The Fake News is back
Tonight is the first night back on air since the WGA strike started. Andrew Sullivan will be the guest on The Colbert Report; I don’t think the guest has been announced for The Daily Show–probably to guard against anyone protesting their appearance.
The idiots who run the faux fansite Colbert Nation still haven’t updated the site to say they’re coming back. (It’s a “faux” fansite because Comedy Central owns and runs it and has created a persona of a “fan” to be the Webmaster, but tries to make it appear that it’s just some random dude lovin’ up the Colbert. It’s absurd. The last character they had playing the WM was an idiotic high-school student living in his mother’s basement, who frequently described how he enjoyed spending time in his mom’s bed watching TV or eating–what the hell is that all about?–and then he “tragically” went into a coma. Now the faux Webmaster is some guy who supposedly “won” a “contest” to see who the best guest Webmaster would be, and with approximately 5 votes compared to the next person’s thousands, he “won.” It’s all quite ridiculous. Comedy Central must think all people who both watch the show and have computers are very, very stupid.) Anyway, the site hasn’t been updated since November 5, so don’t bother getting any information there.
Anyhoo, this is pretty much an historic event as far as late-night TV goes. They’re coming back without writers, and cannot perform any material that was previously in the habit of being written by writers, or as any character that was written by writers. So Stephen’s entire act pretty is off-limits; Jon has a little more leeway in that he’s basically himself–he’s not playing a character–during the show, but it’s not like he writes the show himself. When I saw Stephen a few weeks ago at that fund-raiser he said he didn’t really know what he was going to do and the plan at that point was to get a general idea of what he wanted to say and then wing it. He can’t write for himself either, and neither can Jon, both being members of the Writers Guild. They can’t even take notes as that would constitute “writing” under WGA guidelines.
Well I do plan to watch. At least for tonight. And if I don’t watch future episodes I’ll still acquire them for my collection. Although I absolutely agree the writers have gotten a bad deal and find it incomprehensible that the AMPTP and the networks can claim they can’t agree to pay a certain percentage of future monies because they don’t know how much money “new media” (aka streaming Internet) will make. Yep, that’s why Viacom sued Google/YouTube for $1 billion for playing their content without compensation: because there’s no money in Internet video. Right.
# # #
When commenting, be sure to do the simple math question or your post won’t show up.