Why (network) television sucks

Just joined Blogclicker, which is a blog-exchange ring: in exchange for looking at other people's blogs, they send traffic to your blog. It's kind of like Blogger's own "Next Blog" button, except that since the blogs actually took the trouble to sign up for Blogclicker, you get a lot more interesting blogs, rather than the one-post "oh, I just started this" entries or personal for-friends-only blogs that the Blogger button brings you. (Edit: I also joined Blog Explosion. If you want to join just click either link - gets me some referrer credit.)

Anyway, the point of that was to say, I discovered another fun blog, Why Television Sucks, written by a TV writer. There's a great entry on it on how TV network execs suck the life out of TV screenplays by seizing on one (often irrelevant) detail. This is just an excerpt, go see the original:

I pitched a pilot one year about my family... The twist was, that because of my amazing Mother's sense of humor, and my Father's amazing sense of FUN, those years were some of the happiest of my life... In the pitch, which was 17 pages long and lasted an hour, as I described the characters, based on my family, there was one sentence (out of HUNDREDS) and it was: My mother was the kind of mom who was young and sexy. She was the only mother I knew who had a RED LEATHER MINI DRESS. I sold the pilot, and wrote it. And from that day forward, the network was upset and disappointed: "Where's the red leather mini dress? How do we show she's SEXY?" They wanted me to put in stuff where my mother would like, go to a bar and men would hit on her, or that wherever she went, men flirted with her. I had written this story about a FAMILY of GRINNING IDIOTS who laugh their way through poverty and Fox COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HOW I WAS GOING TO MAKE THE MOM SEXY.

Three words: Lowest. Common. Denominator.