Screenwriters on Strike

It has been 19 years since television and film writers have seen it necessary to walk out of the studios and onto the picket line. In 1988, a Writer's Guild strike managed to shut down Tinsel Town for five long months, but that was the '80s, when we still had squeegee men in New York City and when people who weren't professional athletes wore shoulder pads. No one seems to remember what a tragedy that strike was -- it spawned both Cops and America's Most Wanted, two of the greatest lows of broadcasting. We seem to be suffering from a sort of cultural amnesia: this time around, Americans may end up watching America's Most Smartest Model and A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. And where the balance of trade is concerned, America is going to have to export a lot more airplanes and chewing tobacco. And what about the writers? What will we do with our time? Here are a few modest proposals.

For the writers of Desperate Housewives:

The "Desperate Housewives" team should help those poor investment bankers with the thing that threatens to undo our entire economy -- derivatives. Ultimately, the problem with derivatives is that no one, not even the Ph.D.s who design them, knows how they will behave, and since there are approximately 30 trillion dollars of derivatives traded every day (almost three times our GDP), something very, very bad could happen. The amnesia-related plot lines on Desperate Housewives are considerably more plausible than the valuations that investment banks and hedge funds assign to their portfolios of asset-backed securities. So who better to help fabricate new financial narratives than Marc Cherry and his crew? What Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch need is a more engaging story, one involving a mysterious and darkly handsome hedge fund manager, a beautiful ratings agency analyst with a terrible secret, a catfight between two Treasury under-secretaries followed by a tearful reconciliation, and most important of all, amnesia -- a large number of characters with no memory of the years 1987, 1998, and 2001.

For the writers of Law and Order:

So far, the campaign for the presidency is boring and confusing, with a lot of superfluous characters, most of them not very sexy. The Law and Order team are the perfect people to punch up the script. Most importantly, they can make the disappearance of minor figures like Sam Brownback into intriguing mysteries, complete with Russian arms dealers and tranny hookers. The Law and Order writers also know how to make Fred Thompson sound thoughtful and presidential, which is more than Fred's campaign team has managed. Perhaps the writers could also solve the mystery of what happened to Fred Thompson's first family -- a first family that includes a wife his own age, Sarah Lindsey, whom he married in high school, and two sons in their 40s. A man with an unknown second family is intriguing, no matter how much of doofus he might otherwise be. And what about a secret Democratic plot to kidnap Ralph Nader and hide him until the election is over? My thoughts: Ralph with temporary amnesia wearing a Hawaiian shirt and working in the kiddy circus school at a Club Med for recovering addicts. But hey, I'm not the screenwriter here.

For the writers of Grey's Anatomy:

Fix health care. Who better to advocate for uninsured children than the people who gave us an entire episode about how raising babies in a meth lab is a bad idea?

The real problem with the health care crisis is that it is boring and very, very slow. How excited can we get about Medicare running out of money in 2026? First, we need to show some extremely attractive surgeons sleeping with each other and saving the lives of a violinist and his beagle and then getting laid off by a mean hospital administrator during a budget crisis. Then we need images of some of the most common surgical challenges: two people impaled on the same pole, a person with a three-hundred-pound tumor, and maybe a boy without ears thrown in for good measure. Then, of course, we need some hot young doctors having sex in a storage room and an older doctor with amnesia who gets confused and cannot fill out the new Medicare supplemental drug plan reimbursement forms. And some surgeons showering in the locker room and soaping each other.

Read more about the strike on the Huffington Post's writers' strike page.

Comments

[thecyberprof]

What a funny idea! MJF is the best!

[BernieO]

"The Law and Order writers also know how to make Fred Thompson sound thoughtful and presidential, which is more than Fred's campaign team has managed."
Clearly the writers deserve more money if they can accomplish this. Case closed!

[KarenZipdrive]

Amen about Fred Thompson needing some good writers. I love how all his drooling Republican fans in the enlarged prostate set are so disappointed that he has the ad lib abilities of Otis the town drunk from Mayberry.
Nixon pegged him as a dumbass back in the 70's, and he was right.

[DaCynic]

AWESOME!

Just the creativity exhibited in this post is more exciting than Cops and all of this reality TV bull crap!

I am loving the fact that actors and some producers (jon stewart) are "crossing the picket lines." This type of solidarity accross industries would help solve many of our labor/workers' problems.

[zagyzebra]

Very funny.