The Sunday Strike Sermon

Sadly, no post fodder has presented itself. So, I'm just going to ramble.

The Golden Globes press conference on NBC has purportedly been canceled over jurisdictional and money issues, and the fingerpointing is in full swing. NBC is, of course, blaming the WGA; the WGA is naturally blaming everyone but their cack-handed leadership. Meanwhile, BTLers and peripheral workers continue to eat the steadily mounting losses and staggering casualties endemic to a pointless dickfight between a corporate Goliath and a spoiled, whiny, disastrously oblivious David fighting, not for his future nation, but for himself.

I'm divided about the strike. On the one hand-the hand ever-treading the upward path-I want the strike to end so that the BTLers and caterers and set designers can get back to work. And selfishly, I want to see more Eddie Cahill and Rob Morrow and David Krumholtz and Shemar Moore. I want my one or two hours per night of brainless escapism.

But on the other hand-the black hand*-the strike and its steady dose of collective delusion are more fascinating than anything the writers have produced in twenty years. The writers are feeding on a collective delusion of grandeur, so convinced of their rightness and all-consuming importance to Hollywood that they're willing to destroy the very thing upon which they depend for their livelihood. They've compared Hollywood to a dinosaur, a lumbering brachyosaur struggling feebly in the sucking mire of the La Brea Tar Pits. They're right. It is. But they are so enraptured by the act of killing the beast that they don't realize that they're killing themselves, too. That stupid dinosaur writes the checks that pay their bills, and if it dies, all they've got is a rotting corpse and the empty stomach that so often comes with a moral victory.

Oh, there's a lot of fine talk about going fi-core and setting up Web-based production companies, but let's face it: ninety percent of these graphite warriors lack the technical savvy to get such a venture off the ground, and even if they had the skill, there's the small matter of venture capital. Either they're going to have to resurrect the dinosaur and hope it likes a new diet, or they're going to have to cede their new power to the richest among them and hope their comrades-in-arms don't become the new despots.

A shoddy hope, indeed, since most of the writers have shown through their comments on various message boards that they're little Napoleons, new bosses waiting for the opportunity to replace the old bosses.

Or they could admit that they're not as downtrodden and impoverished as they'd have the public believe. At least, they weren't before they foolishly grabbed the shovel and headed for China. That might make them look bad, and in this raging PR war, that would be a cardinal mistake.

So, the strike drags on, and I find myself curiously unaffected. I miss my shows, yes, but not as much as I thought I would, or would have done two years ago. I'm glad for new episodes, but I'm not hanging out the windows for them. The DVDs have served me quite nicely when I need a fix. In fact, I watched four hours of network TV this week and will watch one this week.

One. That's a far cry from the six hours of network TV I usually watch and nothing compared to the twenty hours of cable TV that I usually watch. From twenty-six hours per week to one, and I'm not dead. In fact, I'm thriving. My muse, unfettered by the knowledge that new canon can't scuttle her scenarios before they make it to the screen, is in a paroxysm of joy. Flackbunny is in overdrive.

I don't miss my TV.

In fact, if it weren't for the "WGA liaison" that infests TalkCSI like wood lice, popping up every time she thinks she can slurp the fans to the Guild's benefit, I would be absolutely unaffected.

Well, except for the immeasurable entertainment value, that is.

*If I'm not mistaken, Medieval wisdom held that the left side, and thus, the left hand, were of the Devil. Hence, the black hand.