More good news for sitcoms...

Hour serialized dramas are tanking this year. ABC’s Wednesday night-line up has plunged 44%. HEROES is now viewers’ Kryptonite. And HEROES has gone all out this year. Mohinder Suresh has been given a new superpower – he looks good with his shirt off.

The networks of course blame the Writers Strike. (They'd blame us for the stock market crash too if they could.)

It can’t be that some of these series have taken bad creative directions. It can’t be that there is now a glut of them. Or that some of their storylines are so confusing and Byzantine that quantum physics professors would be lost.

What the Writers’ Strike did do, however, was make America realize it didn’t miss these shows when they weren’t on. Life can go on without the spin-off of GREY’S ANATOMY.

(One exception: I can't wait for the new season of LOST.)

Meanwhile, sitcoms are gaining in the ratings. The CBS Monday night line-up (despite not having hot looking actors and show titles with words like SEXY and DIRTY) is doing just fine thank you. HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER is up 14%. Tina Fey should ride the Sarah Palin horse to the winner’s circle when 30 ROCK premieres later this month.

If you went into ABC today with THE SOPRANOS they wouldn’t buy it. And that comedy you pitched them two years ago – bring it back in.

Sitcoms are only a half hour investment. You can miss a couple of weeks without getting hopelessly lost. You don’t need to buy the first three seasons on DVD and watch seventy hours in one sitting to get up to speed. And laughter is the only commodity Wall Street can’t devalue.

So that’s the good news. Now the hard part. The new sitcoms have to be good. Fresh. Original. About something. Featuring characters you care about. And actually funny.

But hurry! There's probably another blogger out there somewhere with a post entitled: "More good news for reality shows..."