Wednesday, 10/23/02

I was reading this NYT article about contract renegotiation difficulties between NBC and the producers of The West Wing. The show's bargaining position is buttressed by an improbable string of Emmy awards, but weakened by all sorts of factors, including the show's falloff in ratings (deservedly so, in the worthwhile opinion of the paper's Caryn James, the first West Wing critic I've seen break out the shark-jump references), and the producers' acrimonious victory over NBC in ER's negotiations last year.

But the real dirt in the story goes unaddressed in its copy, and left to a sidebar photograph: Jeff Zucker, NBC Entertainment president, is clearly related by blood to Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer. The pictures don't lie. DNA analysis seems superfluous at this juncture.

11:05PM «

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