Hollywood Punches Back in As Strike Ends

(AP) — Euphoria over returning to work quickly gave way to workaday cold sweats as Hollywood writers resumed the daily grind of cranking out scripts after a three-month strike.
"I felt giddy," Craig Sweeny, a writer for the NBC drama "Medium," said about being back on the job Wednesday, a day after the Writers Guild of America overwhelmingly voted to end the walkout. "Then someone handed me a production schedule, and then I felt scared."
TV writers face tighter deadlines than usual to salvage what's left of the season for shows that went into reruns because of the strike that started Nov. 5. On its first day back, the crew at CBS' "CSI: NY" scrambled to start pounding out two scripts from scratch in two weeks, about half the usual time, so new episodes could premiere in early April.
Dates were announced Wednesday for some series to return to the air, among them CBS' "How I Met Your Mother" on March 17, NBC's "My Name Is Earl" on April 3 and NBC's "The Office" on April 10.
Along with the 10,500 writers who walked out, the strike immobilized thousands of technicians, makeup people and other production workers. The Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. estimates the strike cost the local economy $3.2 billion in lost wages and revenue.
AP Photo/Ric Francis
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