So Super Tuesday has you feeling the strangely unfamiliar stirrings of optimism for the first time since 2001, like the promise of a brighter dawn is just around the corner. Obviously you've forgotten that we're still a year away from any discernible change, the real backbiting and smear campaigns are still to come and, oh yeah, there's still nothing good on TV. Grind that up with the usual grab bag of misery—celebrities making stupid decisions, revered movies being fed through the remake machine, and the bafflingly immortal success of people who (in a fair world) would have been stoned to death a long time ago—and you've got a fresh, steaming cup of Friday Buzzkills to wake up to. It's morning in America!
– It's been a while since we checked in with the writers' strike, but at Day 89 there just has to be some good news to report, right? Right?! After all, the recent bout of informal talks between WGA leaders and studio heads was supposed to result in the sort of interim agreements that put David Letterman back on the air and gave Paul Haggis another chance to exorcise his white liberal guilt. Unfortunately, not only are things not any better, growing "strike fatigue" actually seems to be making matters worse, with those once-promising informal meetings remaining "largely unproductive" and still no date set for formal bargaining, meaning the CEOs may just opt to end talks out of sheer frustration. Even more disheartening, some are speculating that after their contract expires in June 30, the Screen Actors Guild will join in on the fun and carry the strike well into the fall, in which case TV is going to suck indefinitely.
– But hey, who needs new chapters of The Office or 30 Rock when you've got 13 new episodes of Moment Of Truth to make you forget all about cleverly written sitcoms and their scripted lies? Aren't the petty confessions of real people made melodramatic by the addition of lengthy pauses and over-the-top gong effects so much more interesting?
– On the bright side, if there's anything the strike has going for it, it's the possibility that–without writers to exploit–producers won't be able to turn their mediocre script treatments into terrible films. Or, you know, they could just hire Brett Ratner. The director—who's known for ignoring scripts when they clash with his "vision"—may be just the hacky hero they need to rescue flailing projects like Universal's Wolf Man relaunch with Benicio Del Toro. In fact, why don't they just hire Ratner and Michael Bay to take over every languishing project and tell all the writers in the world to sit and spin?