Our long national nightmare is over

February 13th, 2008 at 08:23am Will Pfeifer

Here’s the official announcement from the Writer’s Guild of America:

“On Tuesday, members of the Writers Guilds East and West voted by a 92.5% margin to lift the restraining order that was invoked on November 5th. The strike is over.”

I know for the last several days it was pretty much over, but now the strike is definitely, absolutely, positively over. Writers are back to work today, pounding out new episodes of ACCORDING TO JIM, ‘TIL DEATH and other brilliant TV fare. Thank god for that.

On the plus side, A DAILY SHOW will be THE DAILY SHOW again, and programs like THE OFFICE and 30 ROCK might return again before the summer rerun season hits. Best of all, LOST might actually deliver more than the meager eight episodes we were going to get if the strike had continued. According to executive producer Carlton Cuse, the goal is to produce five more episodes for season 4 (the current one). That’s not a full season, but it’s better than nothing. And apparently seasons 4 through 6 will still have 48 episodes total, meaning we’ll get more shows in seasons 5 and 6. So, to sum up, we eventually get the same amount of LOST we would’ve gotten without the strike, but we’ll have to wait a bit. I can live with that.

Plus, the writers got at least some of what they wanted, and the giant corporations had to fork over a tiny bit of their colossal profits. That might mean a few less solid-gold backscratchers for the CEOs this Christmas, and that’s a victory in my book.

Not a movie-related post, but there’s more to life than movies — there’s TV!

(And the strike, had it continued much longer, would’ve had a bit impact on the 2009 movie season. But it looks like that bullet has been dodged. Now the writers can start working on GOOD LUCK CHUCK II: BETTER LUCK CHUCK!

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