Soap writers rarely considered preemption a good thing. The usurping of soap air time by a breaking news event meant that their careful plotting of cliffhanger Fridays was upended, or that scenes that they had written and seen produced would never air.
I get it, believe me. No one wants to see hard work go to waste. And no one wants perfect timing to be compromised. But every so often, don't you wish you could have a little preemption--stop the clock for just a moment, so that you can catch up, step back, redo? Wouldn't you sometimes deal with a little inconvenience in order to buy a little time or breathing room?
So, maybe, once in a while, we let "breaking news" (or anything else "breaking" in our lives) preempt our regularly scheduled events. Maybe, sometimes, we allow the world to step in and alter what we have created. Maybe, just maybe, we even create a preemption of our own, just because. And we hope the stories and cliffhangers still work. Because no preemption, no matter how necessary, should get in the way of telling our stories...
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