The Writers Guild of America is heading back into negotiations this morning, after approving a strike that could cripple the television industry, and the hope is that the labor dispute will be resolved in the final hours, as happened in 2001.

The fear is that it will not be, and the television industry will face the sort of meltdown it experience in 1988, a strike that went for five months before a new contract was reached.

At this moment, it's looking a lot more like 1988 than 2001. Writers and the television industry are way far apart and giving off no signals that a compromise may come before the strike deadline, set for Nov. 1. A strike would also hit the movie industry but the effects would not be nearly as immediate.

On Friday, the 12,000-member WGA authorized union leaders to call a strike following months of talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that failed to reach any agreement.

The strike deadline is not set in concrete. Writers could continue working if union leaders thought they were making progress, but the authorization is still a significant step toward a walkout at the end of the month.

Writers are demanding a share of revenue from emerging media, including residual payments from shows on DVD and new platforms like mobile devices and the internet. Industry negotiators are insisting on a 30-month delay to allow for a full analysis of the costs and revenues of those new media, in what writers are dismissing as a stalling tactic.

As crippling as the 1988 strike was, both sides appear hunkered down for a repeat performance, with the networks stockpiling episodes of scripted dramas where they can and lining up reality series they can plop in as the need arises. Reality series would not be affected by a strike because their writers are non-union.

Should the writers walk, the first to be affected would be the live shows that air daily, like “The Tonight Show” or “The View,” which rely on writers to come up with the dialogue and skits. In the short term, the networks would turn to repeats. Alternatively, the hosts could come up with their own material and resort to longer interviews to soak up time.

The soaps, which rely on complex storylines, would soon feel the brunt of a strike, and would be dropped from network schedules completely rather than repeated.

Longstanding scripted primetime series like “CSI” would likely air through mid-January without being affected, since episodes are filmed well enough ahead of time. But at that point the networks would be forced to switch to reruns and air reality series, whose writers are non-union.

New shows with only a few episodes in the can would feel the hurt immediately, and the networks would probably slide reality series in their place. New shows that were headed for cancellation will likely avoid the axe until the outcome of the threat of a strike is known. Though low-rated, they'd serve to fill schedules, at least for the early weeks of a strike.

Longer-term, a strike would affect planning and product of pilots for the 2008-'09 television.