Have you noticed that earth-shattering writer’s strike going on? Nope, neither have I.

  • Isn’t the first rule of labor lever­ag­ing that if going out on strike would only make peo­ple notice how lit­tle they need you, you don’t want to go out on strike? I’m won­der­ing if any­one told the tele­vi­sion writ­ers that.

    The writ­ers’ strike has been going on for a week now. No, make that a cou­ple weeks. Or a month, maybe? The fact is, I don’t know how long it’s been going on, because I don’t watch much prime­time tele­vi­sion any­more, and I don’t know many peo­ple that do. If you did, you still wouldn’t be notic­ing the change — I’ve heard that it’s the soaps and the night­time stuff like Leno, Let­ter­man and the Daily Show that have had to go into reruns. I know that some­one must be watch­ing these things, but I would bet that they shrug and watch reruns, or put in a DVD, or even (saints be praised!) turn the tele­vi­sion off.

    I don’t want to act like tele­vi­sion writ­ing isn’t an impor­tant job. It’s just that tele­vi­sion … well, what can you say? I think Amer­i­can audi­ences are just get­ting fatigued. I don’t say that it’s a bet­ter world for the fact that young­sters now are more likely to watch the same DVD over and over, or spend all their time with a com­puter game or a cell phone they can mes­sage on. But at least it gives these guys a lit­tle more free­dom. With the DVD option, you’re able to do things on your own timetable, and know what you’re going to see. With the com­puter games and cell phones, at least you’re doing some­thing, not just watch­ing peo­ple you don’t know doing things that prob­a­bly would never happen.

    It may not be bet­ter, really. But it’s dif­fer­ent, and it’s one of the ways the mass enter­tain­ment world is chang­ing too fast for the indus­tries that built them to keep up. This arti­cle from Vari­ety puts it like this:

    Notably, “Lost” co-creator Damon Lin­de­lof touched upon sev­eral of these points in a New York Times op-ed Sun­day that bol­stered the stu­dios’ case as much as the guild’s. In it, he ref­er­enced fears that the tra­di­tional TV model is “dying” and expe­ri­enc­ing a trans­for­ma­tion that’s “noth­ing short of ter­ri­fy­ing” — con­cerns this season’s tepid TV rat­ings have surely reinforced.

    Given that uncer­tainty, both sides are in a sense nego­ti­at­ing from a posi­tion of weakness.

    Yep. It may be a weaker posi­tion than they know. Turn­ing off the TV has an inter­est­ing effect. It makes you won­der why you had it on in the first place.


    Related posts:

    1. The destruc­tion of hearths
    2. The Wrath of God in a light green suit
    3. Yep, we still have skyscrapers
    4. A post about Tom Cruise
    5. Twenty good min­utes out of “King Kong”

    November 14th, 2007 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 11.14.2007

    I basi­cally don’t watch TV, espe­cially any­thing that takes writ­ers. What lit­tle snip­pets of pro­grams I have seen is garbage any­way. I don’t miss them at all.
    Amer­i­can cul­ture with­out TV? Now THAT’S fod­der for a TV series! :)

  • Grace

    I admit I’m find­ing it hard to wean myself off of it. Tele­vi­sion actu­ally can be edu­ca­tional, thought-provoking, enter­tain­ing … but it’s like play­ing a slot machine any­more. The odds are get­ting slim­mer and slim­mer of find­ing any­thing that isn’t total mush.

    Prob­a­bly my best exam­ple of that (and a pet peeve that Greg is tired of hear­ing me harp on about) is what hap­pened to A&E’s Biog­ra­phy show. When they were doing biogra­phies of peo­ple who were actu­ally inter­est­ing or impor­tant with just a few celebri­ties thrown in there, it was a truly great show. But some­body in cor­po­rate just decided that they had to start skew­ing more and more toward movie stars, and then even­tu­ally toward any­one who was cur­rently enjoy­ing their 15 min­utes of fame for any rea­son whatsoever.

    They even started up an entirely sep­a­rate cable chan­nel just for biogra­phies. So do they *ever* do biogra­phies of Max­field Par­rish, Alfred Nobel or Cather­ine the Great? Nope, too busy doing re-runs of Brit­ney Spears, Snoop Dogg and the lat­est ser­ial killer.

    As the Wicked Witch of the West said, “What a world, what a world!”

  • Cather­ine K.

    Inter­est­ing to hear what has hap­pened to Biog­ra­phy. When I gave up on cable about 3 years or more ago, both that chan­nel and the His­tory chan­nel were in a WWI & II phase. I just referred to them as the War channels…

  • Grace

    Oh, that’s far too gen­eral for A&E and His­tory now. You don’t need to devote your pro­gram­ming to both world wars, just the sec­ond one. And not the whole war, just Adolph Hitler. And not all of Adolph Hitler’s life story, just any­thing you can attach his name to: Hitler’s House­plants; Hitler’s Bea­gles; Hitler’s Snackfoods.

    It’s idi­otic.

  • Cather­ine K.

    Still, after more than 3 years? One would think that even they would have become tired of the rerun top­ics by now.… sheesh

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