Weekend Assignment #196 or What’s up with Boston legal?

John Scalzi has passed on the Weekend Assignment “torch” to Karen Funk. She’ll be the caretaker of this weekly tradition, so far so good. This week’s assignment has to do with TV, which coincidentally today’s post was all about. So with a few a tweaks and a couple of rewrites I slapped together a hopefully coherent post.

To answer the question of how the WGA strike is affecting me as viewer, I have to delve into my viewing habits. First of all the company who set up my satellite receiver provides only 50 channels, no ifs ands or buts. So they like to change the channel lineup just to keep things interesting. This has wreaked havoc with my favorite shows, which are:

Enterprise – cancelled, so it doesn’t matter
Mythbusters – only available on the European Discovery Channel, which got shuffled for the Indian one so no more Mythbusters
The Daily Show with John Stewart – doesn’t come on the version of CNN they are currently providing
The late night shows, leno, letterman, conan – the channels that carried them got pulled off well before the strike.

With basically no good shows to follow I exist on a steady diet of Hollywood movies whether its on cable or DVD. So in a way the strike hasn’t affected me much, although I wish them good luck and hope they are able to get what they are after. Which brings us to today’s post, it deals with a specific show, mainly Boston Legal. I am getting the earlier seasons over here so I am pretty sure they were produced well before the strike. Here goes:

I mean seriously it seams like William Shatner has lured all his SF acting buddies into the show. Just take a look at the regular cast James Spader (Stargate: Dr. Daniel Jackson) Rene Auberjonois (DS9: Constable Odo), yeah I know he got kicked off but still. Also I saw an episode with Jeri Ryan (STVOY: Seven of Nine) in it, also Scott Bakula (ENT: Captain Archer) is doing an episode! I mean come on guys, what’s going on here!

So if my first assumption is correct then William Shatner has some serious hold over the show’s producer; and that’s why all the SF/ST dudes are winding up over there. What’s next will Patrick Stewart (if you really need to know you don’t belong here) drop by in need of legal counseling; from the great Denny Crane? I am sure that’ll work out nicely. As always I want to know what you know.