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Hollywood sees journalists and our ilk as the next great comedy foils, the Boston Globe writes. Lawrence O'Donnell ("West Wing") is doing a half-hour comedy for HBO set in a cable news network. He says it will have "really funny bursts of egotism and failure and embarrassment and fortunes rising and falling on the weirdest things, and ratings driving people nuts..." The Globe says that no fewer than four other sitcoms about journalists are competing to get on prime time this fall. Writes the paper's Don Aucoin:
If popular culture is part funhouse mirror, part Rorschach blot, what are we to make of this surge of interest in journalists? Partly, it is that the character of a reporter has always made a handy proxy for audiences, who can see the action through the journalist's eyes. But it also seems to stem from the current celebritization of a trade that was once considered home to ink-stained wretches.