Just Pull Yourself Down To the Far End of the Cable

The central fear around the Writers Guild of America strike, as it's been portrayed to viewers, is that without a resolution there soon won't be anything good on.

Nothing? The permanent, body-shaped dents in the American sofa would suggest otherwise: There was never anything good on, really, and somehow something is always on. Any viewer who feels acute withdrawal pangs because of the writers' strike simply isn't watching TV with the lowest possible expectations. You have to let go of the modern idea of consumer-chosen, purpose-driven, TiVo-organized watching.

The trick is to watch TV as if your mother never allowed you to watch all the TV you wanted (or never allowed it at all), and she is about to come into the room and tell you to turn it off and go outside. In that frame of mind, all television becomes so much more enticing, because a television with junk on it looks great compared with the horror of a television that is off.

The trick is also to watch everything, anything, except popular television. For us devoted watchers of tepid TV, we were already untethered from Jon Stewart, Letterman, "Lost." You must assiduously avoid anything with fresh zeitgeist. Millions of uncounted, unregistered, uncaring television watchers can happily take in "The Real Housewives of Orange County" over and over. We watch old episodes of "Three's Company" and "Full House" and never speak of it. Soon the pain goes away, replaced by paralysis. We watch in lieu of desire. We watch while we eat, and then we're done.

To tune out the writers' strike, simply watch what's on -- whatever's on -- north of Channel 40 (yet well before the premium movie channels in the 300s), where almost nothing except the cartoons and sitcom reruns is, or was, professionally written:

Rural American dwarfs go grocery shopping, while you don't go grocery shopping. Gastric bypass is always being performed on morbidly obese hospital patients. Stacy London and Clinton Kelly (who? don't pretend you don't know) are always about to throw some woman's favorite sweaters into a trash can and send her out in New York to buy new clothes, and then later -- always, redundantly, if you remember to click back and check in -- Nick Arrojo will come in to persuade the poor lady to cut off the blanket of long hair she's worn the same way since high school; Carmindy Bowyer will come in to give her smoky eye shadow, and they send the woman home to a tearfully impressed husband.

The cops of "Cops," with their big cop arms and their NASCAR accents, are again, always, in a 2002-ish rerun, hurling some unfortunate meth-opotamian face down into the grass strip outside the Taco Bell. Niecy Nash and her "Clean House" crew coax yet another family to sell beer-stein and Beanie Baby collections in garage sales and rid themselves of the "hot mess" of clutter. Nancy Grace is still looking for Natalee Holloway. There is always a Japanese obstacle-course show. Some tool is "Next"-ing another airhead, sending her back to the opaque-windowed bus where she and the other Nextees in halter tops will talk about how gross he is. Lauren and Heidi are still frenemies. It's always the "Best Week Ever." People are frantically sewing dresses on deadline, frantically installing granite countertops, frantically having frantic meltdowns. Keith Olbermann is outraged again, interviewing Dana Milbank again.

That is presented as reality TV, but for some reason, when I have the clicker, it fulfills my desire for pure and redundant fantasy: Here are the cakes I'll never bake, the houses I'll never flip, the dates I'll never go on, the war I'm not fighting, the candidates I'm not supporting, the supermodels I'll never reject, the cluttered garage I don't have to clean. The writers' strike has merely theoretical influence on my junktastically random viewing habits.

All we ask in my house is that, when it's on, the television be plotlessly absorbing and strictly noncommittal, and that we can feel like the calf who has adventurously (perhaps stupidly) wandered a bit from the herd. "American Idol," Fox's golden strike-deflector that starts up again next week, holds too much broad appeal, and is too watched by millions of others. (Everything you'll ever need to know about "American Idol" will be talked about by everyone you know.) Nutritional fare from PBS, or the laser-perfect "Planet Earth" series on the Discovery Channel, carries the burden of good intentions. That way lies tote bags.

Instead we spell a lot of five-letter words on Chuck Woolery's "Lingo," way out there on the Game Show Network, even as we know there's probably something better on, something that will actually be buzzed about. (But look: Chuck Woolery! Remarkably preserved. "Two-and-two" he still says, at a commercial break.) More and more, it is a time to appreciate the sort of television that feels as if it isn't registering any rating blip at all. Now is the time to watch Nielsen flat-liners that feature people who aren't all that watchable.

We've missed the "good" stuff because we are too easily distracted by a rerun of "America's Funniest Videos." (And I mean the Saget years.) We miss the top dramas, or the few worthwhile comedies. We haven't hooked up our TiVo.

We can never remember when "How I Met Your Mother" is on. We have never seen much or any of "Friday Night Lights," and not a minute of "House" or "Heroes" or "Grey's Anatomy" or "Gossip Girls." (What could we learn about those shows that the next issue of Entertainment Weekly can't tell us?)