When the Writers Guild of America went on strike in November, production on all television shows came to a screeching halt. Because of the nature of  production schedules, viewers were able to cope with the impending future of darkened screens by saying goodbye slowly as networks rolled out all of the remaining content they had stockpiled. It wasn't really until the holiday season that viewers began to feel the impact of the strike. As difficult as it has been to find other things to do than plant oneself in front of the television for hours at a time, such as *gasp* talk to other humans or read a book, the strike may have been just the kick in the pants television needed.

Though established shows were merely put on hiatus, the future for the season's new shows was unclear. Without a locked-in audience, studios were reluctant to renew new shows like ABC's Pushing Daisies, NBC's Chuck and Life, and other newbies. The good news is that, since the end of the strike, these along with Dirty Sexy Money and Private Practice have been renewed for the fall. 

The downside for the studios is that the momentum of these new shows was lost with the strike and they will now have to spend much more in building the audience back up. Likewise, the strike put crew members out of work. With the shows not starting back until September, crew members have had to find other jobs and now won't return to the postponed productions. 

What to do, what to do? Variety informs us that studio heads are now thinking of relaunching the shows as new entities during the pilot season. Last fall saw horrible ratings, so execs might be willing to go for a do-over. 

The benefit for us, the viewers, is that the strike gave the writers and execs a chance to rethink the direction and story arc for all shows. I don't know about you guys, but the Meredith-Derek back-and-forthyness was quickly growing stale, the fight between House's potential staff got just plain annoying, and, Heroes, good God, Heroes. And that's really all I was watching at the time of the strike. TV was just that bad.

The Variety article talks mostly about the ABC show Pushing Daisies, which was suffering from longer post-production schedules than previously anticipated and overblown budgets. Heroes and 24 are also taking advantage of the chance to take some time off in order to rework complicated plots (and because it's nearly impossible to produce enough episodes to bring these shows back in time).

All I can say is, with all this time off, these shows better hit the ground running.