When I was much younger, I was a big fan of Nick @ Nite.  I’m not really sure why, but I really dug the Laverne & Shirley and Taxi reruns (though I’m fairly sure I never absorbed one single storyline and could not tell you, to save my life, what one episode was about).  Peppered in the commercial breaks, Ben Stein, of all people ¹ would come out and give little TV tidbits.  I can remember one night in particular when I was floored to find that the television hour was only fifty minutes long.  Fifty?  Wow, that’s amazing!  What do they do with the other ten minutes?

My older self is all too aware of what they do with the other ten minutes.  They stretch it so it’s more than double and pack it full with the most grading ads of television history.

My Ben Stein/ I Love Lucy days were probably around 1995/1996.  Last night, I was watching a show and it t was 39 minutes long.  I know, you’re saying, Carrie, that’s pretty long for a sitcom.  Yeah it is, except I was watching a so-called “hour long” drama.  Do I need to repeat myself?  39 minutes.  ”Hour long” show.  Sitcoms today, like 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother are fortunate enough to hit the 18 minute mark these days. 

I don’t even know how I can express how ludacris this is.  Packing a fulfilling storyline into less than twenty minutes– it’s doing more harm than good for our shows.  The quality of our shows are having enough trouble as it is without having this uphill battle. It is possible to argue that it just forces the writers to make a much more crisp story in which they have no time to fool around with fluff, but you know what, that’s bull feces, and just an excuse for slackness and the lowest common denominator philosophies ²

The average Buffy episode lasted 43 minutes.  That’s a four minutes drop in eleven years.  When How I Met Your Mother first began, it was 22 minutes long.  That’s four minutes in four years.  And it’s the same damn show!

Not only is the hour disappearing, but at an increasing rate.  At some point, writers aren’t going to be able to tell any story at all.

 I don’t watch TV shows as they air.  I prefer to watch them in large chunks of episodes and without commercials.  I do not think I am going to like being able to watch a half-hour show in ten minutes and a hour show in thirty.  The luxury of watching an episode is gone.  It has been swept away with the rest of our face paced existence.

There might be a glimmer of hope though.  Most basic cable hours are still forty-seven minutes long while some of the networks like Showtime and HBO still hit 53-54 minutes.  Too bad these aren’t all that mainstream, and we still rely on the four major networks to supply us with our fix — even if the quality and quantity are racing each other down the drain.

Sigh.  And that title, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason I will never be Tina Fey.  I had a perfect oppurtunity to come up with a intelligent and witty title for this worship-inspired post, and yet, I failed. 

I’ll admit, I didn’t like Tina Fey when she did Weekend Update, but I will say now, this was no fault of her own.  It was Jimmy Fallon’s.  I hated him (though I pretended to like him because I had a crush on the Priest’s daughter, who would lick the floor he walked on) and by an unfair judgment, I didn’t like her.  By mere association. I’ve seen the error of my ways.  Who doesn’t love Mean Girls?  However, I would guess it would be 30 Rock that sealed the deal for me.  At this point, I would like to note, she merely rose to someone I admired. ¹  

Yet, the more I think of it, the more I want to elevate her to Idol Status.  She’s so smart and funny, and I’m talking actually funny, here.  Her humor is intelligent and clever, something that I really admire.  She doesn’t aim to attract the lowest common denominator.  You’re either with her, or you’re not.  In a world of the Craptastic Spoofs, I admire this.  She’s relatively young, and she has already been the head writer of SNL (the first female one, to boot) and has moved on to her own (highly successful and hilarious) series  – that she created — not to mention penning and starring in various movies.  Then of course, she did that Sarah Palin thing, and who didn’t love that?  Even Palin did, I’m fairly sure, and that woman is an idiot.  Tina Fey is awesome.  And a tad on the hot side.

Tonight I toiled covering the Emmy’s, but why would I?  I could probably offer no insight, so instead, I thought I would pay tribute to someone cool in my books, who happened to also do very well in this year’s Emmy’s.

Tina Fey, keep doing what you’re doing — unless it’s online reading arbitrary blog posts about yourself, because I find that a bit disappointing – because I’m more than certain you are a hero to more young girlies like myself.

P.S. I would like to state that even though I adore Tina Fey, it really freaks me out how much of a different person she looks like when she removes her glasses.  Like, it actually freaks me out.  I just shuddered a bit there.

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