I recently wrote a WordPunk article called — Show Business Not Show Show — and the meat of that article argued Show Business is about making money and not creating art.

That said, we need to realize many professionally trained television writers — many are member of the Writers Guild — believe everything they write is on the quality level of Shakespeare… even if they are writing for situation comedies or reality shows.

That need to feel important and to lift the ordinary writing to higher level by historic association is vital to the author ego because it is a form of protection from the dual reality of their job:  Dreck passing for earnest entertainment.

Most television writing is pretty awful.  It lacks structure.  It has no substance, conflict, or dramatic core. 

Of course, no television author reading this thinks I’m writing about them — and we’d have it no other way.