By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, December 20, 2007

David Letterman's Worldwide Pants production company will meet with the Writers Guild of America tomorrow to try to pound out an interim agreement that would enable Letterman and Craig Ferguson -- whose CBS late night show is also produced by Worldwide Pants -- to return to the air with their writers on Jan. 2.

"With the WGA now embracing a strategy of offering interim agreements to individual companies, it is inconceivable to us that there is any producing entity more deserving than Worldwide Pants, which has been and continues to be a staunch supporter of the Writers Guild and its positions," Worldwide Pants President and CEO Rob Burnett said yesterday in a statement.

It's the second we're-the-good-guys statement Burnett has issued in two days.

Tuesday, Burnett sent out a statement saying, "We are willing to agree to the writers' demands that are within our control, so we have no reason to believe that an interim agreement can't be achieved with the WGA. . . . As a result, our only focus is on returning Jan. 2 with writers."

Worldwide Pants owns both of CBS's late night shows but CBS has the rights to new-media use of the shows -- a key sticking point in the guild's demands for a new contract.

Also complicating things, the WGA's negotiating committee chief, John Bowman, yesterday was quoted by the trade paper Variety saying that while the guild is indeed in talks with several smaller production houses about forging interim agreements, the guild will throw the switch on such deals only if it gets a "critical mass" of deals. The number of deals, he told Variety, would need to be "large enough to have an impact" and pressure the major studios that have control of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, with which the guild has been in a death match for seven weeks now.

"Interim agreements are fine but what we really want is to get back to the table" with the majors, he told Variety.

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In other totally depressing strike-related TV news, the Writers Guild has decided to go ahead and picket the Golden Globes, just to make sure even the cast of "Entourage" understands they are crossing a picket line if they attend the trophy show of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which NBC is scheduled to broadcast next month. The guild had already announced it refused to grant the show's producers a waiver so that guild writers could craft all those witty gags delivered by presenters and backstage by whoever is filling in for Dick Clark in the press room, thereby rendering it a "struck show."

The guild also turned down the Academy Awards producers' request for a waiver on film clips and -- before the Oscar producers even asked -- said it would turn down a waiver to use WGA writers to help Jon Stewart with his monologue and with all those unforgettable lines read off teleprompters by presenters on the ABC broadcast, set for February.

While these two trophy shows try to recover from these blows, another trophy show has essentially perished.

The People's Choice Awards ceremony -- at least as we know and love it -- will not be held this year, the first Writers Guild Roadkill.

CBS is trying to figure out how to present some sort of made-for-TV People's Choice trophy show on Jan. 8, but the 34th annual will probably be a taped affair, lacking red carpet arrivals and no press allowed -- in other words, stripped of its picketability.

"The show will go on," CBS said, putting on a brave front. "The People's Choice tradition on CBS will continue and we plan to introduce some new ideas in the process."

Word of the PCA's demise was first reported by celebrity suck-up show "Extra" on its Web site.