As viewers grew weary of repeats and dim-witted reality shows, the actors and writers who make scripted series found themselves getting antsy after three months on strike.
Writers kept to the picket line, while some actors got in a little stage work. Mostly, though, they waited for their return to work.
Monday, viewers can sample some of the first post-strike episodes when CBS airs new installments of "The Big Bang Theory,” "How I Met Your Mother” and "Two and a Half Men.”
Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Barney on "How I Met Your Mother,” was interviewed a week before production resumed on the comedy.
"I hope he shacks up with some chick longer than the span of one episode,” Harris says. He quickly adds that could "jump the shark. I'm still pining for Cobie Smulders (Robin). She is awesome, and I would love to cuddle with her more.”
"He's the fifth wheel, the oversexed cad that everyone claims they know someone like,” Harris says of Barney. "He's always trying to get his gang of friends, including himself, into troubling predicaments so he can embellish it over a round of drinks. Other than that, he has no redeeming value.”
Harris, whose loyalties are with the writers, has nothing but kudos for them.
"For me, it is always akin to getting a great Christmas present every week,” he says. "I open the script each week and get to see what ridiculous things I get to do.”
Those writing the scripts also wanted to get back to work. Chuck Lorre, executive producer and writer of "Two and a Half Men” and "The Big Bang Theory,” says he spent much of the last three months, "home, being despondent and walking around in a circle with a stick. I'd go to matinees and sit in a movie theater, saying, ‘What happened to my life? Why am I seeing a 1 o'clock showing of a movie I don't want to see?' ”
Now, he's driving to work in Burbank, Calif. Though both shows will remain essentially the same, characters will continue to develop, he says.
Lorre describes brothers Charlie and Alan Harper (Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer) of "Two and a Half Men” as "the man we all wished we can be and the man we all are. Charlie's character is almost magical. He has managed to be successful without working hard. ... We punish Jon Cryer more for being a good citizen. He's a biblical Job, assaulted constantly, and all he is trying to do is the next right thing.”
The show will also evolve as the titular half-man, Angus T. Jones, 14, grows.
Cryer says his biggest surprise his first day back at work was that Jones had grown a few inches during the strike and that his voice deepened.
"It feels like we've got a lot of gas in terms of doing more,” Cryer says. "And this little break was really nice. Struggle is good for the soul.”
Cryer, a member of the Writers Guild, was on the picket line. On the last day before work, he did a home inventory for insurance and cleaned out his rain gutters.
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