Almost every acceptance speech at Thursday's inaugural Television Academy Honors dinner started with a statistic: The rise of HIV infection among teenagers; the number of severely wounded soldiers returning from Iraq; the rate of cancer in people under 40; the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease among the elderly.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' newest kudo (not to be confused with a new Emmy category) aims to honor "television with a conscience." Thursday's gathering at the Beverly Hills Hotel was all about achieving lofty goals and using the electronic soapbox of educate, enlighten, motivate and inform -- but the event itself managed to stay low-key, not too starchy and like a well-produced television program, breezy.  (Dinner at 7, program at 8 and we were grabbing the goodie bags by 9:20. Event producer Phil Gurin deserves a kudo for that.)

TV Academy Honors was the brainchild of ATAS chairman and CEO John Shaffner (pictured in center above with recipients David E. Kelley and Dick Wolf), who explained at the start that he felt it was important for the org that recognizes television excellence via the Emmys to also "honor programs for their humanity and their conscience." Event's debut ceremony was dedicated to the memory of Ronnie Lippin, publicist and wife of longtime ATAS publicity rep Dick Lippin. Ronnie Lippin died of breast cancer last year; the TV Acad Honors idea began as an effort to pay tribute to Ronnie Lippin and her work on behalf of numerous charitable causes.

Inaugural kudos, selected by a 22-member committee co-chaired by Shaffner, went to Discovery-BBC's "Planet Earth"; HBO's "Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq"; ABC's "Boston Legal"; Lifetime telepic "Girl, Positive" and series "Side Order of Life"; CNN's "God's Warriors"; "Law & Order: SVU" seg "Harm"; Hallmark Hall of Fame/CBS' "Pictures of Hollis Woods"; and Showtime docu "Shame."

The standing ovation of the night went to the half-dozen servicemen and women in the crowd in connection with "Alive Day Memories." Exec producer Dawn Halfaker (pictured at podium), an Army First Lieutenant who lost an arm during her service in Iraq, recalled being shocked when she was approached by HBO's docu maven Sheila Nevins about getting involved with the project. "I didn't think anyone would be interested in my story," Halfaker said. "I'm just a soldier."

It was a celebration of a mighty impressive achievement -- "ER's" 300th seg -- but the talk of the party thrown by Warner Bros. Television Saturday night at the Cabana Club in Hollywood was all about what may transpire on Sunday and Monday.

Any gathering of TV industry insiders would have been abuzz with talk of the writers strike called for 12: 01 a.m. Monday and the Hail Mary meeting set for Sunday between the scribes and producers. But with "ER" in particular, it had to be the dominant theme given "ER" exec producer John Wells' background as a former WGA West prexy, one who skillfully helped avert a Defcon 4 scenario in 2001 when contract talks got heated (though not nearly as scalding as they are this time around).

In his brief remarks saluting the show and the people who make it, Warner Bros. TV prexy Peter Roth called Wells "the Eisenhower of all showrunners," and his use of a militaristic comparison was not lost on the crowd, unconscious as it may have been on Roth's part. NBC U Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman was more pointed, saying that Wells was going "fix all of it" in relation to the strike.

During his turn at the mike, Wells didn't use the S-word (except to sheepishly scoff at Ben's remark), but he did note that he'd done the math, and in the 14 seasons since "ER" dawned, skein has produced some 24,682 pages of scripts.

Neal Baer, a WGA negotiating committee member and an "ER" alum (who now shepherds NBC's "Law & Order: SVU" and does the work of angels as a licensed physician in his spare time), was on hand and inundated by "what's gonna happen?" queries. It was intriguing to see Baer and Wells and former "ER" showrunner Lydia Woodward huddled in a heavy-duty discussion toward the end of the evening.

As befitting the spirit of "ER," there was a define touch of optimism to all the strike talk among partygoers. The fact that a meeting was called for Sunday on Friday afternoon, hours after the WGA formally announced its plan to walk out on Monday, was widely dissected and discussed as a flicker of hope. There was also a feeling among the card-carrying types in the room that after Friday's strike announcement, some of the CEOs were starting to get more personally engaged and realize the serious-as-a-heart-attack-ness of the threat at hand.

Maybe, just maybe, there'll be enough of a give-and-take on Sunday for the scribes to hold their fire, even if it's 12- or 24 hour increments. Or in "ER" parlance, let's hope Sunday's meet turns out to be the final act of a two-parter, packed with guest stars and exotic location shoots, with a cliffhanger in the middle...and an uplifting ending by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.