Hollywood has been far from unique this year. Either all the creative people in the land of the stars have disappeared, or they have just gotten lazy. The same ideas and actors are being used over and over again without giving the audiences time to breathe.

Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live and Mean Girls fame has created a TV show called 30 Rock. The premise of the show, according to the NBC Universal Media Village, is “Tina Fey as the head writer of a frenetic late-night television variety show.”

Another show that has already started is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. The premise of this show, according to the NBC Universal Media Village: “Emmy Award-winning Aaron Sorkin’s and Thomas Schlamme’s (NBC’s The West Wing) riveting insider’s take on the backstage drama of a late-night comedy sketch show.”

While 30 Rock is considered a comedy and Studio 60 is a drama, the plots are too similar. Not to mention they are on the same network and are both new shows for the fall season. NBC is trying to sell people the same idea twice.

The crime noir has come back, twice last month, in both Hollywoodland and the The Black Dahlia. It was easy to get these two movies confused. Both are based on true stories of death in Hollywood. They both have Academy Award winners and nominees in their cast, such as Adrian Brody and Hilary Swank. Hollywoodland was released on Sept. 8, and then a week later came The Black Dahlia. If the movies had come out more than a month apart, maybe their box-office totals wouldn’t be so small. Hollywoodland raked in a pathetic $14 million, and The Black Dahlia a little more than $21 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has been sucked dry with remakes and sequels. The most recent is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning starting Friday, three years after the remake. New Line Cinema must not have had any original horror ideas for this Halloween. The more screen time Leatherface gets, the less scary he becomes.

Though many people may not have seen the film Capote, they at least know of it because of Oscar winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Just a year after the award-winning movie debuted, another movie about Capote, Infamous, will be released on Oct. 13.

Stars can be just as overexposed as ideas. One of the more recent examples is Ashton Kutcher. Last Friday, two movies starring Kutcher were released: The Guardian, a drama, and Open Season, an animated comedy. That’s two movies in one day – he only made three this year.

Actress Scarlett Johansson is also spending too much time on camera. She has had two movies released so far this year released so far – The Black Dahlia and Scoop– both of which failed to impress at the box office. The Prestige, opening Oct. 20, pairs Johansson up again with Hugh Jackman, with whom she has no chemistry.

Hollywood needs to get its act together if it expects to make any profits and keep its audiences interested. Recurrent, mindless sequels have always been a problem, but now it appears as though sequels are giving way to facsimiles.