Here's my very, very, very petty (but accurate) criticism of the very annoying, very Boomer show, Brothers and Sisters. To be precise, the episode entitled "Book Burning," which aired last Sunday.
In this soapiest of soap operas, which features a Boomer-heavy cast: from Sally Field, born at the beginning of the boom, 1946, to Calista Flockhart and Rob Lowe, both born at the end, in 1964. There's also Patricia Wettig (1951) and Ron Rifkin, born in 1939, which makes him so old he's actually pre-Boomer.
Anyway, this is really nit-picky, but I was amazed when I saw what Kitty Walker (played by Flockhart) passed around, supposedly the result of "accidentally writing a book." This alleged printed copy was passed around to every member of her nosy family. The manuscript, held together by a large clip, was, at most, about 80 pages long. It was barely one-inch thick. (Check out this screenshot I found online.) As someone who has just finished writing a book, I can attest that my computer-printed manuscript was 433 pages long, so I do have some idea what a typed book manuscript looks like.
THIS IS NOT IT!!
Then, it hit me. Some dopey television writer decided to take a script, something that represented, say, an hour-long TV show, and decided that he could use it as Kitty's tell-all political memoir. What's the diff, he figured?
Hey, it's a big diff. A book manuscript is hundreds of pages long. Unless, of course, you are writing a pamphlet or a short story or a graphic novel. But, in TV-land, apparently, a book manuscript is exactly the length of a shooting script. Whaddya know?
Sheesh.
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