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With a background in advertising and roughly sixty-eight versions of his Law & Order franchise currently on the air, cops-and-lawyers-procedural brandmaster Dick Wolf is uniquely qualified to declare that anyone who thinks they know how commerce, emerging platforms, and traditional programming will intersect in the future is quite obviously hitting the pipe. Reports the WSJ:

The Wall Street Journal: We see producers trying to come up with ideas that will play well on mobile phones or the Web. Are these ventures worthwhile?

Mr. Wolf: I'm feeling that maybe I'm totally out of touch. I've been pitched Webisodes. I've been pitched everything. ... C'mon. Please, you think ringtones are going to be a major revenue stream for studios or networks? ... Unfortunately, the business model is irreparably broken, and people are going to have to figure out something new. ... I'm 59 years old. I don't think the world is going to come crashing down in five to six years, but I guarantee you, if anyone tells you what the television business is going to look like a decade out, they are on drugs.

One need to look no further than the still-evolving example of NBC president Kevin Reilly's apparently misplaced trust in West Wing hitmaker Aaron Sorkin to stir the Peacock from its fourth-place funk to see how easily desperate television executives can misinterpret this Wolf Corollary ("Anyone who says they know something is on drugs") to the Goldman Principle ("Nobody knows anything"), misguidedly thinking that "anyone who has a history of using drugs can tell you how to save your network."