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View From The Middle
Thank heaven most of us didn't get addicted to those reality shows! (C'mon. Admit it. You were really starting to get into the minds of the contestants on "Moment of Truth," right?). The producers saw what a fabulous, money-making show American Idol became by being, essentially, a reality show patterned on an idea fostered in old radio - a pioneer, if you will - of a big, inexpensive hit called "Amateur Hour." The amount of money spent for the fantastic return the producers receive is phenomenally low, for one thing. They take some would-be singers and have them do their thing (a capella, of course, so they don't even have to pay for the accompaniment), make up some ad libbed comments (ad libbed because they supposedly don't need writers to feed the judges their lines), choose a winner and, hey, they've got a 26-week run, which is the standard for two seasons of the show. That's how to make money on a reality show! It's obvious they knew what they were doing from the start - and they didn't have a writers's strike to contend with, either because they've been on the air for a few seasons. We can't blame others for trying to follow their lead, since it's such a success. And with the strike on the networks digging deeper and deeper into their advertising income, reality and talk shows were all they could come up with. The late night presentations, especially those hosted by Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel, were getting really stale. I don't know how many times Leno had an animal act on his show, but it was many many many. Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel subsisted on rerunning episodes of previous shows, while the viewers read a crawl along the bottom of the screen saying that, although their writers were on strike, the show's producers felt sorry for them and they would receive residuals for all the reruns anyway. David Letterman and Craig Ferguson both had contracts with a different arm of the WGA, which was settled early-on. They have a team of top pro writers. And you can see and hear the difference. It turned out that the strike eventually became a bit too serious for people to joke about, however, when its third month rolled around and the writers still didn't have a contract. November 5, 2007 is when some 12,000 writers (you didn't know there were that many people in the entertainment industry who could spell, did you?) walked out because they couldn't come to terms with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents all the big media conglomerates, like General Electric, NBC, Walt Disney, Viacom, etc. and even Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corp. What the writers want, justly so, is to receive a residual (royalty) for their work on DVDs and income from new media (Internet, etc.) when their work is performed. They also want jurisdiction over writers who are used for reality shows and, of course, motion picture films. And it is only right. Have you ever sat down to compose even a letter, or perhaps an essay, and poured out your deepest thoughts, even though they were inconsequential and maybe funny? Have you ever tried being a writer? Well, it ain't as easy as it looks. And the next time you laugh at a funny situation on a TV show, or perhaps cry a little at a sad scene in a movie drama, realize those scenes were created by someone. Remember that storytellers are indicative of a cultured part of what we call civilization, a civilized society that could die if our emotions couldn't be awakened and we could not be inspired.
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