The END of Bionic Woman, Heroes, Smallville

Every show with writers faces the same problems with the strike. I imagine "serial dramas" like 24, Heroes, Lost, Desperate Housewives, etc. suffer the most because of the need to tie-in each episode to maintain continuity where sitcoms and "single-shot" dramas like CSI and Criminal Minds aren't as reliant and might make do with strike jumpers or stringers to help produce shows.

Bottom line is if the show is worthy of coming back, it will --- just a matter of when. Smallville and BW (in our genre) face the biggest challenge like Argo said, for two unrelated reasons.

If the strike is prolonged, hope everyone is ready for the influx of Reality Programming that we'll be bombarded with in addition to reruns and several new "movies of the week". One possible scenario I thought is that networks should take advantage of the "open programming space" and use it as a test market for pilots that were filmed but never greenlit. What a better focus group opportunity? In terms of our community, maybe CBS will dust of the "Ultra" pilot and see if it will fly (no pun intended). Of course, the show WAS pretty bad (semitruck lifting scene aside! )....

I live in America, and I was wondering that myself.

Okay, the writers' strike will put a lot of shows on hiatus. Re-runs and such will presumably fill the vacated time-slots. But when the strike is settled, what's to prevent the shows from picking up where they left off?

Heroes is a popular show with a large cult following. Hard to imagine the network will drop it permanently on account of the strike. I believe Smallville is in its final season. I don't know how robust its ratings are, but surely CW would want to wrap up the current story-lines (and, if we're lucky, set up a Supergirl spin-off). The Bionic Woman I'm not so sure about. It's a new show that may not have built up much of an audience yet, so I could see the network just pulling the plug, especially if the ratings are anything less than spectacular.

But then, I know nothing about the inner workings of television networks. Are there legal issues or something that would mean the end of the line for these programs?

Well said, CM! It'll get resolved soon, I believe. Then we get to look forward to the Director's Guild Strike, whose contract expires this summer I believe (though I hear their negotiations are going better than the writers').

I don't think we should give up hope here, people. The writers strike might be settled in three weeks.