From Watercooler to Parking Lot at the Funeral Home

Remember those TV shows we used to talk about at work the next day? The thrillers or science fiction or cults shows or action series that everybody was watching then; they were the talk of the lunch room and water cooler and the first ten minutes of any committee meeting you didn’t really want to attend. In the old days it was shows like The X-Files, Friends, and ER. More recently, it’s been Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, 24, Survivor, and Lost. And as this season began, you heard some chatter about V and FlashForward.

But here’s the weird thing. According to our patent-pending mega-scientific Rush Survey, there is exactly one show on that list that people are actually still talking about … yet all the rest are still on the air.

What happened?

Lost seems to have reinvigorated its water-cooler status by making a big deal about this being The Final Season. This, of course, implies that the nearly endless series of “wtf?” questions will actually be answered by the end of the arc (but come on, does anyone really believe that?). But the rest? If you asked most people who were avid fans just a season or two ago, they’d give you the copyrighted “ER response:” “What, is that still on?”

Heroes got mucked up in the time-travel repeat-myself add-more-characters-no-MORE-characters! disease in Season Two, then got hit by the writer’s strike and never recovered (this season, sadly, is not much better as well as unwatched)

Battlestar Galactica finished its initial run with a mildly satisfying tie-up, and then tried to bleed turnip stone with a series of spin-offs and prequels that, really, seriously, nobody cares about.

24 just stopped being able to top itself. Once you’ve revealed a black presidents years before Barack Obama was even a blip on the radar and nuked an American city … I mean, really, who cares?

Survivor … excuse us, why did we like Survivor in the first place? Memory fails us …

Meanwhile, this season the two new water cooler possibilities have stumbled right out of the gate. FastForward started with a great first episode, but almost immediately bcame mire in illogic and soap-opera clichés. V ended its very brief first arc on a wildly uninteresting “reveal” and banked on a group of characters that, with the exception of Anna (Morena Baccarin) are dishrag uninteresting and predictable.

There are still shows worth watching. We love us our Human Target and Chuck and Castle and True Blood and Bones and Lie to Me and Leverage and Big Bang Theory and even the occasional Mentalist. But none of those whip up the “gotta see it” compulsiveness of the past.

And once Lost is lost … we all will be.

Gird your loins, people. There void approaches.