Remember back when people watched TV?

Seems like a day scarcely passes without my receiving a missive from a cable network trumpeting its highest ratings for a night/week/month in its history. By contrast, Variety gets all gloomy-Gus with us, reporting the latest in the downward spiral that is the broadcast-network ratings landscape, particularly in wake of the writers strike (all percentages are measured vs. the networks’ ratings in the same week last year):

ABC: Down 23%
CBS: Down 26%
NBC: Down 7%
Fox: Down 15%
The CW: Down 50%

You look at NBC there and think, “Well, that’s not too bad, is it? That Ben Silverman really has rescued this network!” But Variety even rains on that parade: NBC hardly had the furthest to fall, since its ratings last season sucked something awful, and it has so far responded the most aggressively by spackling over its depleted lineup with reality shows.

As a result, NBC’s engaging in some pretty severe belt-tightening (just make sure it’s your belt and not your necktie, guys), including scaling way back on producing pilots (to just about zero) and instead ordering a number of episodes of a scripted series that they really, really like from the get-go (which’d help keep the network from having to pay actors money for nothing to keep them on retainer until they decide whether or not to pick up their pilot). (This is a little closer to what cable does in keeping its costs down.) They’re also, as we’ve previously noted, thisclose to killing the traditional May upfront where the network introduces its fall schedule to advertisers and the media.

“It's not about making less programs; it's about making less waste,” declared NBC’s CEO/Waste Management Expert, Jeff Zucker (isn't "make waste" what moms call baby poo?). “We're not going to do worse than the figures I cited for the last two years.” Which sounds about as close to raising a white flag without actually raising a white flag.

Anyway, none of this comes as a surprise, since all these things were discussed at that double super-secret background luncheon with NBC last month. If memory serves, NBC Entertainment co-chairman Marc Graboff said, “That’s a good question” to one of my questions. If memory serves, my question was, “Are you going to eat that Cornish game hen?”

As for The CW: Is it still on the air?