What could be more dramatic than the plotline of an afternoon soap opera?

Media buyers may soon find out.

Going into the writers' strike, all the talk was that the soaps at some point would shortly run out of fresh scripts and simply go off the air, reruns not being an option because of the complicated nature of their plotlines.

That has not happened. The series continue to air and new scripts continue to be churned out, meaning the shows will continue airing as they always have, likely until the strike is finally resolved, relying mostly on non-union writers.

So far, ratings have not suffered as a direct result of the strike.

But that's expected to change quite soon, media buyers fear.

The reason is that the scripts penned by the shows' longtime guild writers, typically months in advance, are fast running out, and the scripts by the less-experienced writers will take their place.

While these may be capable writers, the concern is that their comparative inexperience will be picked up on immediately by devoted fans of those shows, leading to ratings falloffs and very public rantings over the shows' declines on message boards.

Typically, soap opera writers have been on the same show for years, decades even, and they're masters at developing often intricate plotlines months out. They really know their characters because they created them.

“I don’t think there’s any way anyone that hasn’t been doing this can write at the same level and with the same tone as people who do it all the time. Regular viewers will notice," says David Scardino, entertainment specialist at Rubin Postaer and Associates.

“The avid viewer, who’s been watching a soap for 20 years or more, may notice something’s going astray with different writers,” says Shari Anne Brill, senior vice president and director of programming at Carat. “If viewers notice a change, ratings will be impacted accordingly. It could be a problem.”

That's exactly what the soaps don't need.

Ratings are already tumbling, the result of long-term attrition as more women returned to the workplace and as cable grabbed off a rising share of daytime viewing.

This season alone, ABC, the daytime leader, is down 14 percent in women 25-54, to a 1.8 rating. CBS is flat with a 1.7 rating and NBC, which has trimmed its daytime drama lineup to one show, “Days of Our Lives,” is down 6 percent, to a 1.6 rating.

Further declines, dramatic declines, would put a lot of ad money at risk. Daytime dramas in 2007 generated $805 million for the year through November, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Once gone, viewers of daytime dramas are tough to lure back, say media buyers.

The networks are scrambling to ensure this doesn’t happen, and one way has been to hire writers who have left the guild to complement their less experienced non-union writers. Still, it's only a few writers per show, compared to about a dozen during normal production.

Working in the soaps' favor is that many actors, like Susan Lucci on ABC’s “All My Children,” have been playing the same character for decades, and they can make sure storylines don’t veer off track.

And of course the new writers are working with storylines mapped out months ahead, so the episodes are not likely to stray too far off course.

But all that said, media buyers are hoping these revived talks between the WGA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers leads to a quick settlement. It would come just in time.