So, it's come to this: entertainment parodies are turning into new entertainment business models.

I can't top the intro to Bill Carter's New York Times story on Sony's planned Minisode Network so I'll just quote it:

The question probably never occurred to viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, but suddenly it is highly relevant: exactly how much worthwhile entertainment content was there in shows like "Charlie's Angels," "T. J. Hooker," and "Starsky and Hutch"?

The Sony Corporation and its production studio, Sony Pictures Television, which controls the rights to those and many other relics of a distant era of television, have come up with an answer to that question: three and a half to five minutes.

That's the length Sony has shrunk episodes down to in order to create what the company hopes is an appealing new business in retooling old shows for a new era of entertainment. Sony even has a name for these shrunken slices of television nostalgia: minisodes.

Sony Television is planning in June to introduce an Internet-based service called the Minisode Network, initially offering the mini-shows for an exclusive run on MySpace. (The company may consider establishing a separate Internet channel called the Minisode Network later.)

Basically, it sounds like the idea is to take leisurely paced shows from the '70s and '80s and re-edit them to run with the pace of, say, "24."

Yes, that's absurd. But, judging from comments by Sony Television president Steve Mosko, Sony is positively embracing the absurdity. "Our people are really having fun with this," Mosco tells the Times. "We're not overthinking the process. You could almost look at this and say a group of college kids put this together."

I mean, hey, if you can digest the first seven seasons of "The Sopranos" in seven minutes ...