Welcome to the digital age, television.

The Writer's Guild of America strike this past winter annoyed me. There, I've said it. As a creative mind and a writer, myself, I understand the WGA's position and I am never going to stand up and beat my chest about money-grubbing writers when I know far well that they do not get paid the wages they probably deserve. I will not, however, stroke the corporations behind these shows for standing their ground and throwing the television industry as we know it a monkey-wrench that destroyed the gears for the better part of a season.

My issue is with the internet.

Ah, yes. The internet. That mystical place where media is available at a single keystroke or click of a mouse. I'm not sure why it took until the tail end of 2007 for the internet to become a hot-button issue for television studios, producers, writers, and consumers. I have friends who have been using the internet--perhaps less legitimately than we would like--to view and collect television episodes and full movies since I was in high school. We're talking as early as 2000 here, folks.

But now, and for the first time, the year 2007 was the year of streaming full episodes, web-only content, AppleTV, and the iEverything. iPhones, iPod Touches, and even iPod Classics were able to hold gigabytes of visual media and play it through (rather than hold the gigabytes but only have three or four hours of viewing time). Every major network offered at least one of their major primetime hits as streaming media online with minimal commercial interruption. "Webisodes" (don't look at me; I didn't coin the term) popped up in just as many places. A few networks even piloted web-based shows. Entire television shows, available only online! I'm not making this up. Moreover, iTunes surged into its greatest popularity ever. American Idol (yeah, them again) hooked in with iTunes, and while NBC pulled all its content from the system, most other stations doubled and even tripled the content that was available to the public via the iTunes store. iTunes was actually lauded as saving a few "bubble" 2006-2007 television series--most notably the NBC comedy 30 Rock--because it gave viewers the opportunity to try on one-episode mid-season and decide if they were interested.

Factor in YouTube--which became a breeding ground for television clips that then companies like Viacom had to fight to be removed from the site--and you got a banner year for media, the internet, and our techno-savvy culture.

One of the touchstones of the strike was the fact that writers wanted to be given royalties for online and iTunes content. I suppose I understand this. If you're to be paid every time a rerun is shown, a streaming episode seems to count to me as a rerun. Whether it should be a flat rate or per viewer, I'm not sure. In the same way, an iTunes download should possibly count as a DVD purchase and not a rerun, but there's still the issue that the writers deserve their due. I'm not going to deny that.

But I have to wonder: how was this not anticipated at all in the last ten years? I'm all for crossing bridges when you come to them, but it seems that in 2007-2008, both the studios and the writers glanced down, realized they were on a bridge, and then went, "Oh no! We didn't discuss toll rates!" This volume of internet media is new, yes. The concept of internet media is not, and considering that You (and YouTube, to an extent) was Time magazine's "person of the year" in 2006, I would think television would have braced itself for this change.

I'm all for internet media. Personally, I'm an internet junkie. (Exhibit A: I have a blog.) But hand-in-hand with internet media comes anticipating the next step. In this entire process of the writer's strike, I often just felt that both sides--the networks and the writers--were being very short-sighted. Technology moves faster than a conversation penned by Aaron Sorkin. We need to be ready for it, or more than just our television series could crumble. After all, this is the digital age. Welcome to it.

(And if you don't get the Aaron Sorkin reference, I'm going to be sad.)

American Idle.

Ha! Starting it off with a pun. Go me.

American Idol has been a staple of American reality television for the last six years. I'm not going to go into the history of American Idol, or about how the British show Pop Idol came first, because that would make me sound like a bitter Anglophile who is sick of America ripping off other programs.

Anyway.

This season of American Idol, if Ryan Seacrest is to be believed, is the "best", with some of the "brightest talent" and "most amazing singers" that the franchise has ever seen. As viewers, we have the "amazing" talent of these young people beaten into our heads every time we turn on the television. Simon, Paula, and Randy assure us that it's "anybody's game".

And that's my issue with this season's Idol.

I was never a great AI aficionado. I watched Season 3 because my mother watched it, and Seasons 5 and 6 under great duress from friends who are far more in tune (music pun!) with reality television than I am. Reality television bores me, mostly because I watch television to escape reality, and watching a mockery of "real life" never suited me. But American Idol offers the voyeurism and buy-in of watching some young person supposedly make or break their career, and that hooked me. Some singers were talented and some were not. I liked that. I liked the fact that Sanjaya from Season 6 couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but had great hair. I liked that Chris Daughtry in Season 5 had a lot of personality and his own idea of how his songs should go. I never felt like any of the major personalities that came out of the competition lacked, well, personality. They always had something to them, some meat to sink my teeth into.

This season is just boring. Every singer is a good singer. Every singer is a consistent singer. Performances are universally pretty decent (with the exception of the Andrew Lloyd Webber theme night, where people actually didn't do well for the first time in weeks). Literally anyone could win, and it's come down to technicalities and who the American voting public thinks is cute.

The talent aspect of the oft-lauded "talent competition" has been removed.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the universal issue with reality shows once they hit the third or fourth season. Take Top Chef, my favorite reality competition, as an example. First season, several of the contestants weren't professional chefs. They were caterers, or just stay-at-home moms who really liked to cook. They had personality and drive, which made them interesting to watch even if they couldn't flambe particularly well. I related better to them as competitors because they weren't all executive chefs at such-and-such a restaurant in Big City, USA.

But as the show has become popular, the caliber of contestants who audition increases. As the caliber increases, it's less interesting to watch as a viewer because everyone's so good. This season's Top Chef is mostly about technicalities because all the chefs are talented and all the food is good. They have yet to serve a dish that the viewer, as a lay-person, can look at and reject as not appetizing. During one elimination round, one of the three who were on the chopping block was there because his station was too messy. That was it! Not a technical issue with the dish, but because it just wasn't neat enough.

I don't want to watch chefs organize their area. I want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I don't want to watch the people on American Idol get voted off based solely on the fact that the fifteen-year-old-girl fanbase is simply not present for contestant X, Y, or Z. I want to see the drama and the actual talent.

We're not getting that, and frankly, it's starting to make guilty-pleasure TV boring. I'm not actually complaining--I think that it's time for the swan song of reality television, or at least, the prelude to it--but if you're going to sell it to us, Seacrest, tell it like it is:

"The most vocally similar and personality-less set of contestants in Idol history."

It's American Idol. Trust me, we'll still watch.