Maybe I’m not the best to ask what is wrong with TV today, seeing as I don’t watch too often, but I’ll give this a shot. No, I don’t condone reality television getting it’s own channel (truTV), but still I can’t really disregard all reality series as garbage. I have more of a problem with sitcoms and the programs that require real honest work from people I once thought I respected. Writers are on strike so coincidentally watching TV sucks right now unless you like reruns more than new shows or progressions of returning shows (I’m speaking in terms of written programs now, not reality shows). The reason we have heroes that receive recognition and respect is because they do more than the average person put in the same scenario. My heroes used to be writers. The people who were unrepresented and underappreciated. The cool kids who didn’t have friends in high school because no one really ‘got’ them.
The thing I most appreciated about writers was that they were artists. Making people laugh is not easy, making people cry is not easy, and keeping people interested is not easy. Great stories are art, no question. What I don’t appreciate is when people step on the way wrong side of the fine line that is walked when creating art that is meant for consumption. The fine line I am speaking of is that line between being a great and giving member of society that wants to share a gift with people for a sense of self-respect plus understandable profit or the other side is being a douche bag about how much you get back for giving to others. There is a selflessness that I always found appealing in artists, that I don’t see in writers anymore.
Yeah they deserve the extra percentage of the profits from the different series’ they made that became really successful, sure, but they don’t deserve the credit they once deserved from the fans of the stories they told us. Here’s where I see TV and, well pretty much most other aspects of entertainment or artistry of mass scale, going to places where everything looks a lot like money, even people. I see much of the WGA as being the type of people who write when they have to or know that they can get plenty of money for it. That’s cool, that is totally cool for people to make profit by being a talented artist and a savvy business person, but it is not cool to be a great artist who sucks with business and yet still feels they should be given something extra even though they suck at handling business. Writers got jipped on DVD residuals a long time ago so now the viewers suffer because they want payback, that is not cool.
Proposition:
You want payback, do it when you aren’t relying on the people who screwed you in the first place to hand you something new. So act like adults, stop holding your breaths like four year olds, and give me back Scrubs and the Office before scabs start writing their own episodes that get you replaced. I want to look up to these people again, the people who make TV worth coming back to even when I have to watch something new instead of what I already know is great all because they have so many ideas that they can’t stop creating stories for the rest of the world to enjoy, for an understandable profit.
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