• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 10, 2023

At last, we are going to get a look at Jon Cryer with a shaved head now that the actors’ strike has ended and production on new TV shows is set to restart.

Cryer -- seen with a bald pate in the photo above -- is the star of “Extended Family,” a sitcom that was supposed to come to NBC this fall, but like so many other shows, was mothballed for the duration of the writers’ and actors’ strikes.

But now, the laugh machines and living-room sets are being dusted off all over TV Land as the newly liberated actors join the already-freed writers to bring the new fall shows to air that were announced at the onset of Upfront Season last spring and then never materialized.

How soon can we see “Extended Family”? That’s anybody’s guess, but the revving up of TV production has the TV Blog anticipating a motherlode of new shows to write about in the weeks and months to come -- good, bad or indifferent.

“Extended Family” tells the (hopefully) riotous story of a recently divorced man named Jim (Cryer) who is amicably sharing custody of his children with his ex-wife, Julia (Abigail Spencer). 

This sounds like many other such sitcoms that have come and gone on network TV for decades. Still, it is good to see everybody employed once again.

What else have we missed out on because of the strikes? One show I forgot about is a medical drama coming to Fox called “Doc” about a “brilliant” physician with amnesia. 

Another Fox show specially made for channel surfers is a Hawaii-based lifeguard drama called “Rescue: HI Surf.”

Some fans of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” are hoping that a new spinoff that was supposed to come to CBS this fall will also be “Good.”

This one, titled “Elsbeth,” centers on an eccentric attorney character named Elsbeth (played by Carrie Preston). Who doesn’t love the occasional eccentric lawyer show?

The networks seem to like shows about missing persons and the people who track them down. NBC has “Found.” Fox has “Alert: Missing Persons Unit.”

CBS has a show on the drawing board called “Tracker” that at one point was slated to premiere after the Super Bowl on CBS on February 11. Maybe the premiere episode will be tracked down before then.

As if all that wasn’t exciting enough, production on all the returning network shows is cranking up too -- from “Blue Bloods” (CBS) to “Will Trent” (ABC).

New shows and new episodes of returning ones flowing constantly into the TV content pipeline -- whether network or streaming -- is what TV is all about. And just in time for the holidays too.