The fact that the statement "governments should be legally required to make pension contributions every year" is controversial is just the latest reminder that it's time to blow up America's horrible pension system.

Adrián García Bogliano's Here Comes the Devil is what would happen if psychological terror and weird sex shit came to a Mentos commercial. Stilted as fuck, fueled on pregnant pauses and eyeball acting that makes virtually every character appear to have a thyroid condition, the movie revels in the kind of unnaturalness the '70s schlock it so admires could only settle for. It's smart-dumb: buffoonery at its sleekest and most stylish.

I hate to recap plots—because come on, who cares—but this one is bonkers enough to at least go through the first act. After we watch two teen girls make out and grind on each other to heavy metal in the opening sequence, they hear what's clearly insistent, murder-signaling knocking on the door. The one who answers it gets killed by a serial killer. Of course she does. The burgeoning lesbian (or young woman going through her bi phase) that doesn't get killed bludgeons him, which causes him to drop the bag of fingers he's carrying, take all his clothes off, and die (outside on a hill). That will have nothing to do with the rest of the movie for about an hour, but it sure is a fun and titillating greeting.

Meanwhile, a family sits on a desert, the parents a few yards away from their son and daughter. The daughter gets her period and she and her brother freak out, but then her mother explains to her it's normal and takes her to a public rest room, whose door she leaves wide fucking open so a weird guy who looks like of like melted Trent Reznor can leer in at the first-bloodied panties on the counter. He is caught and averts his eyes in a very exaggerated manner, but the mother doesn't close the door. He will come back later, too, but not for a while.

The children decide they want to go up to a cave near the gas station where the mother took her daughter to the bathroom. The parents are like, "OK," because they are fine with letting their barely teenaged children hike up to a gnarly, exploitation-movie looking cave in Tijuana where it seems that their best case scenario will involve an interaction with people dressed in giant felt costumes like those you'd see on H.R. Pufnstuf. Apparently, the parents just wanted the chance to discuss their early experiences with sex (they're just now getting to it despite having clearly been married for upward of 15 years). While they trade stories, the father fingers the mother in their car ("Then I smelled it. It smelled like pee," he says of the first vagina he ever encountered way back when). The parents collapse in the afterglow of the mother's orgasm. When they wake up, it is dark and the children still aren't back.

This leads to a few interactions with some weird, murder-y locals and a half-hearted attempt to call the kids from the bottom of the cave. The parents go to their hotel room, where they bicker. The next morning, they leave their hotel and the cop they met the night before brings their kids back. All seems normal. They go to the movies, the mother is sitting on one side of the children, the father on the other. The mother looks at the father, the father looks at the mother. They slowly smile. Mentos. The freshmaker.

But then, it becomes clear that everything is not normal. The kids are fucked up. Were they molested? Are they doing it with each other? This movie is called Here Comes the Devil, so is it the devil? Are they the devil? Are they coming this way? Are they going to come off the screen and sit in my lap and make me tell them about my first sexual experience?

Is their house haunted all of a sudden? It is, after all, 2013. That's always a possibility.

This movie is often goofy, but the intrigue runs thick regardless. I never stopped wanted to see what the fuck ridiculous thing it was going to throw at me next. It intensifies at certain points into shockingly brutal violence, and is more effective for being so felicitous about that. Without going excessive and taking a torture-porn turn, this movie shows you that it means business and isn't just some jump-scare-loaded, soft-R-for scary bullshit.

I emailed the director to ask about the structure. "I think every element must serve a purpose," he wrote back, "and you have to be careful of not overkill anything that you use. I don't think there's a limit to use the gore I just think you need to figure out how to keep the interest of the audience and go one step beyond on your next set piece. In this movie the gore serves a very specific purpose but I was sure that what I had to show after, was even more intense but for different reasons. I was talking the other day about that with Eugenio Mira, who directed the absolutely awesome Grand Piano and it's a perfect example of how you can keep the interest of the audience if you know how to create a progression on something that otherwise could be very repetitive."

This I agree with—as the mother hunts for clues as to what happened to her children up on the hill to make them so fucked up and what's going on with them now, the movie slows down. But it's never boring. Here Comes the Devil is way too out of its head to ever be boring, from the outlandish plot developments to the conveniently vague script ("I saw someone...I can't describe it") to the perpetually zooming camera (I mean, the thing just keeps giving you zooming shots of everything, but chiefly hills and eyes).

Here Comes the Devil has more personality than any horror movie I've seen this year. Granted, 2013 was underwhelming—the only bona fide horror phenomenon was the old-school, by-the-numbers haunted house story The Conjuring. The next highest grossing were similarly themed Insidious Chapter 2 and Mama. Miserable ghosts hanging around and complaining everywhere you look. This genre is musty as old curtains.

Now, there were a few under-the-radar offerings I enjoyed. You're Next was a blast. The V/H/S franchise is thrilling in the sheer number of new ideas it puts forth onscreen and the velocity in which it does it. I thought Franck Khalfoun's Manaic remake was gorgeous and ingeniously choreographed, an extremely clever way of incorporating a POV aesthetic without doing the found-footage thing. And underneath its domestic-drama sheen, Jim Mickle's We Are What We Are was the most disgusting and disturbing movie of the year (and I'm including the hyper-gory Evil Dead remake in my estimation, though I also enjoyed that one, too).

But nothing was as hilariously off-the-wall and hardcore fucked up as Here Comes the Devil. I don't think it's a great movie – part of its charm is camp appeal. But I think that Bogliano knows what he's doing, and that one day soon he will, in fact, make great movies. Here he comes.

Winter is coming, blah, blah, blah, just get me Game of Thrones the fourth season and get it now; the Interstellar is light on story, but heavy on McConaughey at his silken-voiced finest; the Weinstein's are back baby, and you'll never work in this town again (if you're a non-sequel); and because this is Los Angeles, you're welcome for Sriracha: The Movie.

• Neither an official teaser or trailer, HBO has given us alms for the poor by way of a five second look at the upcoming fourth season of Game of Thrones. Their end of the year promo looks ahead to 2014, and around the 1:35 mark we get a delectable tiny snippet of King Joffrey scowling, Sansa victorious, and Tyrion in chains. Winter can't come fast enough. [YouTube]
• Christopher Nolan's new teaser for Interstellar doesn't tell much by way of story, but damn is good to hear Matthew McConaughey speak. Which is pretty much all it is. [YouTube]
• The most fearsome brothers in Hollywood, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, will be reuniting with Miramax almost a decade after their 2005 split from the company, which was owned at the time by Disney. Once one of the most innovative studios in the game, according to Harvey, their first order of business will now be doing sequels from movies in the Miramax vault, like Good Will Hunting. How do you like them apples? [NYT]
• File this under "Most L.A. Thing Ever"—on the heels of the news that the Sriracha plant in Los Angeles is being shut down due to local resident complaints, we now have Sriracha: The Movie. Because, of course. (To be fair, it's a documentary, but still.) [NPR]

Breakdowns is a daily roundup of all the news that wasn't interesting enough to deserve two paragraphs.

'Tis the season to put dying trees (or those that never lived) in your home and cover them with things that sparkle (so they seem more alive?). We want to see your trees! Send us pictures!

"Part of our reporting was sitting with those girls, sitting with their families, seeing their scars on their wrists, hearing the emotion." - Jessica Hopper revisits the underage-sex allegations against R. Kelly that everyone has conveniently forgotten with the journalist who broke the story, Jim DeRogatis

Just in time to sneak into Oscar nominations, the boys are back, this time at 22 Jump Street. Everyone is white boy wasted, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill can't stop hugging, and Rob Riggle does his best Saturday Night Live Scared Straight.

Is this chocolate lab broken? Confused? A rebel? A doggy lifeguard? Or maybe just taking a pee break?

According to the video description, our curious canine loves being in the water, but for some reason she just doesn't swim.

Better guesses why go below.

[H/T: Tastefully Offensive]

In the latest setback for the NSA, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the spy agency's phone metadata collection program, which gathers information on calls to, from, and within the United States, probably violates the Constitution.

Calling the practice "indiscriminate" and an "arbitrary invasion" of privacy, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon wrote that a lawsuit brought by conservative activist Larry Klayman had standing to continue and would likely lead to the NSA's program being struck down for violating the Fourth Amendment.

From Politico:

"Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephone metadata covering the last five years, and the NSA's Bulk Telephony Metadata Program significantly intrudes on that expectation," wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. "I have significant doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism."

Leon issued a preliminary injunction banning the NSA from collecting data on the Verizon accounts of Klayman and one of his clients, though the order was stayed to allow for an appeal.

As the Wire points out, the ruling could lead to the end of the NSA's metadata collection, which is already facing challenges from Congress and the White House.

Monday's ruling — even though its judgment is stayed pending an appeal — will provide ammunition to those who've sought to eliminate the NSA's ability to collect phone metadata. There are multiple bills before Congress right now that would refine the Patriot Act's Section 215 to eliminate the ability to collect this information; President Obama's own panel recommending reforms will apparently offer some restrictions on the practice.

UPDATE: Edward Snowden released a statement on the ruling. From the New York Times:

In a statement distributed by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was a recipient of leaked documents from Mr. Snowden and who wrote the first article about the bulk data collection, Mr. Snowden hailed the ruling.

"I acted on my belief that the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," Mr. Snowden said. "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many."

[Image via AP]

The scourge of SantaCon — the "nonsensical Santa Claus convention that happens once a year for absolutely no reason" — is the bane of pretty much every New Yorker, but a boon to voyeurs of badly behaving Santas.

Dirty ol' Santa or Ho Ho Ho, just remember No Means No. #TheSantaCode #NYCSantacon

— santacon (@santacon) December 9, 2013

First there was that six-Santa brawl near Union Square that could result in criminal charges.

Now, courtesy of aptly nicknamed filmmaker "Peeping John" Wilson comes footage of another naughty SantaCon incident that took place just a few streets away.

Writing in to Bowery Boogie, Wilson claims he witnessed a SantaCon attendee getting his candy cane swirled by a handy little helper in the outward facing vestibule of a Duane Reade at 3rd and 14th.

And he has the Instagram videos to prove it.

Here's the thing: If you're going to be a SantaCon jerk, might as well make it literal.

[H/T: BroBible, screengrab via Instagram]

It goes without saying that we're fond of bizarre voicemails around here, but this one provided to us by an anonymous tipster is on a very different level. After failing to properly hang up, a woman sings a sweetly nutty song to, we think, her dog.

We're told the woman is a recruiter, though for what business or industry we don't know. And we're not entirely sure her "beary-babe" is a dog; it could be a cat, a stuffed animal, a child, or perhaps even an actual bear. Here's a transcript of what you're missing if you don't listen to the full call above (which has, of course, been edited to protect everyone involved):

Oh, cutie that you are, because you're so precious.
Come here!
Come here, my little monkey!
My little bear, oh, will you stop it? You're just crazy.
I love my little beary-kins. You can stay here!
You're in demand, my little boo-boo.
You're in demand, my little beary-babe.
You're in demand, my little bear-bear.
You're so sweet, my little carebear.
My little carebear.
[kissing noises]
I love my little beary-boy.
He's a baby!
He's a baby boy.
[kissing noises]

Now, be honest, pet owners: You've sung to your little beary-kins, too. (I tend to serenade my dog with a polka about how Harper Hound is the Best Beagle Around.) The speed with which this recruiter goes from all business to foofy-foofy-goo-goo is incredible, but really she's no different from you and me. Who among us doesn't love our little beary-boys?

Reposted on Reddit over the weekend before making its way to Twitter and then the web writ large, the feast beast they call Cthulken (or, alternatively, the Craturktopus) reared its ugly, ugly head yet again to freak everybody out.

But something was different this time around: The monstrosity came with a long overdue origin story.

Gothamist spoke with Cthuken's creator, Rusty Eulberg, a Texas-based database administrator said he just wanted to do something "unique" for Christmas dinner two years ago.

First thing's first, it's called a Cthurkey, not a Cthuken ("no duck," says Eulberg). Secondly, despite its grotesque appearance, the Cthurkey is eminently edible.

"Jenny [Robledo, Eulberg's wife] is a big fan of Cthulhu so we went and bought some crab legs and some octopus and bacon and cooked them all separate and slapped them together on a plate, and that was it," he told Gothamist.

His dinner guests were initally turned off, mostly out of concern that they might find their face being "hugged" by the creature if they got too close.

The "old Nazi plate" Eulberg used to serve the creature on was also something of an appetite suppressant.

But once his friends actually tried some, they found out it wasn't as evil as it looked. "It was delicious," recalled Eulberg.

Asked how he plans to improve on his creation, Eulberg, who has since gone on to prepare a chicken-based version he called the "Cthicken," said maybe he'll just deep fry the whole damned thing.

[photo via Rusty Eulberg via @damana]

Turn that cherry out, turn that cherry out. I want you to, turn that cherry out, turn that cherry out.

A series of events: the New York Times writes about how insulated Twitter is from its destitute urban surroundings. Twitter engineer writes that, well, if you've made it into the company's offices, you've deserved it.

Even if people who work in an office building have in some sense "earned it" in that they have gotten a job in said building this is... probably not the best way to look at. At a time when resentment between the tech sector and the rest of our charted cosmos is quite high, hidden poverty in Silicon Valley remains invisible, and classist swine-headedness is unfettered, let's reconsider comments about who deserves to be where in San Francisco. You are literally tweeting about being above people who are less fortunate than you, and it's not helping.

The bedtime story about disruption goes like so: a big bad useless government financed by greedy incumbents is the only reason that authorities are concerned about issues like public transportation or unregulated genetic testing. That's why Airbnb's non-profit astroturfs for donations for "the sharing economy."

And why Uber's CEO retweets statements like this.

Like Uber, Airbnb benefits from a story line about hotel and landlord lobbyists, particularly in New York City, which the company has made a testing ground for regulatory battles. Nevermind that the $2.5 billion startup works directly with its own lobbyist, Bolton-St. Johns, and indirectly as "an industry stakeholder" the trade group Short Term Rental and Hospitality Association, which has hired the lobbyists Cordo & Co.—all to fight against New York's illegal hotel law.

Then there's Airbnb's artisanal ass-kiss for mayor-elect Bill DeBlasio:

Today, according to New York state senator Liz Krueger, one of Airbnb's lobbying arms has started a misinformation campaign about the law to put more pressure on elected officials. Krueger is referring to Peers, a non-profit industry mouthpiece that presents itself as a grassroots organization for folks who just wanna make a little money on the side—and what kind of monster would object to that? Except that Peers was cofounded by Airbnb's "head of community" and has investment from the Omidyar Network, the foundation of eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar—connections that are glossed over in order to make campaigns look more authentic, and less like a pre-IPO necessity.

In a series of tweets, Krueger politely trolled Peers for not actually understanding the illegal hotel law. Peers brought a number of its members to Krueger's office, but according to this Storify from Andrew Goldston, Krueger's press guy, "many of them said their Airbnb hosting activity consisted of renting out spare bedrooms — which is not a violation of the illegal hotel law!"

Goldston also offers more context from Krueger's camp about the law:

Here's another crazy thing about Peers/Airbnb's rhetoric on this — they say they want to protect their members from unjustly being impacted by the law, but the biggest threat to most of their members isn't the law — it's the fact that overwhelmingly, Airbnb is encouraging them to do things that violate their lease agreements or their coop/condo bylaws, which could put them on the hook to be evicted! And that has nothing to do with the law. We could repeal the law tomorrow and that problem would be unchanged — in fact, it would be worse, because landlords would have a huge new incentive to evict their tenants and convert apartments to full time illegal hotels.

It seems highly unlikely that New Yorkers would get evicted en masse if the law were overturned—Craigslist part-time subletters have been renting out their apartments for years, albeit without startup profits and scale. But more to the point, a truly populist "member-driven" organization wouldn't freak out its members unnecessarily. If Peers was really about growing the "sharing economy," it might be more focused on getting Airbnb to cover the occupancy tax CEO Brian Chesky recently proposed, rather than shoving the burden onto Airbnb hosts.

Megyn Kelly may have been joking, but one New Mexico teacher apparently wasn't when he told a black student he couldn't dress up as Santa because "Santa Claus is white."

Cleveland High School students were given permission to dress up as their favorite Christmas character to honor the spirit of the season.

Christopher, a ninth grader from Rio Rancho who also suffers from autism, decided to come to school dressed as Santa much as many of his classmates did.

Enter the school's resident racist Grinch.

"Christopher, don't you know Santa Claus is white? Why are you wearing that?" is what the teacher told the student, according to the teen's stepdad Michael Rougier.

"There's no room for that in the classroom," Rougier told KOB Eyewitness News 4.

The school district agreed.

According to a spokesperson for Rio Rancho Public Schools, the unnamed teacher self-reported the incident to officials after recognizing his "stupid mistake," and has been disciplined "appropriately."

He was also made to apologize to Christopher and his family.

But Rougier believes the damage has already been done, and will only get worse so long as the teacher remains at Cleveland High.

"If it's not for parents like me that's part of interracial families to say, it's time to stop this," said Rougier. "It's time to stop." Christopher has since been removed from the offending teacher's classroom at the family's request.

[H/T: Mediaiate, screengrab via KQRE]

A copywriter collapsed and died over the weekend shortly after tweeting about working for over 30 hours straight.

Mita Diran regularly turned to Twitter and Tumblr to vent about working ridiculously long hours for her employer, Young & Rubicam Indonesia.

"The more you spend time at the office, the more you consider moving your bed here," she wrote back in October.

Her tweets were often accompanied by the hashtag #AgencyLife.

On December 14, Diran was again on Twitter. "30 hours of working and still going strooong," she tweeted.

Hours later she suffered heart failure and slipped into a coma from which she wouldn't awake.

Though Diran's death was immediately attributed to overwork — A Path post attributed to her father, an ad agency employee himself, suggests Diran may have been working for up to three days straight — local media reports say her regular consumption of the energy drink Krating Daeng (also known as "Thai Red Bull") may have also contributed to her sudden demise.

Y&R, which hired Diran back in May of 2012, has since released the following statement:

Dear Friends and Colleagues in the Advertising & Marketing community,

It is with a heavy heart and deep sadness that we have to inform you we have lost our friend, sister, and work colleague, Mita Diran, earlier this evening. Mita was a talented copywriter with a gentle smile who will always live on in our hearts.

We have been to Mita's family residence tonight and expressed our sincere condolences on behalf of Y&R Group Indonesia. It is a great loss and we wish Mita's family the faith and strength in each other in going through this extremely difficult time.

Tomorrow, December 16, we will close the office for the day to pay our last respects to Mita at her funeral at Jeruk Purut cemetery at 10 AM. Let us all take a day of silence tomorrow and give Mita's family the support and prayers that they need, from the bottom of our hearts.

Sincerely, Y&R Group Indonesia

Sadly, Diran is not the first young ad agency employee this year to die after spending an impossible number of hours in the office.

In May, Ogilvy & Mather China confirmed that 24-year-old Li Yuan collapsed at his desk from an apparent cardiac arrest after working until 11 p.m. every day for a month.

He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

[H/T: BuzzFeed, photo via Facebook, path screengrab via mumbrella]

He evaded a stiff criminal penalty, but the 16-year-old Texan who drunkenly plowed his truck into a crowd, killing four people, may have just cost his family their life's fortune in civil court.

Ethan Couch was convicted of accelerating over 70 miles an hour and hitting a crowd of people gathered by a disabled vehicle on the side of a Ft. Worth road. Couch reportedly blew a .24 on a Breathalyzer test, three times the legal limit (which, of course, doesn't apply to 16-year-olds in any case).

But the teen avoided a lengthy prison sentence after his family hired a psychologist to testify that Couch was a victim of "affluenza," indulged by the family wealth and unable to follow the straight and narrow without counseling.

That may not save Couch's family in the long run. They now face five civil lawsuits—three from families of the people Couch killed and two from those he injured, according to NBC-Dallas/Ft.Worth. The amounts specified in the court filings are big:

The Boyles are seeking damages in excess of $1 million in the case...

Maria Lemus and Jesus Molina are the parents of Sergio Molina, who was riding in the bed of Couch's truck when he was thrown during the crash. Their son sustained a severe brain injury and is no longer able to move or talk. The family is seeking damages of $20 million.

The lawsuits also name Couch's parents and Cleburne Metal Works, the family company, since he was driving a company-owned F-350 super-duty pickup truck at the time of the crash.

[Screenshot courtesy of NBCDFW.com]

"Are malls becoming extinct?" I'll say! And becoming, and becoming, and becoming...

Following yesterday's post about a SantaCon Santa who was allegedly caught by a filmmaker having his North Pole publicly waxed by a naughty little elf, Gawker received an "urgent" email from a man claiming to be Santa's lawyer.

Here it is in full:

Take Down Article Or Deal With Legal Ramifications

To whom this may concern,

I am representing my client, who is the male shown in the video posted in your article from today entitled:

SantaCon Santa Gets Public Handjob from Naughty Mrs. Claus

My client is a successful New York business man who was simply trying to get home with his girlfriend who had a little bit too much to drink while at SantaCon. The articles that have been posted are extremely hurtful, derogatory, and are simply a defamation of character. The accusations being made have no merit and no basis and are not only inappropriate, but damaging for my client and his girlfriend's reputation and their respective careers.

I am drafting up a lawsuit as we speak and I will pursue several charges against the Huffington Post for the untrue, damaging, and hurtful article that has been posted about my client and his girlfriend. Unless this article is removed within the next 24 hours I fully expect to seek damages for my client and his girlfriend. I imagine that this is something your legal team does not want to deal with, but I have been retained by my client and I am fully prepared to seek corrective actions.

Please give me a call at [REDACTED] at any time to discuss this matter or confirm that the posting will be removed.

Regards,

Tyler Van Buren, Esq.

While the identity of the SantaCon attendee remains unknown to us, we do know quite a bit about his attorney, Mr. Tyler Van Buren, Esq., thanks to his various online bios, which are linked to the telephone number he provided, and his Google+ account, which is linked to the Gmail account he emailed us from.

For instance, while Mr. Van Buren, Esq., appends the "esquire" honorific to his name—which is traditionally understood in the United States to indicate the status of a practicing attorney—neither his LinkedIn profile nor his Seeking Alpha biography indicate attendance at law school. His name does not appear in the New York Unified Court System's directory of attorneys who have been admitted to the state bar. Nor does it appear in the directory of the state bar association of California, the state in which Mr. Tyler Van Buren, Esq., was married in 2011.

Furthermore, according to his LinkedIn profile — where Mr. Tyler Van Buren, Esq., goes by Tyler M. Van Buren, MSc — his actual area of expertise is life sciences, which would make sense, since he is the recipient of a bachelor of science in biochemistry and cellular biology and a masters in science in stem cell biology, both from the University of California at San Diego.

That's probably why, earlier this year, he accepted the position of Specialty Pharmaceuticals Sellside Analyst at the New York-based financial services firm Cowen and Company.

(A brief interlude, apropos of nothing: Section 478 of the New York Judiciary Law states in part that "it shall be unlawful for any natural person...to assume, use, or advertise the title of lawyer...in such manner as to convey the impression that he is a legal practitioner of law...without having first been duly and regularly licensed and admitted to practice law in the courts of record of this state.")

Lastly, while we initially didn't post a second (since removed) video from "Peeping John" Wilson's Instagram page showing a much clearer image of Tyler Van Buren, Esq.'s client, we now feel it's worth a closer look:

[screengrabs via Instagram, photo via LinkedIn]

Tis the season to quickly Google the cost of a gift that someone gave you, so that you can ascertain both how much you mean to them, as well as their disposable income. In the spirit of the holidays, it seemed like the perfect time to remind you that your goal for Christmas 2014 should be to make friends with your friendly neighborhood TV writer—sure they may be anti-social and laugh at their own jokes, but they sure do make a lot of money, and those retina displays aren't buying themselves, now are they?

Variety reported last week that the Writer's Guild of America will be renegotiating their minimum basic agreement, a basic contract they have with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) to make sure that all members of the guild are paid a certain minimum wage based on specific services rendered. Among the WGA's key demands are an increase in cable payment to its writers—no surprise given the rise in quality of cable television programming, and the increased viewership (and thus, ad dollars) that cable networks and producers are profiting from.

Sticker shock aside, there are a few major takeaways from the numbers below—but before we dive into the numbers, it's important to remember that these numbers are simply minimums. Savvy agents will negotiate a far higher payday for their clients, both on their weekly salaries as well as their rate for writing a specific episode. The minimums are also far closer to the actual payday for staff writers, but once you get to a level higher than staff writer (story editor, executive story editor, producer, etc.), the minimum amount of payment is far lower than what you'll generally be paid: they solely exist to prevent a network from lowballing a writer far below their paygrade.

Being staffed on a TV show is good money. Really good money.

Though show schedules can vary, there are still basic amounts of how many weeks of production you can expect to be paid for. A show that is in production for six weeks (which would be about six episodes, though often rooms start earlier than episodes start shooting), would earn a staff writer—the lowest rung on the writers' room totem pole—a minimum of $25,908. Network shows that go a full season are generally in production for 26 weeks, to produce 22 episodes, so though the weekly staff writer payday dips a bit, a staff writer would still pocket a little over $96,000. At a level higher than staff writer? A full 26-week season for anyone above staff writer pays out just $60 dollars short of $157,000, at minimum. And remember, there are about eight levels between staff writer and show creator…those are some pretty high six-figures, on average.

The major discrepancy between network and cable payouts isn't at the weekly salary level, but in specific episodic rates.

Cable and network writers are held to the same minimum weekly paydays, though it's naive to assume that they thus make the same. Cable shows often have far fewer episodes per season (usuall six to twelve), making the weekly payouts lower. The increases the WGA is negotiation for come at the episodic level—when writers are commissioned to write specific episodes and can earn money for story and teleplay. (Story fees are simply paid out to whomever conceived the episode idea, teleplay goes to the actual writer. Story and teleplay combo fees, accordingly, are if the idea and script come from the same writer.)

For a comedy story, cable networks pay at just 67% the rate of a primetime network. For a teleplay, that rate drops to 51%. For both story and teleplay, it's in between, with cable paying just 56% of what a network like ABC or NBC would. For dramas, the discrepancy hovers around 70% in all categories. If the AMPTP meets the WGA's demand to increase cable payouts, they will be reinforcing the fact that cable television is as in-demand as a network television job (if not moreso), and should be compensated accordingly.

In this metric, the writers at staff writer level are still the ones getting screwed—even if they're assigned an episode during their tenure as a staff writer, they don't get paid story or teleplay fees on top of their weekly salary. Those perks are only reserved for story editors and above.

Given the numbers above, coupled with the sharp uptick in quality of cable programming in the last few years, it's no wonder that the WGA is seeking to increase cable payouts. Cable shows are often lauded for their quality due to their high production value—fewer episodes doesn't just combat viewer fatigue and help avoided strung-out storylines, it also means fewer weeks of production, allowing for higher budgets per week. While AMPTP members will doubtlessly argue that by increasing writer salaries, production budgets for those shows may decrease, the guild can always argue back that the lack of brain drain to network shows by good writers following the money will more than make up for it.The negotiations shouldn't prove tricky, given that no one wants to sink back into another writer's strike like the strike of 2007-08, over issues such as DVD residual fees and new media payouts, among others.

No matter how you slice it, given that the bare-bones minimum of a TV writer's salary on a full season show gets damn near six figures, now is the time to start your campaign for next season's iPad. How else do they expect you to stream their well-compensated work, after all?