ABC Upfront: TV Defeats Television

ABC's upfront at Lincoln Center begins with a video, interspersed with scenes from ABC shows, of people riding unicycles with cellphone symbols inscribed on the wheels, riding a surfboard into a computer logo, juggling little black balls with iPods on them. The (apparent) message: television may be fading away, but TV shows are not.

This is quickly becoming a theme of this upfront. Before the show started, a colleague asked me if I thought that TV was dying out. To which I gave my usual answer: the networks will probably get smaller, the screens may be different, the shows may be different lengths, but I'm not too worried about the future of People Watching Stories on Screens. I mean, what? are we going to start reading?

Maybe we need to start distinguishing "TV"—the content—from "television," the medium and the device that it is (or was) chiefly delivered on.

In any case, ABC is delivering little new TV to your televisions this fall—two new shows, as we discussed yesterday. So ABC spent much of the presentation making elaborate statistical arguments—a lot of mumbo-jumbo about Disney's "comprehensive research facility," where apparently men in lab coats will devise brilliant new ad models using test tubes—that ad money was still best spent with the Alphabet Network. Ad-sales chief Mike Shaw promised to give Madison Avenue its money's worth with innovations like video-on-demand services with the fast-forwarding disabled. (He neglected to throw back his head and laugh evilly.) And Jimmy Kimmel, doing what has become a traditional monologue, put his best spin on the economy for the TV business: "TV sets are bigger than ever, kids are fatter than ever, and gas is more expensive than ever. We've got the entire country on their couches!"

So outside the brief trailers for game show Opportunity Knocks and drama Life on Mars (can't vouch for its quality, but its 70s scenes had a nice washed-out look, like old videotape), my big news from the upfront is that we got to see several minutes of the Lost finale. I won't tell you about it, even though it was not particularly spoilery (except possibly for some casting news), but because I'm just that big a tease.

Other than that, the ABC presentation was a highly theoretical affair, with president Stephen McPherson arguing that the schedule they're bringing back was #1 in the key demo before the strike (suggested slogan: "ABC: We''re Still #1, As Far As We Know!") and that they have 20 exciting pilots in development, for someday.

The were a few previews of possible midseason shows—including a TV adaption of online show In the Motherhood—but they mostly consisted of the series creators talking about their work, which does not exactly make for compelling viewing. And they previewed several summer shows; the best-received trailer, by far, was for an extreme obstacle-course show called Wipeout, which is basically a network version of "Ow! My Balls!" from the movie Idiocracy—seriously, it was like five minutes of fat and skinny people falling in mud and getting clocked in the head—a nice irony since one of ABC's midseason shows is an animated sitcom from Mike Judge.

Which just goes to prove, yet again: Idiocracy was not fiction. It was just fact that hasn't happened yet.