After three harsh months, the writers' strike against the big movie and TV studios is nearly over, with writers expected to return to work on Wednesday, after a speeded-up vote to approve a new three-year contract.

From the start, many in Hollywood believed that whatever good case the writers could make for a bigger slice of what the studios make in revenue, especially in new media, the studios would come out the winners.

If that's how it actually happened, no one is saying so. Union executives are saying the deal they reached was not all they’d hoped for but far better than what the studios were offering when they went out on Nov. 5.

That's certainly true. The new package offers the writers payment for their work in new media on a par with what the directors got when their union, the Directors Guild of America, settled with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers a few weeks ago. Instead of a flat fee, writers will receive a percentage of revenue.

But it would be hard to argue that represents much of anything. The revenue future of new media is a big unknown.

And the studios held the Writers Guild of America back on really important issues, such as expanding their reach to include writers on reality shows.

The real test of who won is yet to come. And it's really about the future of network television.

Up through January at least, the networks can rightly say their ratings were not hurt by the strike. They had gotten by on reruns and holiday specials.

For the networks, their hour of truth is just now beginning. The great unknown is in just how well their ratings hold up in the coming two months. By mid-April, new episodes of top scripted shows will be returning to the air as writers churn out new scripts and actors assume their roles and the cameras roll again.

But between now and mid-April, broadcast will be awash in reality shows, some still to debut, and it's two months for the networks to evaluate just how well reality-laden schedules will do in place of scripted fare.

Many expect that ratings will tank, dipping 15 percent or more. If that does indeed happen, the networks will know their great reality experiment failed. They'll return to scripted fare for the coming fall and beyond.

But if the new reality shows catch in any way with viewers, the networks will read that as their future. And we'll see more of them.

For all the worry over ratings, and a very real concern, so much of what's driving network thinking these days is cost, and reality programming is simply that much cheaper to produce. Their argument: There's really no difference between a poorly performing scripted show and a poorly performing reality show, except for one. The poorly performing reality show costs about half as much to put on the air.

It's not hard to see their point. Of all the new scripted sitcoms that debut, almost all fail. Is the sitcom dead? It's a tired question, but if you are writing checks for scripts, it's real easy to say, as many have, that reality is the new comedy of television, its replacement.

It just makes that much more sense to rush of out slew of reality shows, as the networks are doing in these months, to see if any of them work, than to labor through many months of scripted shows that have the odds working against them before pencil first touches paper.

All this signals yet more changes to come as the networks attempt to break away from the old ways: the set season, the accepted genres, the familiar drama and family comedy themes that have dominated network TV for decades now.

We're seeing plenty of signs of it--talk of fewer pilots, talk of not even having upfront presentations.

In many ways, network television seems an industry set on reinventing itself, and anxious to figure out where to begin.

That will be the real story of this strike, told not this week or next but next year and the year after and the year after that.