Deadline.com yesterday broke the best news since "Advisory: Nikki Finke Out Sick." 90210's show-runner Rebecca Sinclair announced she's stepping down from the series. Reached for comment by this blog, she responded, "Who the hell are you?" but I'm pretty sure she meant to say, "I couldn't possibly do more damage to this show than I've already done."
This means that there's a show-runner vacancy that needs to be filled. Well, breaking literally minutes of speculation, I, The Bitter Script Reader, yesterday used Twitter to officially announce my candidacy for 90210 showrunner.
Some of you might remember that back in September I used the resolution of a season-long storyline on 90210 as an example of television writing at its most inept. (In fairness to 90210, Perfect Couples still had yet to premiere.) The season premiere opened with the revelation that Annie - who killed a man in a hit-and-run and spent entire season trying to cover it up - had at last paid her debt to society. That payment: a summer of house arrest, which Annie assures us was SUCH a drag.
(True, the man she killed was homeless - but I think Annie would have had to have been a racist cop in order for that to get legally bumped down to a misdemeanor in Beverly Hills. Fortunately, this apparently didn't leave any sort of mark on her permanent record, for later in the season when she's suspended from school for three whole days it's treated as a potentially disastrous blow to her college applications.)
So in that blog post I had some strong words for the writers of that show. I implied that I any idiot would have seen the pitfalls of that plot, and said that I would have cared more about the quality of the show than they did, even if I was working for free. Summing up the quality of the writing that made it to air, I said, "Professional writers should be better than that."
You might argue that professional bloggers should know better than to directly insult people they're trying to work for or with, but I would remind you that I'm not paid for this blog and therefore, am absolutely not professional.
I do, however, have experience. In college I ran a student-produced half-hour drama that was not too dissimilar from what you do on 90210. It was no One Tree Hill, but it's certainly at least on par with your "Adrianna steals a dead man's songs" and "Annie sent to bed without supper after shooting a hobo just to watch him die" storylines.
More than that, I'm already a Google-certified expert on 90210's bad writing. If you Google the search terms "90210" and "bad writing," my blog is the first entry that pops up. (NOT a joke - try it yourself.)
Thus, I seek to get what I want the way anyone else does these days - by complaining about it on the internet and launching a massive Twitter campaign to be selected as the new 90210 showrunner. As showrunner, I promise I will not cast any teenager who looks old enough to have his prostate examined. I'll be hard on fake crime too. In my TV-universe, murder would be punishable by more than a summer's worth of house arrest!
I promise not only to reach out to Jennie Garth to return to the show, but I'll even bring back Ian Ziering if that's what it takes!
We need to move past the failed policies of the Rebecca Sinclair era! Support my grass roots effort on Twitter by Tweeting your meesages of endorsement. Use the hashtag "#BitterFor90210." You can also Tweet the CW directly at @CW_Network and demand 90210 gets more Bitter!
You can also reach people connected with the show at: @90210Assistant and @90210PRgirl.
Even if you think I'm an asshole for campaigning for the job so rudely, wouldn't it be worth it to see me have to share a writer's room with people whom I have directly insulted? If you don't want to see me succeed, I'm betting you'll enjoy watching me squirm.
