Forget sympathy

THE producers of scripted television -- and movies, for that matter -- have nobody to blame but themselves for the rise in reality programming (“Actors, Writers Grin and Bear a Harsh Reality,” by Brian Lowry, March 10). For years they have been exhorting writers to create characters who operate in the narrowest of frameworks. Sympathetic, they call them. Irrelevant is what they’ve become.

If the producers and so-called experts of scripted programming had even the slightest clue as to what true complexity is, they wouldn’t be whining about the fact that apparently the public has been waiting for some truly unsympathetic characters, such as Simon on “American Idol,” for quite some time.

Doug Hall

Los Angeles