THE NEW TV SHOW
ROBERT LOERZEL

My mother calls before dinner and tells me not to forget to watch the new TV show.

"I can’t believe you find anything entertaining in that rubbish, Mother."

"What do you mean? Rubbish?" she says, bursting into tears, as I’d known she would. "You haven’t even seen the show, and already you hate it. Just like you hate me."

I tell her I don’t hate her, and I agree that I won’t forget to watch the show tonight. I am certain I will not like it. I circle the listing with a red felt-tip pen. I glare at the TV Guide, wishing it would go away. My mother purchased a subscription for me.

I toss the TV Guide onto one of the piles of journals and magazines on my coffee table. I’ve lost track of which pile includes the periodicals I have already finished, and which consists of the ones that I haven’t yet read. And somewhere in this mess, I believe there is another pile that has begun to accumulate, a pile of the publications that I’ve finished reading but which have articles that I intend to save for one reason or another. The TV Guide really belongs in another pile, one which I haven’t yet created, for magazines that I do not want to read at all. But before creating such a pile, I suppose I should sort out the existing piles. This place is too much of a mess, I know, but what difference does it really make when you know the likelihood of visitors is infinitesimal?

As the hour approaches, I actually hope I will receive one of those telephones calls from an annoying someone conducting an opinion survey. It would present me with an excuse to leave the television off. But the telephone does not ring, despite my best efforts of staring at it, so I reach for the remote control, which lies half-obscured beneath the aforementioned piles.

The show is even more appalling than I had anticipated. As far as I can discern, it does not contain a single joke, and yet each time the actors recite some mundane line, prerecorded laughter erupts on the soundtrack. I imagine how idiotic a studio audience would have to be to laugh at such insipidness, and I find small comfort in the fact that this audience has been contrived through tape effects. I still want to tell them — the members of the nonexistent audience, that is — to cease their brainless guffaws.

Of course, the new TV show is a sitcom about a family. What else could it be? When the family dog, a fluffy Saint Bernard, bounds into the living room, the fictitious studio audience members spontaneously burst into applause, as if they idolize this pet. It sounds as if the audience members, at the sight of that dog leaping onto the couch, cannot restrain themselves from rising to their feet and clapping their hands as hard as they can. And then, two seconds later, the applause ends as abruptly as it began, as if the tape has been cut.

When the TV family’s doorbell rings, the kindly, bumbling husband asks his wife, "Can you get that, honey?" At this remark, the artificial audience giggles. I swear, it’s as if the laugh track belongs on another program.

"Why, sure," the wife responds, winking in a manner that is somehow lustful and obscene. "I’ll get the door. You just sit there on the couch."

Hearing this "joke," the audience members go out of control. I envision them rolling out of their seats into the aisles as they laugh and laugh. I am beginning to get a migraine.

I put a TV dinner in the microwave, unappreciative of the irony, and eat in sullen silence while the show finally arrives at its mind-numbingly unfunny conclusion. Now I am afraid my mother will call to ask what I thought about the new TV show. I must leave my house at all costs to avoid that telephone call. I decide to accept an invitation I received to a party on campus tonight, although it sounds as if it will be the sort of affair I do not much enjoy. I am infrequently invited to such events, and I ignore most of the invitations I do receive. I am somewhat surprised I receive any, considering my conspicuously antisocial behavior at the last faculty gathering. And yet, despite my best efforts, the others still occasionally attempt to draw me into their foolishness.

When I arrive at the party, I am appalled at the crowd it has attracted. Some of the attendees even appear to be students. A young woman wearing all black clothes asks me, "So, which department are you in?"

"History."

"Oh, how interesting. What’s your specialty?"

"Feudal society. It used to be one of the core subjects, but unfortunately, it isn’t multicultural enough to appeal to today’s students. In fact, no students at all signed up for my class this semester. It’s not a required course."

The woman appears confused. She has been holding an empty plastic cup in her right hand for the past ten minutes, as if more beverage will appear in it. I had originally thought she might be a graduate student, but now I beginning to think it is more likely she is not affiliated with the university at all. I notice from the corner of my eye that two faculty members from the History Department are talking to each other in low tones, one of them pointing occasionally in my direction. I am certain they are talking about me, probably saying something about the fact that I am conversing with this woman. I am certain my colleagues think I am on the make, or whatever that expression is, even though that would seem to be an unlikely prospect given my previous track record. I reluctantly acknowledge to myself that this may have been my initial motivation for striking up a conversation with this woman. She is not, it must be said, wearing black to hide a weight problem. In fact, her figure is rather stunning. And yet, when I contemplate that vacuous expression on her face, the very idea of carrying on this conversation much longer, let alone doing anything else with the woman, is obviously out of the question.

"So, not a single student signed up for your class?" she says, her painted-on eyebrows furrowing in puzzlement.

"Nope. Not a single person."

"Then what do you do? Are you working on research projects or filling in for other teachers or..."

"No. I just lecture to an empty hall. It’s quite cathartic, you know. I can say anything I want, and no one in the administration will give me any demerits."

She takes a step back, stares at me, then walks away in a kind of sideways motion, always keeping me within the range of her peripheral vision, as if she is afraid I might vanish like an apparition. I walk in the opposite direction and eventually end up in the kitchen, where everyone is talking about the new TV show.

"Did you see that episode last night?" says a woman in a leopard-skin-print dress, munching on some sort of orangish-yellow chip. "God. I just about died laughing."

The woman is not speaking directly to me, so I am not required to answer. I imagine a burst of canned laughter in response to her comment. Just think how convenient it would be if you could bring your own laugh track everywhere you went. Perhaps you could fit it on your belt. Discreetly press a button each time you say something, and the laughter would burst from hidden speakers inside your vest.

I mumble to myself with a sneer, "Why, sure. I’ll get the door. You just sit there..." but no one notices.

The man next to the woman dressed as a leopard says he has been recording the new TV show each week since its premiere two months ago. "I’ve got every episode on tape," he says, sipping from a plastic cup half empty with red fluid. "I’ve seen them all three or four times. You’d be amazed — there are so many things you don’t pick up on the first time you watch it. It really gets funnier the more you watch."

I move toward the bathroom. The man and woman do not notice I have walked away. I look at my face in the bathroom mirror and practice making an expression that will subtly hint at my disdain of the television show without rudely insulting the other party guests. Just when I feel I have nearly perfected the expression, someone knocks on the door. "Hey! Hurry up!"

On Monday morning, I stop by the History Department to see if I have received any mail. I overhear the department head and another professor talking about me in the next room.

"Isn’t there something we can do about Ferguson?"

"I’m afraid not. He’s quite hopeless, isn’t he? I told him no one would be interested in his course, but he wouldn’t listen."

"There must be something else he can do this semester. It’s such a waste for him to lecture three times a week in that empty hall. Couldn’t he teach something else, or work on some sort of research?"

"He’s quite stubborn, you know. He insists on holding his lectures anyway. I think he’s doing it to spite the students."

"To spite them?"

"For not taking his course."

"That’s ridiculous! How can he be spiting them if they don’t even see him or hear him?"

"Don’t ask me. This is Ferguson we’re dealing with, remember. He told me he doesn’t even like the new TV show."

"Too bad he has tenure. I know a bunch of people who would love to have his position. You know what his problem is? He needs to get laid."

"Why do you think I invited him to the party? It seems like a lost cause, though."

My left hand crumples the piece of mail I have retrieved from my box. I scowl and slink out of the office, hoping no one has noticed I was eavesdropping. The other professors cannot comprehend the overarching concept of my lectures. What can you expect from people who watch the new TV show?

After I spend an hour and a half in the lecture hall, outlining the relationship between the manor lords and the rising class of tradesmen, I sit in my office for six and a half hours, pretending to grade my students’ papers. I read a magazine, but keep a pile of exams from last semester nearby, so I can quickly slip the magazine underneath the tests if someone knocks on my door. I am annoyed to discover my magazine contains two advertisements for the new TV show, in addition to a profile of the idiot who conceived of the series. This magazine never used to run articles like this. I do not approve of the recent changes in editorial policy.

At five o’clock, I lock up the office and walk across campus toward home. Although the rest of the TV show was just as idiotic, that one scene with the couch and the doorbell and the St. Bernard is stuck in my head. I go over the lines from the scene in my mind, desperately wondering what could be humorous about them. Is it possible the show is funny for the mere reason that it isn’t funny? Or maybe there is something about the way the actors say those insipid lines. I repeat them, stressing a different word each time. "...You just sit there on the couch. You just sit there on the couch. You just sit there on the couch..." The changes in emphasis don’t seem to matter. It must be the words themselves, even though I cannot find an iota of humor in them.

I wonder if other people would laugh if I were to say one of the lines from the TV show. A female undergrad, dressed in a scanty outfit similar to that worn by the teen-age daughter character on the new TV show, is walking in front of me. I pick up my pace a little, and when I am a few feet behind her, I whisper, "You just sit there on the couch."

She doesn’t appear to have any immediate reaction. I am not sure if she heard me, so I say it again. She keeps walking, a little faster. Before I get a chance to catch up with her, she turns off the sidewalk and ascends the steps of the library, glancing in my direction before she goes through the door. Her reaction only reaffirms my beliefs about the new TV show. Perhaps she finds it as bafflingly unfunny as do I. I decide against conducting any further experiments today.

Just before I reach my house, I pause in front of the home of my neighbor, Harry Bosko, and contemplate whether I should enter. I am not certain why I have made a habit of visiting him. We have little in common, and he is exactly the sort of low-brow cretin who probably enjoys the new TV show. However, he does allow me to visit, and it seems to boost his ego to be in the company of such an esteemed member of the academic establishment, so I tolerate his presence.

When I ring his door bell, the phrase, "Can you get that, honey?" runs through my mind. When I realize where the line is from, I grimace.

Bosko is in an unusually jovial mood this evening, although he offers no explanations for it. I would ask him why, but it is all I can manage to restrain myself from insulting him for wearing that ugly plaid shirt again. I smile weakly at the first couple of "jokes" he makes, but my mind is not on the conversation. I forget the things we say only seconds after they leave our mouths. I keep thinking, "Oh, God, why did I come over here?"

Bosko’s dog, a black poodle, enters the room. I recall the Saint Bernard on the new TV show and the way the fake audience responded to it. Should people applaud when dogs enter the room? It seems like such an extreme reaction to the presence of a domesticated animal.

I absent-mindedly pet Bosko’s dog, barely noticing what Bosko is talking about on the other side of the room. I wonder where Bosko’s wife has been. Casting discreet glances at her was one of the few pleasures I got from my visits to Bosko’s house. Now that I think about it, perhaps that is the primary reason I’ve made it a habit of stopping by. But she has not been home the last six or seven times I visited. He has not mentioned her absence. It has occurred to me that she may have left him, although it’s also possible he killed her and planted her in the garden behind the garage. I have good cause for these suspicions, which is another reason I try not to stay very long when I visit Bosko.

"Say," Bosko says, "did you see the new TV show last week? Pretty funny, wasn’t it? I couldn’t stop laughing."

"Yes, I watched it," I say.

Bosko stares, astonished at the icy tone of my voice. First, he looks at my face, then his eyes move toward my hand, which is still petting the dog. I recoil, pulling back my hand, as if Bosko has caught me in a foul and unspeakable act. "What’s the matter?" Bosko says. "Don’t you like the show? I thought everyone likes the new TV show!"

"Everyone except me, apparently. Perhaps I should be going. I’m feeling rather tired, and I wouldn’t want to keep you up..."

"It’s only six o’clock!"

"Oh yes. You’re right. It is only six. Strange. It seemed much later. Anyway, I think I’ll go home. I’ve got numerous tasks and errands that require my immediate attention."

I can see plainly that Bosko is buying none of my excuses. I leave anyway. If I stay, he will interrogate me about my dislike of the show. This sort of thing always happens to me.

I decide to watch no TV at all tonight, not even public television. I reach behind the television and unplug it. Just as well. I never have enough electrical outlets in my house. I straighten up the piles of magazines, finding a couple of reminder notes I’d written to myself last week and promptly forgotten. "Cancel subscription to TV Guide..."

I’ve just settled down on the couch to read a journal when the telephone rings. I immediately surmise that it is my mother, and my supposition is confirmed when I hear her heavy breathing on the other end of the line. As she says hello, her voice has that quavering quality that means she might burst into tears again at any moment.

"Hello, Mom. How are you doing?"

"I’m fine, John," she says, her voice perking up a little. "How did you like the new TV show? Funny, wasn’t it?"

"I didn’t particularly enjoy it, Mom, although it certainly seems that everyone else does."

"Oh," she says. She pauses and I cringe, expecting she is about to have an outburst of some sort. But she only says quietly, "You could try a little harder, John. Do you always have to be different than everyone else? I bet you haven’t seen any girls this week, have you?"

"What do you mean? Certainly I’ve seen ‘girls.’ This is a coed campus, you know. I can hardly leave my front door without seeing girls walking around on—"

"You know what I mean. You haven’t had any dates, have you?"

"No, Mother, of course not."

"What do you mean, ‘Of course not’?" she says. I can tell she is crying. "It would be normal, wouldn’t it?"

"Mom, what does this have to do with that idiotic television show?"

"Everything, it has everything to do with it," she says. She sounds like she is wiping her nose.

"I’ve got to go, Mom." I hang up. Perhaps she was more upset than I realized the last time we spoke. She bursts into tears with such regularity it’s difficult to know how she is feeling.

At the lecture hall on Wednesday, I am surprised to see a young woman in one of the seats. She is near the back of the large room, as if she expects other students to show up. I shuffle through my notes on the lectern, and ponder whether I should say anything to the woman. Obviously, she is not here to learn history. If she were, she would have signed up for my course during the normal registration period. I begin my lecture, describing the social tensions in 14th-century Germanic lands. When I contrast the clothing worn by serfs and lords, my attention wanders from the notes in front of me. I look up at the young woman and notice the clothes she is wearing. This year’s campus fashions are particularly nauseating. The colors are so fluorescent they hurt the eyes, and yet my eyes are drawn to them. What’s worse, the students dress exactly like the characters on the new TV show.

"Unlike today’s fashions, the fashions worn by peasants and the nobility of medieval times did not change with every turning of the calendar page," I say, diverging from my notes. "But then again, the people of that time lacked the sources of inspiration we have today. They never had the opportunity to watch television sitcoms, for example. Imagine how different the course of history might be if medieval serfs had been given the chance to see the new TV show."

Although it was not part of the lecture I had carefully outlined for today’s class, I find myself critiquing the show. No, critiquing is too mild of a word. I am ranting about it, and I know that I am, but I cannot help myself.

"It is difficult to find words sufficiently grotesque and insulting to describe the scope of this show’s idiocy. It takes the most banal and annoying elements of life — no, it has nothing to do with life. It merely draws upon the most banal and annoying elements in the scripts of older sitcoms. There is not an original thought involved in the production of this show. It makes me retch. Worst of all, that laugh track, that horrible, horrible laugh track..." I realize my voice is too loud, so I stop speaking for a moment.

I notice the woman sitting at the back of the room is taking copious notes, although she has a small, narrow notepad rather than the more typical spiral notebook. I clear my throat, hoping it will influence her to stop writing, but she carries on. She must still be trying to write down something I said a minute ago.

I want to ask her why the new TV show is so funny, but instead I fold my notes in half and say, "I am afraid that is all the time we’ll have for my lecture today. For Friday, read chapters three and four of Maximova." The young woman has a smirk on her face as I walk out.

I retire to my office, but I cannot even pretend to work today. I cannot stop thinking about that girl. Why she was in my lecture hall this morning? Is it possible someone sent her to spy on me? Perhaps one of the other professors sent her, or the department head. But why? They must be trying to strip me of my tenure, or, or... I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps my mother sent her.

Later that night, when I try to sleep, I lie awake for hours, my eyes wide open. I have been thinking about that young woman and her narrow notepad all night. The television is still unplugged. I have the feeling it is watching me through my open bedroom door. As if it will help, I get out of bed for a moment to discard the latest issue of TV Guide.

The next day, an article by the young woman appears in the campus newspaper. I am surprised when I see a photograph of myself on the front page, a picture that must have been taken when I was a teaching assistant some twelve years ago. I thought I had disposed of all photographs from the semester when I had that frivolous mustache, but this snapshot apparently survived somehow. At least no one will recognize me.

The story is called "In a class by himself." I suppose the headline writer was attempting to be witty. The department head finds little humor in it, though. He slaps the newspaper down on my desk. "Publicity," he says. "We don’t need this kind of publicity."

Several students who read the article in the newspaper attend my next lecture. I assume they expect it will be amusing to observe the professor who lectures to a class without students, although their very presence in the room defeats their purpose. As I wait for the class to begin, I wonder what to say. Should I go on with my lecture as normal? I consider telling the students to leave, but I decide that would appear too overtly hostile. Perhaps I should lecture again about the new TV show.

I go over the lines from that couch scene again. The problem with my first experiment may have been that the girl I was walking behind did not properly hear what I said. Or maybe I didn’t include enough context. I wonder if I should try again.

I find myself looking from the corner of my eye at two young women in the lecture hall, who are wearing appallingly short skirts. Although I tell myself to stop it, I keep stealing glances at their legs. To get my mind off them, I think again about the TV show. Perhaps my experiment is worth another attempt. Just say the words, I tell myself. I am not sure that I can, though. I fear they will like me. Why should I want these overgrown children to like me? But I look again at those skirts, or rather what is underneath the skirts, and I know I must say it, I must, even if it goes against every bone in my body.

When the class bell rings, I take it as my cue. "Can you get that, honey?" I say. A student giggles, although I am not sure if she is laughing because I am quoting the new TV show or because she thinks I am preposterous.

I speak in a falsetto, imitating the TV wife. "Why, sure," I say, winking with as much lustiness as I can muster. "I’ll get the door. You just sit there on the couch."

There are only seven or eight students in the lecture hall, but it sounds to me as if hundreds are laughing. I say a few more lines from the show, but soon I am guffawing along with the students. I cannot help myself. I am laughing so hard that I can barely see those two girls in the short skirts I wanted so much to impress. No, I can’t believe I said— What? Ah— ha ha ha ha... The laughter fills the lecture hall as if loudspeakers are wired beneath the seats. We laugh and laugh until our sides begin to ache. Tears are streaming from my eyes.