Heroes and 24 still way far away

Two of my guilty pleasures seem to have been knocked off the air for the duration, despite this week's settlement of the writers strike. Producer Tim Kring says don't look for Heroes to return before fall, and I read somewhere else (and now forget where) that 24 will be back in January 2009. On the upside this means Zachary Quinto, the evil Sylar, will be available for the show's third story arc, "Villains." He was going to be otherwise engaged in filming the Star Trek reboot this winter, where he is playing the pivotal role of Spock. It would've been weird to have a story called "Villains" without Sylar in it.

Perhaps this is poetic. Kring seems to be enamored of Trek, to the point of casting George Takei and Nichelle Nichols for his show. The second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was truncated by the last writer's strike, setting up one more little parallel for the pop culture history books.