HOW annoying is Holly wood? While Rome was burning (OK, Malibu) yesterday, the emperors were still fiddling.
Thousands of people possibly being burned out of their homes? Terrible, sure, but not compared to the threatened writers’ strike! Dear God, what would happen if “Carpoolers” is not able to finish out the season?
Fearing a TV writers’ strike is like fearing a cure for psoriasis. Why wouldn’t you want to be rid of the itchy, scaly, patches that drive you insane?
We should all be so lucky that these hacks are threatening to take a break! In fact, I want to get down on my knees and make a holy vow to God that such a thing should only happen. Today.
Are they all too busy justifying their giant paychecks to actually watch the current crap, er, crop of shows they’ve spent bazillions to produce? I can’t remember worse writing since happening upon one of those torturous blogs with “musings” in the title.
No? I give you “Gossip Girl.” That phony-baloney mess has as much to do with Manhattan private-school kids as “The Sopranos” had to do with French Impressionist paintings. The writing is positively amatuerish.
And the aforementioned, “Carpoolers?” Help! Four suburban males spouting dialogue so bad it sounds like it was written by scabs who came in when the writers went on strike.
But it’s not just men who are given short shrift this idiot season. There’s the all-bad/all-the-time “Women’s Murder Club,” which is so badly crafted that watching it is enough to make you kill someone – or maybe yourself.
Four women working in various areas of homicide discuss bikini waxes and relationships while viewing corpses. You can’t make this stuff up – but these writers tragically did.
And then there are the original TV movies, so bad they should be required to carry warning labels that say, “Watching can cause cancer.”
And what about the possibly worst TV movie in five years, “The Gathering,” about devil worshipping Donald Trump-types who turn into ravens. Disastrously, people were paid to write this stuff.
And we’re not talking pittances for this puny prose. We’re talking $20,278 for a one-hour network episode which actually comes to 42 minutes of screen time.
For a half-hour (22 minutes minus the commericials), it’s $15,031 per episode. That’s $683 a minute.
And the gig comes with a built-in laugh track.
Strike? Please!