen commitment with license to do whatever he wants.

Unfortunately, a delirious Kelley--exhausted thanks to writing every episode of two new spinoff series, the children’s program “Ally McBeal Babies” and late-night Cinemax show “Ally McBeal’s Erotic Fantasies”--can come up only with a blend of two films he wrote, “Placid Mystery at Lake Alaska,” a macabre comedy about a giant alligator that eats hockey players.

* Attempting to shake off its stodgy image, CBS airs the special “Shocking Moments With CBS Stars: Caught on Tape,” using outtakes of Bill Cosby, Dick Van Dyke and the cast of “Touched by an Angel” in uncensored expletive-laden tirades.

* Hoping to boost its stock price, Disney stops making any pretense regarding its use of ABC as a vehicle to promote the studio and its holdings. As a result, “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” begins wearing mouse ears, fellow Friday comedy “Boy Meets World” becomes “It’s a Small Boy Meets World After All” and the new drama “Wasteland” is replaced by an anthology series called “Fantasyland,” “Frontierland” and “Tomorrowland” on a rotating basis.

* Trying to reach kids as soon as they escape the womb, Viacom hires the makers of “Teletubbies” to develop an in-hospital channel for newborns, to be piped into neonatal wards.

* E! Entertainment Television and the National Enquirer team to launch a 24-hour network called Mostly True Hollywood Stories, and Our Lawyers Dare You to Prove Otherwise.

* Realizing that a special built around crashing a plane won’t be enough to jump-start its ratings, Fox airs an hourlong show titled “What You Don’t Know About Nielsen Meters Can Kill You.” The program out-rates the Super Bowl, at least in homes metered by Nielsen.

* Time Warner acquires NBC and schedules a new version of the TNT wrestling show “Nitro!” on Saturday nights. In a novel promotional twist, the new series pits such NBC stars as Brooke Shields, Christina Applegate and Kirstie Alley against one another in cage matches to see who wins a place on the network’s Thursday night lineup.

* MTV--encouraged by “The Real World’s” ratings success featuring a youth with an alcohol problem--initiates a game show, “Student Body Shots,” in which teams representing various universities try to drink one another under the table.

* “Wheel of Fortune” adds a trap-door element, in which any contestant who can’t solve more than one really easy puzzle is dropped into a vat of snakes.

* UPN seeks to one-up “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” with its own new quiz show, “Die, Brainiac, Die!” Players compete first by answering trivia questions, then the two leading money-makers--their wrists tied together, taking a page from the 1952 movie “The Iron Mistress”--engage in a knife fight to the death to see who keeps the loot.

* Art Bell becomes the last nationally syndicated radio personality to get his own TV show. In the late-night program, Bell sits in a dark room, mutters about the government tampering with our precious bodily fluids and waits for aliens to land or the end of the world, whichever comes first.

Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.