Top 4: Writers' Strike Silver Linings

It didn't take long for the Writers Guild of America strike to impact the television landscape. With no one to write original material, most every talk show went to reruns. Saturday Night Live will probably have to as well. It sounds like most scripted network series have 5 scripts ready to go, so they should be ok for a while, but if this keeps up, there won't be much to watch beginning in December. So with that in mind, let's look at a few positives of the strike:

#4. Brian K. Vaughan has more time to write comics: Brian K. Vaughan was hired last year as a writer on Lost, and co-wrote the episode "Catch-22." But he made his name writing comics, as evidenced by the argument over whether Superman was faster than the Flash in that episode. Vaughan is the creator of Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and Runaways, and (perhaps most important to television fans) is scripting the current arc of the Buffy Season Eight comics. BKV recently blogged that he will "take however long the strike lasts (which could be anywhere between a day and forever) to concentrate on making Ex Machina kick as much ass as possible as we start to head into that series' final year, and to continue to develop my next big creator-owned projects," which is nice for a fan to hear.



#3. Comic Books: Speaking of comic books, I've got a pile of them to read. And now with an extra hour a day (which I would have spent watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), I can start tackling them. Among the titles to catch up on: Criminal, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' noir-ish crime book, Invincible, quite possibly the greatest superhero comic in the universe, and Dynamo 5, which I haven't actually read any of yet, but it sounds pretty cool.


#2. Netflix Queue: Should the strike keep up for long, I'll have more than an extra hour on my hands, and I can start going through those Netflix DVDs faster. I usually watch 2 a week, but I might go as far as upping my plan to the 3-at-a-time if we're stuck with only reality and game shows at some point. My queue is almost 300 movies long, and I seem to add things faster than I watch them.


#1. Writers Getting What They Deserve: Apparently, the last time the WGA contract was up, the union was told that the home video market for television would never amount to much, so the writers didn't push the issue. Now, TV on DVD is huge business. According to a recent televisionary post, TV series writers are currently getting four cents per episode for TV on DVD sales. So when you're dropping $40 on a season set, about 90 cents is going to the writers. That hardly seems fair. On top of that, I don't think the writers are seeing a penny for itunes, those amazon unbox things, or ad supported streaming video on network websites.

I love television as much as the next guy, and I have no life, so production shutting down on my favorite tv shows sucks for me. But the writers create the characters we love, dream up the worlds they inhabit, put them in the situations that drive the action, and don't seem to be getting their fair share. Hopefully this can all be resolved quickly, writers will get their due, and maybe the studio suits can handle life with only one butler.

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Top 4: Random Thoughts

I haven't written anything in a while, largely out of laziness. So here's the disorganized Top 4 things on my mind right now, with some rare music content.

#4. Teri Garr was totally hot in Young Frankenstein. Always lovely, and a genuinely funny actress (a rare combination), but I never think of her as actually sexy in any other role. Why this one, I'm not sure, but it's probably one of these things: she wears a lot of low cut tops, she's a lab assistant which plays right into my nerdy-hot tastes, or that German accent. But whatever it is, it's a wonderful thing. And Young Frankenstein's one of the funniest movies ever made, so it's lovely icing on a hilarious cake. Sadly, it's being turned into a Broadway musical, which kinda feels like Michael Jordan coming out of retirement to play for the Wizards.


#3. John from Cincinnati has the best theme music on TV.



The show itself is kind of a mess. Flashes of brilliance, but whiny characters and a general sense of "what the hell is the point of all this?" are dragging everything down. But "Johnny Appleseed" by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros is a great song and a good fit for the series.

#2. The Avett Brothers rock.



Except they're not playing rock at all. My musical tastes are pretty broad, but I still never would've thought I'd be recommending a band that bears any resemblance to bluegrass, yet here I am. It's just three guys, a bass, a guitar, and a banjo, but their sound can be plenty powerful.

#1. All the best summer movies came out in a row. I haven't seen every major release or everything, but I've seen a bunch, and it had been a fairly disappointing summer for me. Then over the past two weeks, this summer redeemed itself. Live Free or Die Hard was a pleasant surprise. It was better than the second one, funny, exciting, and ridiculously over the top without being silly. Transformers wasn't perfect, but with Michael Bay at the helm I was afraid of Pearl Harbor or The Island. Instead, we didn't have an entirely bad plot to fill in the gaps between scenes of hot robot-on-robot action. And then Ratatouille really blew me away. It will probably end up being the best movie of the summer.


Brad Bird had previously written and directed Iron Giant and The Incredibles, two movies that appealed directly to my geeky nature with big robots and superheroes, but this time he went for rats and cooking, which is a harder sell. It's not a movie that's easily described, but it works on every level. The kids in the theatre seemed enthralled (except for two little brats who were screaming and kicking seats while their parents seemed to think it was no big deal), the adults had plenty of laughs and a nice story, and the animation, as always, was beautiful. After a pretty disappointing effort in Cars, Pixar is back on track.

Honorable Mention: Era Vulgaris, the new Queens of the Stone Age album, made a poor first impression on me at first, but it's growing on me in a big way. Flight of the Conchords is considerably funnier than Entourage these days (though last night's Entourage wasn't bad).

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Top 4: Celebrity Crushes of 1980-1985

This is easily my most random list to date, but I read an article that mentioned WKRP earlier, which lead immediately to the list forming in my mind. I was very young in this time period, not even 10, but I vividly remember finding these women appealing.


#4. Jan Smithers - Loni Anderson's Jennifer Marlowe got all the attention on WKRP in Cincinnati, but my eye was always on Bailey Quarters. I was never a huge fan of the show, and I only remember it on syndication, but I always lingered on an episode long enough to catch a glimpse or two of Ms. Smithers. My affinity for nerdy-hot types obviously developed at an early age, and I still love women in glasses, though generally not specs as big, goofy, and Sally-Jesse Raphael-like as hers. Not long after WKRP ended, she married James Brolin (I'd be jealous, but he's now stuck with Barbra Streisand) and dropped off the radar entirely, which is a shame, but she'll live on forever now that WKRP is out on DVD.

#3. Erin Gray - Now who fills out a ridiculous looking space suit better than Erin Gray? A model since her teens in the 60s (even appearing in the 1969 SI Swimsuit Issue), she moved into acting in the late 70s. She landed the part of Col. Wilma Deering on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in 1979, spending a full two years prancing around in the aforementioned silly costume before moving on to Silver Spoons, where she played the motherly Kate for 5 seasons. Since then, she's kept busy with acting, popping up now and then on various TV shows, and for a woman pushing 60, she's still looking pretty darn good.

#2 Carrie Fisher - Well she'd have to be on this list. When Jabba the Hutt dressed Princess Leia into the slave girl outfit in Return of the Jedi, geeks everywhere fell in love with Carrie Fisher (if they hadn't already). Or at least they fell in lust with her. Thank you, George Lucas. Since then, things haven't gone so well for Carrie Fisher, though. Even though she kept her acting career going and did some writing as well, she's had a number of personal issues to deal with: bipolar disorder, substance abuse problems, a divorce, and a long term relationship ending when her boyfriend (and father of her child) left her for a man... yikes. Today, she kinda looks like a woman who's had a rough life. But we'll always have those precious moments in Jabba's palace to remember her by.

#1. Lynda Carter - It takes a special kind of woman to pull off that costume (I've seen a few actresses wear it, but Rachel Bilson is the only other one who didn't look awful in it). Ok, so technically Wonder Woman ended its run in 1979, but it was still on in syndication, and she was active in various TV projects throughout the 80s. More recently, she popped up in the The Dukes of Hazzard movie, and a recent episode of Smallville as Chloe's mother. And at 55, she's still a fine looking woman.

The only real question here wass whether Carrie Fisher or Lynda Carter would be on top (ha!), and if I'd written this on another day, I might've reversed them. Not that you can really go wrong either way.

Honorable Mention: Pam Dawber (Mork & Mindy), Jaclyn Smith (Charlie's Angels), Catherine Bach (Dukes of Hazard), Kim Fields (Facts of Life, and who I almost put in my top 4 to make myself not feel racist, but I'd rather give my honest answers and blame my lack of diversity on TV and movie executives of the time).

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