Transmission: Impossible

What Will 'Everybody' Be Watching? Trust Us: 'Nobody' Has a Clue.

We grow more and more wistful about the idea of an "everybody," a very large group of people that apparently no longer exists. The end of everybody is a cultural umbrella theory that explains all things now: the extinction of local radio, the last days of newspapers, the demise of the rock album.

And certainly it works as a way to talk about the death of fall TV.

Who wouldn't want it to die, come September, when the networks (what are networks?) unleash their wallop of slickly packaged hopefulness, with relentless and outdated demands: Hey, it's us, your old friend, the network! Howareya? Watch these 100 shows! All of them! In September and October! Watch until it's canceled! Watch what we used to show you on Wednesday nights, only now watch it on Mondays -- got that? Watch it all! On a television set! On Tuesdays, on Wednesdays, on Thursdays, on Sundays! In your living room, at the appointed Eastern/Pacific (Central/Mountain) hour! With the commercials!

It's sort of sweet, like Christmas. The way we used to do it.

Fall TV campaigns transport us back into television's not-so-distant past. You almost want to dance around to that saccharine cover of Orleans's "Still the One," sticking your thumb up, Fonzie-like, in an ode to the inviolate 1970s-ratings juggernaut that used to be Tuesday nights. "We're still having fun -- on ABC -- and you're still the one!"

The season arrives now with an increasing chorus of naysaying futurists, who pause to look up out of the bitstream and claim that this fall will be the last fall of the antiquated notion of a "Fall TV" preview guide. A new, independently acting "everybody" knows the many ways that "nobody" watches fall TV anymore.

The word "nobody" has replaced the word "everybody": Nobody watches television on an actual television. Nobody watches actual broadcasts in real time, because nobody sits through ads. Nobody watches entire TV shows, just the best clips. Nobody watches prime time. Nobody watches anything until January when the good stuff starts, or better yet, summer. Nobody watches a season until cult status is achieved (you got your "Heroes" people, you got your "Lost" people, you got people going on and on about "How I Met Your Mother"). Nobody goes all in until they can watch the entire Seasons 1 and 2 in a weekend DVD binge, with the extras and commentaries and hidden gems that explain the stuff that everybody but you has figured out.

Nobody watches any one thing, and nobody watches what I watch, the way I watch it, because I am far too special to belong to an everybody, because I am a niche, and so are you. (No wonder advertisers want to shoot themselves.) Once in a while, when actual people talk to one another (instead of type to one another) about what's on television, you get a sense of a sham-everybody -- a group of people who prod you into feeling bad about not watching the shows nobody watches:

Example: You haven't been watching "Mad Men"?

Example: You haven't checked out "Gossip Girl"?

Example: You don't do "30 Rock"?

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