• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, November 7, 2007

"Saturday Night Live's" Seth Meyers toted an "SNL on Strike" sign while joining about two dozen other show-business writers on a picket line Tuesday, but offered up optimism that the "Hollywood" strike would be short-lived.

NBC continued Tuesday afternoon to promote an all-new episode of "SNL" starring "The Rock" and singer Amy Winehouse for Saturday--and Meyers said in the morning he remained hopeful that a deal could be reached to clear the way for the cast and crew to work overtime to put the show together by 11 p.m. Saturday.

Back on "SNL" for a seventh season, Meyers picketed for a second straight day in New York.

Meyers--one of the show's head writers as well as a performer--shrugged his shoulders about an exact deadline for when an agreement would have to be reached for the show to go on, but said "it would be fun" to try and put it together on a truncated schedule. (Much of the cast, including Meyers, has roots in improv.)

No such luck. NBC said Tuesday evening that an "SNL" repeat would air, since no settlement was in sight. With the strike now in day three, "SNL" is the latest late-night franchise to experience an interruption.

Beyond expressing interest in what would happen if "SNL" were to play it by ear even more than usual, Meyers repeated the writers' position that the studios must share income with them on content distributed on new-media platforms from iTunes to Joost.com.

"We understand it's a tricky situation, (but) the marketplace is changing," he said, emphasizing that writers need to take a stand now, partly to establish a precedent as linear television consumption wanes.

While Meyers hoped for the best, Daniel Palladino--a former executive producer and writer on "The Gilmore Girls," now doing the same for the ballyhooed Fox series "The Return of Jezebel James"--said: "My sense is it's going to be a very long strike. These issues have been boiling beneath the surface for a long time." "Jezebel James" is slated for a January debut, and all seven episodes that the network ordered are ready to go.

Meyers, Palladino and thousands of other members of the Writers Guild of America are locked in a standoff with the group--negotiating on behalf of the Hollywood producers, mainly over residuals from new-media outlets.

The pair and others circled outside Silvercup Studios across the river from Manhattan in Queens--where a sign announcing filming for the CW's "Gossip Girl" hung and some of TV's most venerable shows have been shot.

"SNL" is an interesting case vis-à-vis changes in content distribution. Arguably, with its "Lazy Sunday" clip gaining popularity on YouTube in late 2005, it helped usher in the era of consumer hunger for online video. Also, this spring, NBC redesigned the "SNL" Web site and added a comprehensive video library.

While "SNL" had a slim chance of avoiding on-air interruption Tuesday, other late-night shows had already experienced that fate--much to the dismay of Rob Dubbin.

Dubbin, a writer on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," walked the picket line in Queens and expressed palpable frustration with the work stoppage. "I miss my job," he said sternly.

Like Meyers, he said new-media distribution is "the future of our medium," and added that it's critical for writers now to gain some share in the upside.

During a lighter moment, but still with a long face, he said, "I hate not working on a day Rudy Giuliani is saying Bernard Kerik's positives outweigh his negatives."