we're more than a week into october & finally the seasons are changing. it is now becoming what as a child was perhaps my favorite season: the new fall season. & i've found that i just don't care. that childlike sense of awe wonder i used to feel as new tv shows began to air has vanished, replaced only by boredom & the distinct feeling that i've become jaded.

the fall season used to be a big deal to me growing up. it meant that new episodes of knight rider or the greatest american hero (or insert your own embarrassing childhood favorite) were coming, bringing new adventures, new promises, new characters, new new new! almost as good, entirely new programs were on their way, aspiring to become new favorites. i remember when the simpsons first spun off from the tracey ullman show, & i still watch the simpsons to this day. hell, i remember all the old-school fox programs, back when fox was only a couple nights a week & before it had discovered married with children or any of its other early hits. i used to watch beans baxter, second chance (about a dead man sent into his own past to prevent his younger self from being damned to hell as he had been... it was, if you're curious, a comedy starring matthew perry as the teenage version, & was totally reshaped the following season into a program called boys will be boys [minus the old, dead guy], which i also watched), & all those shows that everyone else on the planet has totally blocked out.

but things are different now, & it's not just that i've changed. the fall season itself is only a hollow shell of what it was. when i was a kid, new shows would start right around the time school started. so that was a big cultural shift each year; summer ruled because there was no school, but all the shows were reruns. fall blew because school began again, but at least it meant new tv. i feel sorry for the kids now, because they were in classes for weeks before new shows started appearing.

this year we didn't get any new tv shows until the beginning of october, & will have to wait yet another month before all the "new fall shows" have begun. that is just ridiculously tardy. by november we should've already had several new series get cancelled (there're always a few that are so atrocious they get canned within 3 weeks); we shouldn't still be waiting for fall premieres.

i read in the paper (yes, i read shull's mailbag. shun me if you must) recently that this season was starting late because the networks didn't want to compete with the olympics. i just don't buy that; this wasn't a sudden, one-time change. this has been building for years.

i think the x-files started the trend. that was the first show i can remember whose new seasons would start inconceivably late. i could've made my own tv series all by myself in the time it took for a new season of x-files to begin. the babies that had been born on failing sitcoms (cliche attempt at bringing in new viewers #2, 2nd only to the addition of new teenage characters) would be full-grown & getting married in the time it took for mulder & scully to get out of that awkward situation from the may before (& it got even worse when x-files pioneered the 3-part cliffhanger). & the show was popular enough that it could do that to us. we would wait as long as necessary to get our x-file fix.

then other shows started doing it too. it became like a race: who can make the audience wait the longest? of course, the seasons still all end in may; if i get in to work late, i must stay late to make up for it, but there's no such responsibility in tv-land. in a few years the new fall season will start in april, & we'll only have 2 months of new network programs a year (but that's okay; cable's better anyway).

as for the new shows themselves, i can't think of a reason to watch any anymore. they're all the same. i saw a blurb on tvguide.com that the big "idea" for new shows this year was urban characters returning to their small-town roots. how fucking dull is that? i know that lookalike shows are commonplace on tv, but could they have picked a more boring plot to duplicate this year? that might be enough to carry a couple really well-written shows, but put half a dozen on at once & people's brains are going to rot away. i don't even want to think about all the "reality-based" shows out there.

i think any faith i might've had in television was destroyed when the upright citizens brigade (one of the most brilliant sketch comedy shows ever) was cancelled last spring in the height of its popularity, despite a massive petition which was circulated & sent on the offending network, comedy central. no, instead of hilarious, original comedy shows, comedy central decided to air shows like battlebots, which is admittedly somewhat fresh but is horrible when compared to the older english version of the show, robot wars (not to mention that it's about as far as you can get from comedy without committing genocide).

since i've gotten my new computer i've hardly watched any tv. & even before that my viewing habits had been decreasing; i would forget to watch the few shows i would make a habit of trying to catch. the interest just isn't there anymore. i did just last night watch most of the premiere (actually a re-airing of the pilot) of one of the few new shows that looked like it could be promising, dark angel. it was unimpressive. it was watchable, but nothing to email home about. in fact the next episode is on as i write this, & i'm not hurrying to finish so i can watch it either. i might tune in 15 minutes from now once this sermon is mailed out, but i'm not really afraid of missing much. i don't think i'll be lost if i miss the first 20-30min of the episode; i wasn't lost watching the pilot, having missed much of the first hour. i'm not even that interested in most of the shows i used to watch (the simpsons being an obvious exception). the season premiere of x-files looks kind of interesting, but then mulder has lost, kicked out of the fbi, or presumed dead so many times that you have to wonder why the fbi keeps taking him back.

i think these days i've actually seen more tv at other people's houses than i have at home. & consider i only go out a couple nights a week, that says a lot about the shape of modern television.