One of the biggest things I miss from our old site was the mock drafts that used to run every Friday. Those were fantastic time wasters, and a good one was a virtual guarantee that you were going to be far from productive at work, as your day instead degenerated into arguments with strangers over who would be the best Saturday cartoon character to have sex with, (and now we all know how that would go), or some other equally inane topic, all of which were still more important than that TPS report deadline your boss was yelling about. Good times.

Well, it’s been long enough. After a discussion in the back channels yours truly is bringing it back, with some slight rule changes. The old site had 4-5 main contributors, one of whom may not have been real. So they’d do 2-3 rounds themselves, then kick it to the kommentariat to draft whatever was left over. You can do that when you’ve only taken 10-15 of whatever topic was up for drafting. We, however, are a much more connected group when it comes to the writin’ and draftin’ of things, so if we did that we’d easily take out 30-50 before we threw the bedraggled leftovers to our beloved readership. That’s no fun. So these drafts, which I expect to last as long as I remember to do them, (2-3 weeks), will just leap right into it.

Also, for content and alliteration reasons, we’ve moved the draft to Monday mornings, so get ready to kill your productivity right from the start.

First come, first served, subject to my randomly assigning the first pick to someone else, generally because they came up with the idea. Or because they bribed me. For now, please wait 10 picks or 30 minutes before making another one. That will be revised up or down depending on how much participation we get, which I hope will be a lot.

This week’s topic came to me as I was walking my faithful dog. That’s right: Sidekicks. The rules are simple, until I disagree with your pick and arbitrarily change them. You can select from any medium, film, TV, literature of any kind.

/sees frantically waving hand

Yes Balls, that includes porn.

/hand gives a thumbs up, drops from view

Anyhoo, the sidekick, in my mind, is a character who gets second-billing to the protagonist, but it still important to advancing the story and/or the protagonist’s interests. Jesse is a sidekick to Walt in Breaking Bad, for instance, because he is crucial to so much of Walt does or tries to do. Patton Oswalt’s Constable Bob on ‘Justified’ is not because, while hilarious, he does not help move the story along, and if anything gets in the way of what Raylan is trying to do. Similarly, while Boyd Crowder is crucial to the story, he cannot be a sidekick because he is actively trying to thwart what Raylan is trying to do. Everyone clear on that? Great. With that in mind, with the first pick in the draft I will take

LANAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

Not just helping our protagonist, Sterling Archer, Lana Kane is also frequently bailing him out of the trouble his schemes get him into it, and she had his daughter, which certainly advanced both the story and, theoretically anyway, Sterling’s growth as a person.

The rest of you, as you should know by now, are on the clock.