Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

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quarterlife, the much-hyped new series from the creators of such shows as thirtysomething, Once and Again and the eternal My So-Called Life, debuted a couple of nights ago to what some are calling “the worst ratings in 20 years.”

I don’t think that this was what NBC had in mind when they announced that they had picked it up from, er, MySpace amidst a busload of hype. Given the fact that it had a pretty high profile and was debuted during a time where there is very little serious drama being broadcast, their expectations must have been that it would at least hold its own.

And yet it failed, miserably. Why? The flip answer is that it sucked, but that’s only part of it. The full answer is a bit more complicated.

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The Writers Strike has been a bit underground in the past month or so, since there is a normal holiday downtime for new original TV shows anyway. This week, however, it took down what might be its biggest casualty yet: The Golden Globes.

With the Screen Actors Guild boycotting the event, The Globes’ massive pointlessness ramped up past the usual level, and so NBC has reduced it from a major telecast to a um, er, press conference.

Ladies and Gents, while the Golden Globes is the first major awards show (I don’t really count the People’s Choice Awards as anything but more money for Dick Clark) that the WGA strike is going to affect, it is by no means the last.

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As the Writer’s Strike stumbles towards Christmas, the latest casualty of the AMPTP’s ongoing assholishness is Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller’s (all together now) quirky hour-long dramedy.

Tonight marks the last episode that was written and produced before the strike, and there are no more eps in the can. It’s a shame: Pushing Daisies was pretty much the only wholly original show that any of the broadcast networks put out there this season, and while the critical buzz was pretty strong, the ratings were mostly middling.

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Thanks to the magic of TiVo, I caught up with what will probably be the Season Finale of Heroes, which is the latest casualty of the WGA strike. No more episodes have been produced, but as a ever-wavering fan of the show, I actually think that the strike might be a good thing for it, in terms of quality.

Here’s the thing that has always driven me nuts about Heroes: it acts as if it is a much much better show than it actually is, and Monday’s Finale was a microcosm of that.

[WARNING: there are spoilers for the Season Finale after the jump]

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I’m a sucker for serialized content. Since I was kid, I have sought out continuing story lines. Naturally, this lead to a youth wasted watching soap operas — though I never went there, it strikes me that at one point in my history, the ultimate girl youth rebellion was to choose All My Children over your mother’s Days Of Our Lives. Soap operas offered a glimpse into a glamorous, dangerous world that contrasted sharply with daily reality.

There is much to be said for the power of escapism and even the skeptics find themselves entrenched in the lives of the Rachel and Julie and Trish and David and Raven and Cash and all the other characters. The writers of soap operas are masters at creating new scenarios, introducing new drama, while making sure that the casual viewer is able to catch up with the story within moments. If you’re away for years, sure, there will be some disorientation, but not enough to make you throw up your hands and say, “That’s it! I’m never watching Young and the Restless again.”
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Outside the bubble, awareness of the Writer’s Guild of America strike is less than you’d think. For those of us who are living and breathing the strike, it seems that everyone should be talking about what’s going on. It turns out that this is not so. As the two parties sit down today to again try to find common ground, the average American, exhausted from a weekend of shopping, is discovering that TiVo is delivering less in the way of new programming and more in the way of wacky recommendations.

(Side note: how about that TiVo love letter on ”’The Simpsons”’ last night? I’ve long maintained that bad things happen to people who watch commercials…I was right!)

This post isn’t about the strike, per se. It’s more about how Hollywood simply doesn’t get today’s consumer. Or rather, Hollywood doesn’t get how today’s consumer is rejecting the notion of appointment television. A common ‘loper mantra is that we want it when we want it. Seems simple enough to understand.
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Remember a few months ago when NBC announced that they would air 30 half-hours of The Office? Here at ‘Loper HQ, where The Office runs neck-and-neck with Battlestar Galactica as our consensus favorite TV Show, there was much rejoicing at the anticipated bounty of hilarity and pathos that we were going to receive.

Well, not so much, as it turns out. Among the many many ironies created by the Writers strike is this: The Office is the first of the scripted prime-time shows to run out of of episodes, which means that this week’s episode is the last ep for, well — quite possibly, ever.

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As you obviously know, the Writers Strike started this week. And it looks like it’s going to be a long, hard slog that may not be resolved for months — maybe not even until the Actors and Directors contracts are up next June. That’s a long time, and while there are any number of articles discussing the anticipated consequences of the strike, what about the unanticipated consequences?

By definition, of course, those are impossible to predict. Which is why I’m going to predict them. So, without any further ado, here are six unanticipated consequences of the writers strike.

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I know, I know, you’re sick of hearing about the looming Writers Guild of America strike. Well, it’s looming no more. It’s here, and, as you know, the first victims will be shows such as “Late Night with David Letterman”, “The Daily Show”, and even “The Colbert Report”. While some of those shows might stand up to the scrutiny of reruns, I’m guessing there will be a lot of audience loss — though this might very well be a boon for HGTV.

It’s my job to think about the future and writing. Okay, fine, nobody gave me this job; I appropriated it. It’s not like there’s a paid position out there called “Thinker About Future and Writing” anyway. Oh, if there were, I’d find the resume I last updated a decade ago.

So here are today’s thoughts on the issue. This strike is about ongoing compensation for work performed. In the majority of cases, when authors sign a contract with a publisher, they license specific distribution rights for their work for a certain period of time. Depending on the contract, the specific rights and length of time varies. Then there’s the whole of issue of “in print” — a contractually squishy point that some publishers use to retain distribution rights despite the lack of serious exploitation.
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