Post Writers Strike Aftermath: The Rush is On

The writers strike is over, which means that what we are witnessing the entertainment equivalent of the great Oklahoma land rush of 1893.

With a hearty "yee-haw," each studio is now feverishly scrambling to get their wagons moving as quickly as humanly possible, to stake a claim on the starved capitalist wasteland. And with a blast of steam and a big puff of hot air, the grimy gears of the monolithic money-making Hollywood machine slowly grind back to life.

And with this many creative brains doing nothing but walking with a sign in front of a studio sidewalk, while subsisting on cup-o-noodles like a college student, there is more than a slight chance that a few of them were working on projects during this time.

If I was an evil Hollywood exec that liked my job, I would have been paying a few of the starving and desperate writers under the table to keep working on things during the strike. Sure this is a against the union rules, but all is fair in love and war in Tinseltown.

But just for the sake of argument and to avoid any lawsuits, let's assume that there are a few writers out there who now miraculously manage to zap out a complete re-write on that miserable first draft that was written before the strike. Or the ones that whip up four new episodes for the shortened, or - based on the quality of the writing - an entire next season. Say these writers now hand their stuff over to executives to read and green-light to the production department. The production teams will quickly break their backs to get the productions shot, edited and on the big and small screens as fast as possible.

However some shows that may have had a few eps already aired pre-strike may now get a change of heart from the executives that were previously desperate for content. Perhaps some will realize that in the light of the morning after, that hurried dash to bed something before the bar closes and the sun comes up may not have been as attractive as they had first thought.

In other words, expect a few shows that the networks not long ago touted as "witty," "hilarious," and "fantastic" may now finally agree with most of the audience and dub them "contrived," "dumb," and "poorly conceived."

Expect some attrition in this war. There may be some shows that you thought were really creative and intelligent, but because of a flawed system of mathematics known as the Nielsens, your one opinion is mixed with the voices of several hundred thousand other people that each have their own opinion about the show. And all these voices are then represented by one person that has been designated as the sole representative.

How can you expect a system like this to work effectively? This same process is used in politics and look at how good its turned out.

But as long as we all suffer through hastily-written and intellectually devoid tripe for a little while longer, we should be rewarded with something that might actually be considered entertaining shortly thereafter.

At least that's the hope.