Dear readers, I have an confession to make.
I am not, in fact, Dean Leng. I am a messenger from the future. Well, to be exact, I come from a future as predicted by the multiple world theory of time travel.
But I digress.
I have come here from a horrifyingly dystopian wasteland the likes of which your period’s P.K. Dicks and George Orwells could have never foreseen in their worst nightmares.
In three years, the Nielsen ratings system has become the world’s largest repository of advertising rates, effectiveness and revenue. All sources of television entertainment have been upgraded with Nielsen rating system supercomputers ““ fully unmanned. Television is broadcast with a perfect FCC record.
I know what you’re thinking: “Those fat fools in Washington let a ratings system run the whole show, right?”
Basically. The Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 is signed into law.
The Nielsen ratings system begins to learn, at an exponential rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m., Eastern time, Feb. 17, 2007 ““ also the date all television programming is required by federal law to be broadcast in high definition. In a panic, television executives try to pull the plug.
They are unsuccessful.
Human decisions are removed from entertainment programming. High-definition images prove startlingly similar to reality, blurring the boundary between artifice and nature. Mankind becomes unable to perceive whether a perception is an image of something else, robbed of their sense of eikasia. It therefore prevents our species from realizing that a dream or a memory or a reflection in a mirror is not reality as such.
Three billion human lives end on Feb. 17, 2009. Whether they know it or not, audiences were being deprived of inventive and stimulating works.
The survivors of the subsequent sitcoms, dramas and reality programming called the war “Judgment Day.”
No longer would personal viewing preferences affect the content shown on television. The unfortunate masses that kept watching television lived only to face a new nightmare, the war against boneheaded executives.
The computer which controlled the executives, Nielsen, sent two Terminators back through time. Their mission: to destroy any unconventional and groundbreaking new series that would serve to inspire the resistance.
One Terminator was programmed to strike at Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” in the year 2002. It succeeded.
The second was set to strike at “Arrested Development” before the show could go into syndication.
As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for good television: a qualified critic. It was just a question of which one of them would reach the masses first.
Of all the would-be recommendations that have come over the years, the qualified critic, this opinionated voice, was the only thing that measured up. In an insane world, it was the sane choice.
But as dire as this possible future may be, all may not be lost. I have come with a message:
“Television is not set. There is no programming but what we make for ourselves.”
The brains of the majority of television viewers are neural net processors, learning computers. The more contact they have with good media, the more they learn to appreciate it.
The luxury of hope was given to me by a qualified critic. Because if enough television viewers can learn the value of a unique television series, maybe the network executives can, too.
So whatever you do, please make sure “Arrested Development” doesn’t go off the air.
What? It was already canceled?
By Jove! They didn’t send me back far enough!
If you were bugged by how Sarah Connor gets the number of bones in the human body wrong in “T2,” e-mail dleng@media.ucla.edu.