Even with a potential actors strike looming over this television season, the ghost of last season's WGA strike is still haunting the networks.

When the 100-day writers strike ended in March, ABC and NBC decided that bringing back certain shows for the rest of the truncated season would be difficult and ultimately pointless, opting instead to keep the shows on hiatus until the fall season began. As a result, it looks as though the extra-long break was actually detrimental to the shows.

Chuck and Life, two NBC series that premiered last fall, experienced sagging ratings when they returned to the airwaves last month, with Chuck losing 31 per cent of its viewers (6.8 million viewers in the US versus 9.8 million last year) and Life losing 47 per cent (10 million versus last year's 18.8 million). Erstwhile golden child Heroes has also seen a dramatic drop in ratings for its third season, is down 41 per cent this season (from 16.9 million to 10 million).

ABC, too, is regretting its decision to bench its shows for so long. Pushing Daisies, which last year averaged 13 million viewers in the U.S., premiered to a mere 6.3 million viewers, down 52 per cent. Other ABC offspring Private Practice and Dirty Sexy Money experienced similar pains, with Money losing 32 per cent (from 10.4 million viewers to 7.1 million) and Practice shedding 44 per cent of its viewers (from 14.4 million to 8 million).

"Holding back the shows after the strike has certainly has not proven to be the best decision," Bill Carroll, director of programming for the Katz TV Group, told Entertainment Weekly. "We are creatures of habit, and when we no longer have the opportunity to watch our favorite show or our new favorite shows, we move on. At this point, viewers have not returned."

Not everyone was hurt by the strike, however. While shows on ABC and NBC went into hibernation after the strike, CBS decided to use the opposite strategy, putting its series back into production to take advantage of viewers looking for something to watch. As a result, most of those shows have seen an increase in viewership: How I Met Your Mother went up by 14 per cent, NCIS by 29 per cent and Criminal Minds has enjoyed a 34 per cent increase. Hey, remember when CBS was a lame network that only conservative senior citizens would watch? If you don't, clearly the eye network is doing something right.

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