Friday, November 16, 2007

Strike


The writers' strike makes me hate TV even more than I already do. The mainstream networks and producers figure that reality shows and reruns are fine for their viewers, so they're apparently willing to let it drag on for months. What's ironic, then, is that I'm probably feeling it worse than your mainstream viewer. My primary TV habit is The Daily Show on Comedy Central. I miss it when it goes on hiatus for a week or two, and now with the prospect of it being gone for this election cycle all the joy is gone from my TV viewing. We pay for cable and DVR, in part, for The Daily Show, so why even have cable at this point? I'm clearly in the minority here. The networks seem to think that their audience won't notice the strike. Writers (the real creativity behind both the bad and the good) should go the way of some musicians and simply start bypassing the networks. Maybe YouTube should start producing.

The funny thing is that The Daily Show is one segment of entertainment most affected right now by the strike (they depend on daily, up-to-the-minute jokes, so to speak), and also the segment with the most to gain from the WGA's desire for a percentage of new media income: The Daily Show may be the one cable show watched by more viewers on the web than on TeeVee.

What would be funny if things like professional sports suddenly went dark from the strike, as though that huge segment of the cable spectrum devoted to sports were all scripted as well.

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