What I Want For Christmas: Television

Thursday, December 14, 2006  -  reddit

I learned from writer Alex Epstein that there is an article on thestar.com entitled "All a TV writer wants for Christmas.." consisting of a list of 50 things the person wants.

My favorites from this list are "Everybody on Prison Break go back to prison", "Lost's writers develop long-term memory. Or logic. Or both", and especially "Networks stop amplifying the audio during commercial breaks."

Here is my list, I'd like to see:

• Heroes finish a storyline. Any storyline.
• A Firefly revival, with a fifteen minute televised apology from the Fox network head for having it up his rear.
• Fewer "reality" shows.
• More guts in drama.
  Mid-Season breaks go away.
• Everything move back to four acts.
• For every new medical/cop drama, an old one must die.
• 24-hour cable news channels be required to show no less than 12 hours of actual news next year, 18 hours the year after, and finally 24 hours by the year 2009, or they must stop calling themselves 24-hour cable news channels or face severe fines for lying.
• Less FCC interference, more judicious use of your remote control.
• To be hired on the Battlestar Galactica writing staff.

Prison Break has been terribly boring this year, it's quite clear that while the actors and writers are talented people, they were lucky enough to catch lightening in a bottle with the first season, and were stupid enough to let it out in the second. I have little interest in watching the second half when it rolls around, and there may be no way of getting around it: the show is just dead.

Number six is important because five acts doesn't allow networks to show more commercials, it just lets them show those commercials more often. Instead of having between ten and fifteen minutes of your show to watch, you are now treated to just six to ten. Sure, the commercial breaks are shorter, but they tear you out of the show too often to get into it. It has to stop.

Speaking of things that have to stop, the mid-season breaks are even worse. Who is the idiot who came up with that idea anyway? Shoot them please. I bet it was a network exec that came up with the idea but got fired for sucking really badly a their job five minutes later, and now we're stuck with it. It's like an urban myth to these guys -- "Who came up with that anyway?" "Damn, I don't know, I heard it was a VP at Fox." "No, I heard it was the head of NBC, maybe coming down from Vevindi."

Who knows, who cares, it was probably somebodies mom. Get rid of it.

The text of this article is © 2006 Paul W. Tenny. All rights reserved. This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Attribution by: full name.