Never has so much been written about so little.

Many of the critics I’ve spoken to during this summer’s TV Press Tour have groused that they’ve never worked harder during press tour than they have this year. Technology, of course, is responsible: Many of them were blogging nonstop or, as in my case, filing story after story for the online editions of their papers when, in the past, we’d only put the event in context for print subscribers. Several colleagues lamented that, in churning out all of this material, they’ve essentially been reduced to transcribers, not writers.

Which is ironic, since very little of substance emerges from the press sessions, just endless variations of “I really loved this script� and “It’s all about the work� and “Good material wins out� and “If a show is good, people will watch� (that last one has been disproved time and time again). So the idea that a couple hundred reporters are all making sure their readers know that Donnie Wahlberg thinks he’s perfect for his role in The CW’s lame new show “Runaway� because “I think what really I’m able to bring in the character is, I’m a parent� is both amusing and depressing in ways that if you have to have them explained to you, you must have stumbled upon this blog by accident or in a drunken stupor.

I’ve sort of kept up with what’s being written out there, and if Press Tour coverage is not of the “Hooray-for-Hollywood-this-is-going-to-be-the-best-TV-season-EVER� variety, it carries a wizened, cynical tone that’s likewise not conducive to much instructive content. At least one blog I glanced upon offered a detail-by-detail account of how transcripts are created during Press Tour, which is so inside-baseball that I can’t imagine anyone finding that interesting. Rather than mainstream readers, a lot of this stuff seems aimed more at fellow critics, who, of course, are too busy engorging their own endless blogs to have time to read others’.

Meanwhile, while this orgy of publicity was erupting in Pasadena, one presumes all these newspapers were paying equal amounts of attention to the pre-party to the apocalypse that they’re currently throwing in the Middle East.

The other complaint – and one that seems sort of more pressing, if you can erase the perspective issue I raised in the paragraph above – is that all these reporters are so busy feeding their respective monsters that they’re simply incapable of divining from one another any sense of perspective on the upcoming season. Simply put, critics aren’t gauging the temperatures of the upcoming season to achieve a sense of what’s truly transpiring. One might reasonably assume that groupspeak has been laudably eradicated, and to a certain extent, that’s true. But also, a cultural perspective has been eradicated, as well. It’s as if everyone has decided to celebrate Kobe Bryant because he scored 81 points in one game and have utterly ignored the day-in/day-out contributions of a more valuable player such as Elton Brand.

I personally have vaguely noted a Zeitgeist-y trend in the upcoming season’s new offerings – one I didn’t want to share with colleagues, lest they steal my (upcoming) story – but I didn’t sense, from the sundry press conferences, that anyone else had really picked up on it. (People I individually interviewed definitely had opinions on the matter, however.) I think this is more attributable to how exhausted everyone has become while covering this event than to my own insight.

As one colleague observed today, the phrase “labor-saving device� has disappeared from our lexicon. What has happened is that industries have learned how to use the conveniences of the new technologies to make their employees work even longer hours. And everyone with a job understands this; it’s a universal concern, scarcely unique to TV critics. What this means, in this – and only this – perspective is: TV critics are being deprived of being able to explain for viewers the context behind the creation of entertainment; no one has the time or space or inclination to explain what TV should mean to its viewers.

Admittedly, this trend is, in TV coverage, the least of our worries. But it’s something someone should opine in the broader nature of our culture. Context is king, no matter what journalists are covering, and saturated coverage of any event – be it a Presidential news conference or TV press tour – doesn’t necessarily result in better, more informed information for those who want to be in the know.