Welcome back, sir!

Rick Maynard is back at the Freedonian, and he explains why the Writers Guild Strike is important:

We’ve all seen the benefits of good writing vs. bad. I would urge anyone who doesn’t understand the value of good writing to check out the entire run of The West Wing. For the first four and a half years, the show was written almost singlehandedly by a man whose dialogue was so captivating that an episode about the markup of an appropriations bill (“The Stackhouse Filibuster”) was arguably one of the most captivating hours of television ever, with an emotional payoff at the end that was simply beyond the scope of Jack Bauer’s finest hour. When he quit, the next writer on the show was a putz that wrote a two part episode about the president quitting without a vice president and turning the White House over to the Speaker of the House from the other party without anything that had so much as the emotional gravitas of your average infomercial.

Go on, read the rest of it!