exclude anything not in its agenda has reached such viewer’s allegiance by reflecting back his/her own automaticndizzying victorious heights as to allow out-and-out gloating, skepticism toward TV. Thus, TV protects itself fromncrass and sarcastic and half-serious, like most everything else criticism or rejection by incorporating our very animusnon TV. Our resistance to such an ugly assertion is negated against the spectacle into the spectacle itself” Nick at Nitenby the inclusive irony with which it is made. Or is it? pushes the inclusive sphere beyond animus, and intonNick at Nite, Will McRobb said, is a real version of identity. Miller writes about TV that flatters “boredom andnSCTV. McRobb meant this to mean a bunch of people who distrust,” but Nick at Nite does not inspire these feelings. Itnstarted their own network and put on what they liked. But it inspires jocularity and warm fellowship with TV, and anis a true statement in a deeper sense. Like SCTV, it subverts sense of being at one with it as it laughs at itself You are not,nthe outside world, talking about “TV” while blending, in of course, at one with hokey Donna Reed, but with thendark glasses and false whiskers, surreptitiously into the commercial that pokes fun at her, affectionately. Debbynaudience. TV Land, Nick at Nite says, is a different place Beece was wrong. The P.R. people knew their jobs,nthan where you and I live. But the “I” is television, and Irreverence is what TV is all about,nincluding the “you” with that “I” commits us to an The success of this mechanism is already spreading. Nownexistence that is half televisual. the Family Channel is advertising Batman in a kind ofnWhen Will McRobb uses the corporate “we” in “we like campy, it’s-so-bad-it’s-good spot, selling it as camp, when inntelevision,” he is not speaking in terms of individual taste, fact it is only recycling the strenuous camp of the originaln”We” are television. Particular programs do not concern show. If the past means anything on television, and it does,ntelevision in the long haul. The good ones, like Car 54, other networks will follow MTV’s lead, in the form of itsnWhere Are You?, get covered with the same blanket of archly likable Nick at Nite. Nick at Nite has introduced anprotective mockery as the rest. It doesn’t matter in the new mode of seduction, that of ingratiation not by selfslightestnthat Car 54 is as hip and witty and self-aware as abasement (TV is too powerful for that) or even of Miller’snNick at Nite itself. “We” don’t like or dislike particular subtle irony, but of out-and-out self-love, cooed to itselfnshows. “We” cancel them the second their ratings drop. while wearing a mask of the viewer’s face. What will the realnSo Nick at Nite expands Miller’s thesis: “TV solicits each face look like, as a result? <^nSeeing Doublenby Rudolph SchirmernHe who prefers street corners to ofEces,nForest nooks to oratories, copses to cathedrals,nAnd was the apple of his mother’s eye,nNot the pilewort in his father’s closet.nWill not be devastated if he readsnThat one so very like him it astoundsnPrefers a marble terrace with a lawnnSo like a meadow it could pass for onenBeneath him to a lodgment anywherenThat offers nothing to step out onnOr run off to, only surly hindrancesnTo all unpolarized activity.nNor should a vagrant fail to postulatenIn every cornered homebody his peer.nLike him in all except mobility,nIdentical in everything but whim.nThe world is made of opposites, we hear.nBut it is also true, and maybe even truer.nThat think-alikes and feel-alikes are innThe manifest majority. Who knowsnBut someday we’ll attest the fact it’s timenTo curtsy to the obvious, eliminatenThe rancors that proliferate deep downnAnd spend the day conversing cheek to cheek.nnnAPRIL 1991/25n