Elteto.net

  With the lack of quality television shows have these days, I find myself indifferent to the writers' cause

Strike, huh? How pretentious! If they bothered to write anything of quality these days, I would understand them somewhat, but with the amount of unimaginative junk poisoning the airwaves these days, I say fine, go on strike, see if I care. There will always be BBC (The "Beeb") and scores of other channels of that quality that air well-crafted shows that are not penned by overpaid writers who cough up 45-minute pieces of junk written in 7-minute blocks just to fit an unbearable commercial schedule. (On the same note, if you have watched any of the hour-long BBC shows on an American network, you have been cheated out of 15 minutes per episode, only to be sold those 15 minutes on DVD later as "never before seen extra footage") Do not be fooled, people, cable, DirecTV, or Dish are NOT the only ways to get TV these days. Just start searching the Web for the terms C-band, Ku-band, 4DTV, Free-to-Air MPEG-2, and "big dish", and see what you have been missing.

There are two possible outcomes to this strike. 1. We become smarter by turning to books and other sources of more quality entertainment, or 2. We become dumber by succumbing to the industry's answer to strikes: more reality shows and re-runs.

One more possibility may be that producers hire non-Guild writers who will write better scripts for less. That should be easy. Any Trekkie, Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5 fan, or a person of similar devotion will do just fine.

On the subject of commercial blocks, I just want to tell all those networks forcing commercials down our throats how much I enjoy starting to watch shows 15 minutes after the hour with MythTV and skip right through.