Sitcoms are great fun and cheap to make (until the actors start demanding a million dollars per episode), but lately the trend has been towards one-hour dramas. An hour gives producers and writers more time to develop characters and craft a good story as well as run the same commercials more than once. Now instead of being exposed to the complete absurdity that is a pickup truck towing an airplane so fast that it lifts up in the air (this would be feasible if the truck were pulling the plane at, say, 180 miles an hour) once, I get to see it twice. Hooray for television.

One network that has made its living on the hour-long drama is the WB. While at first they decided to fill their lineup with well-crafted sitcoms like the Wayans Brothers and Muscle, the fledgling network quickly (after two seasons of ratings in the toilet) decided to shift to a more drama-heavy schedule. So now we get hip teens and twentysomethings overdramatizing simple problems with snappy in-your-face dialogue. Dawson or Pacey, Dawson or Pacey, Dawson or Pacey? Apparently this kind of important decision takes about three seasons and hundreds of witty one-liners. It's a good thing Katie Holmes isn't our nation's president. And the best thing is that all the characters are interchangeable. Take Clark from Smallville and drop him into Dawson's Creek (well not literally into the creek, maybe on that rowboat with Dawson. Imagine the sexual tension and witty cracks...) and no one would notice the difference. At least until Clark lifted up a car or ran faster then a speeding bullet, at which point someone would make a snappy comment about his super powers and their impact on his performance in the sack and then he would sleep with Jen or Jack or both.

Then there is the formula that every other network uses: take some sort of profession (lawyer, teacher, police, medicine, crime scene investigator, plumber...) and glamorize it in the most outrageous way possible. Did you know that not only did our high school teachers educate us, but they also all slept with each other on school grounds? And that being a crime scene investigator is so easy due to the immense amount of physical evidence that every bumbling criminal leaves behind that workers can stand around and zing each other with sizzling one-liners? And that doesn't even begin to describe TVs portrayal of the legal profession.

Lawyers on TV are either young, attractive, and moral or old and wise. Nowhere are the sleazy ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyers that I see ads for here in south Florida (there are plenty of opportunity for personal injury around here, what with all the blind 80 year olds behind the wheel of cars the size of school buses). Instead every case is fraught with controversy and criminal intrigue, and the best part is that a judge hears it within 24 hours no matter what. And the prosecutor gets to sleep with the defense attorney.