Support the writers!

Home shopping, religious nuts, yapping pundits, infomercials, old-style reality shows, new-style reality shows — face it, these days, about 4/5 of all television just completely sucks. The stuff on teevee that doesn't suck? It was written by actual professional writers.

"Writer" means someone who actually thinks about what's going to happen on the show, and what the actors should say, and how to make your experience entertaining or even, sometimes, intelligent. The alternative is to just point cameras at people and stuff and hope that something interesting happens — where "something interesting" is usually a drunk shirtless guy getting arrested, or a houseful of drugged-up snotty egomaniacs gossiping about each other.

"Professional" means (or is supposed to mean) that these "writers" get paid for it. With, y'know, money, so they can pay bills, feed their kids, cover the rent; all that boring stuff that enables them to continue being writers, instead of just giving up and selling paint and wallpaper for their brother-in-law.

If you like to watch teevee occasionally, and you appreciate the parts of it that don't suck, then you should care if the writers get paid. Right now, the corporate bosses that run the conglomerates that own the studios that employ the writers don't want to pay them for their work when it's distributed over the internet. So the writers have gone on strike.

You can support the strike by the Writers Guild. Find out more at United Hollywood.