Daily Show, Colbert Report Return January 7th

Comedy Central announced today that The Daily Show with Jon Steward and The Colbert Report will return with new episodes starting January 7th. The show went dark because of the ongoing writers strike.

From USA Today: In a joint statement, Stewart and Colbert said: "We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."

From Variety, it appears that lot of the funnier features of the shows are going to remain on strike:

According to insiders, trademark features like Stewart's "Headlines" and Colbert's "The Word" will obviously have to take a break since they're heavily scripted.

Instead, it appears the shows will try to work around the missing writers (and the guild rules that bar anything that's traditionally the domain of scribes) by relying heavily on pretaped segments from the field.

In many of those cases, the segments are produced and edited by non-WGA members. That would still seemingly prevent correspondents who are WGA members from participating, but it's believed that some of the show's contributors are with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, rather than the WGA. (In addition, "The Daily Show" has occasionally run pieces by individuals who are not regular contributors.)