Official WGA Writers Strike thread.

[CharlieDontSurf]

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KneeCo,

You dismiss most of the writing produced for the most popular medium ever as being trite, "familiar," accessible," etc, and denounce it as unskilled labor. At the very least, you seem to think that just about anyone could reproduce that work.

And that's the biggest hole in your argument. You say that, "The only value judgment I've made of TV writing in this thread is that the best of it is brilliant but most of it is crap; and I think that's not a controversial statement in the slightest, in fact I would guess most people would agree and of those who don't the majority would think the statement is too generous to TV writers, not too harsh." While all that may be true, it doesn't affect in one bit the fact that the vast majority of people couldn't write one of those shows if they had a gun to their head, those shows make a lot of money, and not getting a share of that money is the reason for the strike.

At heart, I think a good writer is not too far from a great propagandist. A good writer can evoke specific feelings from his audience. Whether that feeling is unexpected humor or familiar laughs isn't as important as the ability to have a goal and achieve it through the written word. Saying otherwise is like saying Stephen King isn't a good writer because he evokes only horror, or Shyamalan isn't a good director because he only makes movies with ridiculous twists. You can make nitty arguments about their artistic merits, but in the end they are both hugely successful in fields where virtually nobody succeeds, and arguing otherwise is a fool's errand.

Your main argument seems to be that, since most TV writers end up credited for something that fails, or isn't high art, they aren't truly skilled. I would argue that even being able to pen something like an episode of the most cliched sitcom ever is somewhat of an art, especially considering that's rarely the only thing on a writer's resume.

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Basically what I was aiming for but you did a far better job than I did with just one post.

and i just realized that AG is probably picketing unless for some reason his strike captain didn't require him to.