It’s difficult to assess the fallout from the Hollywood writers’ strike, but it’s going to be big.

When “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” went into reruns this week, hundreds of thousands of American citizens lost contact with what’s going on in the outside world. The recourse to vintage episodes of “The Colbert Report” immediately disconnected voters — at least the ones too young to remember the ’70s — from the nation’s unfolding political drama.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. However much we may miss our daily dose of faux mock reality, the discomfort is nothing compared to the pain we will feel if the networks respond to a prolonged strike by falling back on the writer-free, unscripted, real reality TV. Forget Colbert. Think “America’s Next Top Odontologist.”

There is a close relation between reality and labor unrest. Reality is a natural place to rummage for ideas for a television producer who is out of writers to provide them. It’s already there, so the sets are cheap. And television audiences have proven that there is no dialogue so bad that they will refuse to listen.

Some old-timers in Hollywood peg the dawn of reality TV to the great strike of 1988, when writers walked off the lot and NBC punished the rest of us with “Group One Medical” — in which real doctors infotained America with real patients. In 1988, Robert Stack’s “Unsolved Mysteries” became a weekly show. “On Trial” and “USA Today: The Television Series” — fortunately no longer with us — also hit the airwaves in that fateful year.

Admittedly, reality TV scored some hits, such as “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” in the late 1990s. But there was still a hope that the genre might recede into the darker corners of cable when the threat of a combo strike in 2001 by writers and actors sent studios again scurrying for the real world.

Today, the dial is cluttered with offerings like “Dancing With the Stars,” “American idol” and “America’s Next Top Model.”

And there’s always more: chefs fight over appetizers; rich middle-aged housewives bicker in big houses; cops chase perps. This might sound elitist, but when “The Office” goes out of production, we worry about what might happen to its place in the lineup.

Regardless of the outcome of this labor struggle, for the sake of America’s television-watching citizenry, we implore the networks not to let reality TV intrude further upon our free time.

Don’t destroy the fantasy.