The Original Cards of Comedy I've found that now that I spent so much time working on tv, I rarely have time to watch any myself.   My beloved 24 doesn't come back until January, and, while I know the networks must have just unveiled a huge lineup of fall shows, I haven't really paid attention to any of them.  (Someone told me the brother from Everybody Loves Raymond has a show??)

There is, however, one exception, a show I've been looking forward to ever since its pilot was leaked online over the summer...  Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip kicks some serious ass.

It's only episode two, but I can already tell this is one I'm going to be following all season long.  Lame, I know, that after a day of working on a tv show I come home and spend an hour watching fictional people work on a fake tv show, but, so what - it is freakin GOOD.  (I suppose it's just like how all my med-school friends watch Scrubs, or how all my castaways on a freaky island filled with polar bears friends obsess over Lost.)

Already, here's one bit of TV reality that the show has captured perfectly: COLORED INDEX CARDS.  I had no idea until recently how universal these bad boys were, but the very first day our new executive producer came on board, she sent a PA out to buy a pack.  We weren't allowed to start without them.

Apparently, ideas in TV aren't real unless they're written on a colored index card and attached to a corkboard.  Witness the wall full of cards in Studio 60.  Witness the cards in John Stewart's office (grabbed from the trailer of the movie Wordplay).  At Current, we have a wall that looks exactly like these (that I'd show you if it wasn't full of super-secret, super-sweet ideas).

At first, I was shocked that technology hadn't killed this practice.  Isn't there some sort of wiki that we could use?  A cool, iCal-looking webapp that everyone in the office could access, annotate and play with?  Are leaky Sharpies and 3x5 cards really the best we can do?

Already, we use software that lets us share/edit our scripts, and I've been slowly getting people to use del.icio.us to share bookmarks across the office.  But I don't think I'm going to make any progress killing the wall of cards, and, the more I see it popping up other places, the less I want to. 

There's something cool about being able to look at the wall (instead of a monitor) and instantly visualize what you have coming up.  But, for me, there's something even cooler about maintaining a couple of traditions that make you feel like you belong to some larger sense of TV history - that your room of writers isn't so different from the rooms of writers on all the shows you've admired growing up. 

As far as Studio 60 goes, I find it funny that there was likely a room of real writers brainstorming ideas for cards that would exist in the room of fake writers.  Though you never see them realized in the episode, the board Matthew Perry is looking at has all sorts of weird sketch names - Julia Child's Child, Jamacian BBQ Hut, and, my favorite, Centaur the Courier.