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

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 21, 2008

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 unleash their wallop of slickly packaged hopefulness, with relentless and outdated demands: Hey, it's us, your old friend, the network!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"?

* * *

Screw what everybody watches, and screw what nobody watches, too: We're just trying to watch some TV here, do you mind? (How wonderful to live in a world where nobody has time to watch all the television that has been assigned to them, like homework from some imaginary Mrs. Crabapple.)

In such a delusional, fragmented world, it's probably safe to go on believing that the people who made millions making television shows will still somehow find a way to make millions making television shows.

One does worry, however, for the academics -- the professors of mass media, the doctoral candidates in media studies -- who've invested decades of research on the effects of television on a demographic. The results of all that research were predicated on the unifying principle of an "everybody." Who will theorize anymore? Who are the subjects, the test cases? What are the data on a nation of nobodies watching everything always?

When thinking sad thoughts about the end of fall TV, also save a fair amount of tears for the TV historians, for the nostalgia nuts, for the social scientists immersed in the fascinating business of remembering Who We Were: These experts lived to tell not only who shot J.R. Ewing in 1980 (his sister-in-law/mistress Kristin did) but shone their lights on what it meant, at that time, in that world, while everyone watched, while everyone waited all summer for the fall premiere of "Dallas" to learn the answer. Fall TV is never like that anymore.

Some strange things have happened to the watchers when it comes to television. We may actually be speaking of physical changes: The eye has taught the brain to watch commercials really, really fast, as the thumb zips through them on the DVR (and naturally, advertisers have learned to make commercials that convey themselves clearly at this speed). The brain has learned to process stories that tell themselves in jolts and cuts and stops and jerks. The hand has worked with the brain and the eye to surf the Internet and watch three or four shows at once.

Slow is the real enemy. Watch a cop show from the early 1980s and marvel at how sloooow it goes, how many shots there are of cars coming around corners and pulling into parking lots, of characters getting out of these cars and deciding whether to walk into a warehouse or around it, while minutes of guitar and keyboard instrumentals go wacka-bow, chaka-now. There is no heartbreak quite like laying hands on the boxed set of a favorite TV show and realizing that it's not the show you miss, it's the anticipation of it being on; it's the devotion that you had for it, knowing its night and time better than you knew anything else, and not missing a moment of it, lest you wait all year for the rerun. That was once the allure of the fall TV season, the feeling that there was this enormous vessel coming your way, a "Love Boat" on the sea, come aboard.

* * *

This started out being a loose essay about mass audiences for television and the idea of loss (all the TV writing is about loss now, or "Lost").

What would a world look like after a couple of decades of people watching a million things in a million directions on a million different devices? Would we ache for the same nostalgic moments? (Probably not.) Would we speak the same references to the same reruns? (We already don't.) Are there too many new shows on this season, operating on the same false hope that enough people will amass into an audience for them? (Assuredly yes.)

Still, there is that irresistible pull of tradition: Now is the time of the year all the new shows come on, sure as the leaves turning, sure as the Halloween candy.

In a personal nadir of wasting time, I blew an entire afternoon watching fuzzy clips of fall TV campaigns from the 1970s and '80s. Some of them reminded me of how seriously I took the fall season as if I were some uncounted Nielsen child, circling in TV Guide shows I intended to watch. At my most susceptible age, the networks had convinced me (and millions of others) that we were all in this together, a family that did nothing but revel in the existence of television: Still the One. We're the One.

You Can Feel It on CBS.

Proud as a Peacock. NB See Us! Catch the Brightest Stars on CBS.

You and Me and ABC. Come Home to NBC.

And further back it went, into the 1960s: The Stars' Address is CBS.

If It's Really Special, It's on NBC.

And this most curious and weirdly prescient slogan, from ABC, exactly 40 fall seasons ago: Find Your Own Thing.

Well, we did.

The new fall season is here! The new fall season is here! Clip it, TiVo it, YouTube it, cultify it, analyze it, blog about it, save it up or spit it out, but whatever you do, don't just watch it. And don't nobody watch it together, and don't nobody talk about it nostalgically 20 years from now.