Television has been quite boring since Christmas due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike. After starting the strike in November, new episodes finished airing around the time of the Christmas break and never came back.

Thankfully, the strike finished in April and the whole television industry will soon be coming back to life with new episodes from your favorite TV shows. To see a full list of the shows that are coming back, along with a number of episodes and air dates for the first ones, check out this page on TVGuide.com.

One thing that you will notice as you go through the list is that studios took the time off to cancel some shows and have decided to post-pone most that had not started yet (like 24) to the fall or next winter.

My personal favorites these days are CSI: NY, The Unit, The Big Bang Theory, How I met Your Mother, 30 Rock. I was very disappointed to see Journeyman not coming back. I felt that the show had really found its rhythm in the last few episodes that aired. I also saw on this list that Bionic Woman was cancelled. No big loss there. It was more filler television than anything else.

The Sunday Dilbert strip made a quick mention to Battlestar Galactica. Just funny.

While doing some quick Google searching, I found a very nice site containing tons of information on Battlestar Galactica, the great science-fiction that I keep raving about. This site is a wiki completely dedicated to storing information about the show. For those who don’t know what a wiki is, it is a database site where anyone can contribute information to try to get the most accurate data possible. This particular wiki uses the same software that the great wikipedia uses as its back-end.

If you watch Battlestar Galactica, you know what this title refers to. Frakking Toasters is an online comic strip set in the Battlestar Galactica universe. They try to have a new strip out every week and what they have so far is pretty funny.

I’ve become a fan of the Stargate universe over the last two years, first by reviewing the season DVD box sets, then by watching every episode of the great Stargate: Atlantis. I was then intrigued when I read about a third “series”, Stargate: Horizon. Horizon is a fan-created series that is set seven years after SG-1. They assume that the Stargate project has eventually gone public on Earth and that people are starting to get used to the thought that aliens might be walking among them. Of course, there needs to be bad guys for a series to work so there is a new race of aliens that is menacing Earth in SGH. Instead of filming episodes, the Horizon project currently publishes scripts for their episodes on their site. I will be reading through these episodes where I get a chance.

The computer-animated science-fiction series Tripping the Rift is coming back for a second season on July 27th. Given everything that they did in the first season, I don’t know what they will do for the second one, but it should be fun to watch.

Two great science-fiction series, Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis are going to start airing on July 15th on the Sci-Fi channel. SG-1 will be starting its ninth season while Atlantis is going to be on its second. I like SG-1 but have not seen all episodes so I’m not completely into it. Atlantis on the other hand I’ve seen from the beginning last year and is quite an enjoyable show.

In reading some news about the uncertain future of Star Trek Enterprise, which could eventually get picked up by another network, I found that quite a few groups of people have been making amateur Star Trek episodes that they are distributing on the web. Most are a bit funny to look at, but they’re still enjoyable to see what people with a passion can do. Check out these sites:

• Star Trek: Hidden Frontier: Already in its sixth season with six to nine episodes per season. The time line is around the time of Star Trek Voyager.
• Star Trek: New Voyages: This series has produced two episodes that focus on the continuation of Captain Kirk’s adventures after the end of the three TV series.
• Star Trek: The section 31 files: Audio adventures of members of Section 31.
• Starship Exeter: Also set in the Kirk era but focusing on a different crew. A first episode has been released with two on the way.

If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll probably find some of these a lot of fun to watch.

The latest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise, has just been cancelled by the UPN network. Althrough the third season was a bit of a drag, season 4 had some great story lines and kept my interest up from week to week. It’s a real shame that UPN decided to cancel it. There is still a campaign going on at SaveEnterprise.com to try to get the show back on another network. Check it out to participate in the efforts to try to get the show back on the air.

For a while, everyone was saying that season 8 of Stargate SG-1 was going to be the last one. However, I just learned today that both SG-1 and its spin-off series Stargate:Atlantis have been renewed for next year. Personnally, I have gotten much more attached to Atlantis since I have seen all episodes as opposed to SG-1 where I’ve not even seen a quarter. The beginning of Atlantis was a bit slow but the second half of the season was explosive and the characters keep getting more attaching.

As well, I just saw that a video game is being made set in the Stargate universe. It is a first-person game (probably a shooter) and will be called Stargate SG-1: The Alliance.