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A press release brings at least a glimmer of end-of-year good news to the otherwise moribund state of writers strike affairs: Worldwide Pants, which sought to reach an independent deal with the WGA that would allow both their late night talk shows to return to the airwaves with a full roster of Guild-approved Top Ten lists, Know Your Current Events questions, and whatever it is they do on The Late Late Show, has successfully negotiated an agreement with their writers' union:

"The Writers Guild has reached a binding independent agreement today with Worldwide Pants that will allow Late Night with David Letterman and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson to return to the air with their full writing staffs.

This is a comprehensive agreement that addresses the issues important to writers, particularly New Media. Worldwide Pants has accepted the very same proposals that the Guild was prepared to present to the media conglomerates when they walked out of negotiations on December 7.

Today's agreement dramatically illustrates that the Writers Guild wants to put people back to work, and that when a company comes to the table prepared to negotiate seriously a fair and reasonable deal can be reached quickly.

It's time for NBC-Universal to step up to the plate and negotiate a company-wide deal that will put Jay Leno, who has supported our cause from the beginning, back on the air with his writers."

While it's definitely a step in the right direction, it's worth noting that this "dramatic illustration" took two weeks and several "terse" statements before being hammered out. Should The Tonight Show fail to reach its own agreement, it will be interesting to see how the two longtime late night foes make out in their unfairly matched showdown, with Letterman backed by a trusty writing staff and an all-new arsenal of rejected-holiday-toy-packaging and buoyancy-test-materials, and Leno left to his own, improvisational devices for a monologue's worth of nightly material. This could be a window of opportunity for Stupid Staffer Tricks-conceptualizing Last Call host Carson Daly to inch into the lead in the NBC late night hosting stakes.