[Televisionary]

It's official: the WGA strike, which began November 5th, has finally come to a close, following a member vote overwhelmingly in favor of ending the strike (92.5% to be precise) and getting back to work during the official ten-day ratification process. You can literally hear the sound of relief echoing through Hollywood today as writers return to their keyboards to try to pound out as many scripts as possible in time to salvage the 2007-08 season. "Our membership has voted, and writers can go back to work," said WGA West President Patric Verrone in a statement. "This was not a strike we wanted, but one we had to conduct in order to win jurisdiction and establish appropriate residuals for writing in new media and on the Internet. Those advances now give us a foothold in the digital age. Rather than being shut out of the future of content creation and delivery, writers will lead the way as TV migrates to the Internet and platforms for new media are developed." So w...

A few freshman series got a slight vote of confidence from their respective networks. NBC has ordered three additional scripts for each of its new dramas, including Chuck , Journeyman , Bionic Woman , and Life . While it's not quite the back nine order that I've been hoping for (especially in the case of Chuck ), it's definitely a step in the right direction. CBS, meanwhile, extended the order for four additional scripts from its primetime soap Cane . So far the CW's Gossip Girl has been the only freshman drama to receive a full season pickup, despite a staggering 30 percent drop in viewership between the series opener and second episode. Given the immediacy of the strike situation (nearly everyone--myself included--now believes that the strike is definitely happening), I am surprised that the networks aren't handing out additional script orders--even as many as nine--left and right. There's no guarantee that these scripts will ever be shot but, given the loomi...

Question: what do Jimmy Smits, Hector Elizondo, Polly Walker, Nestor Carbonell, Rita Moreno, Paola Turbay, and Alona Tal have in common? Answer: they all appear in CBS' cracking and taut new drama Cane , which launches this fall. Cane charts the soapy twists and turns in the lives of the Duques, a wealthy family in the lucrative rum business who must fend off takeover advances from the shifty Samuels clan, who'd like nothing better but to put the business started by pater familias Pancho Duque (Hector Elizondo) and now run by adopted son Alex Vegas (an incandescant Jimmy Smits) firmly under their thumb. The matter at stake in Cane is the titular sugarcane, used in rum-making, which is now being considered by politicians as an ethanol fuel alternative... which means big bucks for who ever gains control of those massive sugarcane fields. Add to this the fact that there's bad blood--as in Shakespearean-scale blood feuds--between the two families (the Samuels may have played ...