Hey Dan

I have a wide swath of contempt for popular culture. Some may say it comes from years of being thought of as a social pariah. In high school, I grew out of my wallflower nerd stage and straight into my geeky skater kid stage. This assured I would never get a date to the prom. While I can understand why this is fertile ground for conspiracies about my contempt for popular culture, it is not the true reason. The real reason I dislike things that are popular is that they are dumb.

Anything that is popular is by definition stupid. Let’s face it; half of all people have to be below average and in order to achieve popularity you have to pander to some of them. This strips away the clock denial around my one true prejudice. I hate stupidity.

If you are wounding what even has raised my ire today, it is the fact that “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” is headed the way of “Sports Night.” The show is on its last legs with NBC because of ratings. If you have not seen either “Sports Night” or “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” they are from the creator of the “West Wing.” He writes character based show about real people. By real, I mean people who have real problem, emotions and dreams. I do not mean freaks that auditioned for a Reality (c) based TV show. A bright spot of literature in the darkness of popular culture is headed for the trash heap.

If you have not seen the show, do yourself a favor and watch it before it becomes the set of DVDs everyone is passing around. This was the fate of “Sports Night.” Everyone I have shown a single episode too, has watched the whole series and cried. They cried not only because it was canceled before its time, but because they writing are that good. When a friend showed me “Firefly,” I felt the same why.

I want more shows on TV written well. Shows that have more then a seventh grade vocabulary. Shows that include characters that face problems and standing up for ideas. My gosh, I want people to write about ideas! I have nothing ageist saving the cheerleader to save the world. But the shows mystery is based on facts they just haven’t told you anything. Writing a mystery into a story is more then not telling audience who done it. You should be able to watch it more then once and still be entertained.

If you want to see something good on TV, tune in, before it is gone. But I must warn you it is on the same time as “CSI: Miami,” “The Tyra Banks Show” and “The Bachelor: Rome.”… The choice is yours. For myself, I am going back to loathing popular culture and reading books.