According to Comedy Central’s Thursday news release, the popular comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be back on screen starting January 7, 2008. Despite the Writers Guild of America’s strike, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report will return “without their respective writing staffs.”

In a joint statement, Jon Stewart and Stephen 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."

So, with or without their script writers, the two popular political satire shows will return starting January 7. Stewart and Colbert’s announcement followed their NBC late-night counterparts Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien’s similar decision. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien will return, also without writers, on January 2.

So, despite the ongoing writer’s strike in New York City and Hollywood, four popular shows have been already announced to return on screen.

On the other side, it appears that other show hosts are reportedly trying to reach separate deals with their script writers. This seems to be David Letterman’s case, whose production company will reportedly meet with the writer’s union in an attempt to reach a separate deal that will bring back the Late Show along with its writing staff.

Since November 5, when the writers’ strike started, both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report have been stuck in reruns and this put Comedy Central’s corporate parent Viacom at risk of losing the big audience of its most successful TV franchises.

Comedy Central officials said "we continue to hold out hope for a swift resolution to the current stalemate that will enable the shows to be complete again." But until then, Stewart and Colbert will return on screen all by themselves.