NEW YORK — Some of the most creative thinking in television these days has nothing to do with comedy or drama. It's about the commercials.

Fueled by desperation, networks are inserting games, quizzes and mini-dramas into commercial breaks. They're incorporating more product pitches into programming. Two experimental programs without traditional commercial breaks will premiere this fall. NBC has even called on Jerry Seinfeld for help.

This is all being done to stop viewers with DVRs from fast-forwarding through ads, or to circumvent those who do.

Adding to the urgency, this week Nielsen Media Research begins offering ratings for commercial breaks, instead of just the shows around them.

"We all need to become more creative in how we incorporate sponsors into a program," said Ed Swindler, executive vice president for NBC Universal ad sales. "No one on the creative side or the business side wants to make commercials intrusive, but we do need to commercialize efficiently so viewers can afford to get free television."

An estimated 17 percent of American homes have digital video recorders. Nielsen estimates that in prime-time, nearly half of 18-to-49-year-old viewers with DVRs are watching recorded programs instead of live ones. Of these, six in 10 skip the ads.

So far, the most frequent experiment is to insert original content into commercial breaks. The CW network pioneered "content wraps" last year where, in one example, a hair care company ditched the typical ad to present beauty tips and interviews with the network's stars, all involving the company's products.

CW figured on doing six content wraps at first, but advertisers were so enthusiastic that 20 were done, a spokesman said.

TNT aired a five-episode mini-drama about a young woman, with viewers directed to a Web site — plastered with ads — for the finale. Fox created an animated taxi driver, Oleg, who appeared during breaks talking to his passengers. Court TV will offer a mystery about a murder with clues dropped in commercial breaks, online and via text messages; the game's winner gets $25,000. Fans of NBC's "Scrubs" were asked trivia questions at the start of a break and the answer appeared between ads.

TBS has tried making commercial breaks a destination. It often bunches a series of funny commercials together and promotes them ahead of time.

ABC is considering ways to get viewers into ads before they realize it. On"Ugly Betty," for example, the camera focuses on a book as its cover dissolves into a commercial. Or there could be a real ad playing on a television that is in the scene of a show.

One expert suggests networks again weave sponsor messages into entertainment. Comic Jack Benny's radio show would include humorous "phone calls" with executives at the company sponsoring his show, said Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.