If you haven’t seen Gossip Girl yet (Tuesdays, 8.30pm on FOX8), you’re not missing much. Based on the dozen or so books by Cecily von Ziegesar, Gossip Girl is a largely by-the-numbers teen drama about fabulously wealthy and incredibly spoilt New York high school kids in impossibly glamorous clothes stealing each other’s boyfriends and drinking champagne to hip indie tunes.

It’s run by Josh Schwarz and Stephanie Savage – the team that brought you The OC. But sadly, The OC’s great strengths – warmth, wit and Peter Gallagher – are nowhere to be seen. It does however, have a useful voice over (the Gossip Girl of the title) which, for those who find the nuances of human behaviour an eternal mystery, clearly spells out the subtext of each scene as it unfolds, thus making Gossip Girl perhaps the least demanding television drama in the history of the broadcasting. If you’re looking to kill an hour, you could do worse, but not much.

And yet, Gossip Girl has been picked up for another season. This confused me. Sure, it was diverting enough while it lasted, but despite my love for glossy teen telly, I forgot it almost instantly and I certainly didn’t care enough about any of the characters to watch it again. Turns out I wasn’t alone. Gossip Girl didn’t rate all that well in the States, even in its target teen demographic. So why the hell was a studio spending good money to make more of it?

The answer is essentially the sticking point of the ongoing writers’ strike. Because, despite its mediocre ratings, Gossip Girl was picked up on the back of stats that showed that when downloads and digitally recorded viewings were included in the figures, Gossip Girl was actually watched by quite a lot of people indeed.

Thus, it seems, Gossip Girl is the future of television. Not in terms of content, obviously, because that is depressingly pedestrian. But its renewal despite poor ratings marks another milestone along the road to television’s death, a further disintegration of the model that for fifty or so years has seen viewers receive free programming beamed directly to their homes in return for having to watch commercials. The future is elsewhere, and the studios know it.

This is the argument that the striking writers, including Lost co-creator Damon Lindelhof, are trying to make – the studios, rather than being utterly baffled, as they claim, by the mysterious voodoo that is the internet, are actually already looking at ways of deriving revenue from outside the traditional model. They have ways of measuring how many non-traditional viewers are watching. And the investment in a second season of Gossip Girl proves that they have a pretty good idea how to monetise this new audience.

All the writers want is a piece of that action. And Gossip Girl, as well as keeping them in touch with what trendy young New Yorkers are wearing, might just be the leverage they need.