Wishing that the crystal ball was a little hazier

Michael Hirschorn has an interesting piece that may serve as a eulogy for TV As We Know It at TheAtlantic.com, entitled, appropriately enough, "The Future is Cheese."

Hirschorn links two events - NBC announcing Jay Leno's move to primetime and "Heroes" creator Tim Kring lamenting that only "saps and dipsh!ts" watch his show Mondays at 9 on an NBC affiliate - to underscore the dire straits the broadcast networks find themselves in.

Kring isn't entirely wrong, Hirschorn says - it's much more satisfying to watch multiple episodes of a highly serialized show back-to-back than to visit it once a week cluttered with commercials, so such a show's very ambition and the fact that it's so costly to make turns it into an albatross for the broadcast networks, who can cut costs massively by stripping Leno across its weeknight schedule.

He continues:

"(T)he problem is what I'd call cultural attention-deficit disorder, which afflicts the consumer bombarded with choices: more TV networks ... more video games, more Web sites, and more ways to consume shows than ever before (VOD, DVD, PPV, etc., etc.). ... Amid the chaos, it's difficult for a media consumer to care enough about any one thing to stick with it--and for a network trying to build allegiance to a brand, convincing anyone that what you're showing matters becomes almost impossible."

And concludes that in the era of niche programming, the quality shows will continue to migrate to cable, where they're content with smaller audiences, while the networks will continue to trot out flotsam like "Superstars of Dance."

What's fascinating is not just that it's true, but that the guy writing this - and kinda sorta passing judgment on bad TV - was named "Mr. Bad Taste" by the New York Observer back when he was running VH1 and junking it up with stuff like "Flavor of Love." In the piece, Hirschorn calls a book by John Seabrook, called "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture" a major influence on his life and says, "I haven't resolved that conflict -- if I'd like to be a populist or highbrow."

So TV's troubled future is a win-win for him, if for nobody else.