Well, if you’re anything like me, you’re pissed. No “24,” no “The Office,” and yet, if you’ve paid attention to the reports on which other shows have refused to comply with the Writer’s Guild strike sanctions, you’ve found out that Carson Daly (my God! Carson Daly?) is somehow still on television. Yep, it’s been a rough 55 days — our sitcoms are in perpetual reruns, our late night shows are gutted and our thirst for the one-hour crime drama has gone without quenching for a ridiculously unprecedented eight weeks in a row. But, my friends, there is hope: between the major networks and cable, about 100 original shows will air in a given year, and up to a third of these will be canceled and replaced the following season. With all that new crap flooding the airwaves, you have to ask yourself: is writing a TV show really all that hard?

Now sure, there are a few just plain geniuses out there: no one’s saying that “Gossip Girl,” Josh Schwartz’s bold new teen drama follow-up to “The O.C.,” is anything short of riveting. It takes real courage and versatility to go from writing about the spoiled and privileged brats of Southern California to writing about the spoiled and privileged brats of the Upper East Side, but Schwartz has done it, and let me tell you, we’re all much better for it. What we do know, unfortunately, is that Gossip Girl is a brilliant exception to the rule of bad TV — it stands out amongst its peers like “Anna Karenina” mixed in with a pile comic books and porn. It’s just the sad truth: most new TV is just plain garbage, but we all suck it up and watch the trash anyways.

So what to do now, you ask? TV’s gone and not coming back anytime soon, so to pass the time, it seems that there’s only one simple solution: make your own TV sitcom.

Really. It’s easier than you think. Sitcoms, at least most of them, follow a pretty basic pattern. There’s an introductory anecdote that usually has nothing to do with the plot, some rising action until quarter past the hour, a catharsis around the 22 or 23 minute mark, a few closing words, and something just plain silly when the credits are rolling. “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “The Office” — they all do it, and without too much modification to your daily routine, you probably can too.

Let’s start with location. Most great sitcoms really only happen in two to three settings, so you’ll need to come up with these before you start everything else. This is not a very difficult task: a coffee shop works, as does a bar, and you’ll definitely want to rearrange your dorm room in such a way that there’s a lot of open space in the middle for you and your characters to talk about the day’s goings on. Next, you’ll need to make friends with people you can think of as broadly generalized caricatures — as this is Stanford, that also shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Once you’ve got your setting and your characters in place, the fun can officially begin. Make a list of all your characters on a sheet of paper and figure out which ones could really set off some comedic fireworks when put in a bind together. Just what will the quiet engineer from down the hall do when the big jock eats ALL his grapes from the fridge? What’s going to happen when mom and dad come early from the movies to find Billy making out with his girlfriend AND drinking a beer? (Note: this will require visiting parents, which in turn will give you dozens of additional storylines, such as girlfriend meets the parents, parents are overstaying their welcome and majorly cramping everyone’s style, somebody walks in on mom fellating dad, etc.). Will plain old Sarah Jo EVER get a date with Chet McCloudelburg, that dreamy captain of the debate team? Seriously, the possibilities are endless.

Now I know what you’re going to say — it’s not TV. Well of course it’s not TV! You know what people did before TV was around? They read. They just read books, and you’re not going to go crazy and start doing that now, are you? Of course you aren’t. So really, come up with your premise (and if you’re lost, a fat Midwestern dad with an impossibly skinny wife and a kooky family has worked about a million times), cast your characters, pick your setting and you’re there. TV is make-believe, people, and chances are that once you set your mind to your own endless potential for creativity, you’ll forget you ever even watched the damn thing — that is, until “Gossip Girl” comes back on.