No ginger ale in this champagne

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As he stood on the picket line in the blustery cold across the street from New York’s Chelsea Piers this afternoon, veteran writer and producer Tom Fontana (“Oz,” “Homicide,” “St. Elsewhere”) saluted the stand his fellow show runners took in Los Angeles today.

“I think it’s extraordinary,” Fontana said. “I applaud them. A union only works if the strongest are willing to step up, and for people like the people who do ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and ‘The Shield’ and ‘Two and a Half Men’ –- that’s great that they’re really putting themselves on the line like that.”

Fontana has also stopped work on his new show, “The Philanthropist,” which was supposed to debut on NBC in January. He had written the first script and broken stories for six more episodes when the strike was called. “I canceled everything -- casting, everything,” he said. “I’m just out here with my fellow writers.”

Although the show runners’ actions may hasten the end of production of prime-time shows, Fontana said he doesn’t believe that fact alone would jolt the networks.

“Because they anticipated that within a relatively short amount of time they’d be running out of scripts anyway, I think whether a show shuts down this week or next week, I think they’re already resigned to that,” he said. “I think this has more to do with showing them our resolve than it does with an immediate economic effect on them.”

The writers will have to remain firm, Fontana said, because he believes the strike will go on until at least early next year. “I don’t see any reason why management would want to talk to us right now,” he said. “This quarter they can write off. But you can’t keep writing them off. Come January, when it’s all reality, all the time, then they’re going to have to take a hard look at the financial bank accounts and talk to us.”

He scoffed at the notion that the studios would try to break the guild and replace the writers with non-union scribes. “It’s total rhetoric,” Fontana said. “Are they going to really fire the writers of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’? The audience is too smart. You don’t take champagne and put ginger ale in it and try to pretend it’s champagne. And I don’t think the actors will stand for it. This is a collaboration.”

-- Matea Gold