Have you ever sat down in front of the television, grabbed the remote control, and surfed the channels only to find a teeming sea of crap? So have I. Has the barrel been scraped? How do these horrible shows break through the quality-control barriers and get dumped on us innocents? Do the bigwig media folks bother finding out what people think before pitching or fabricating this dull and insulting dross? It turns out they do, and there are several independent companies that poll the public on proposed new programs. One of them is Television Preview, and I was a happy participant in one of their fun survey nights last Friday, thanks to the invitation of my generous friend Jen. I had a blast, and I think I may have saved the world from another crap television drama.

Here’s what Television Preview says about themselves:

Television Preview was formed over 25 years ago for the purpose of providing independent, impartial testing of broadcast material. This is Television Preview’s only business [;] we sell neither products nor services to the general public. Television preview presents screenings of pre-recorded 1/2 hour television segments (including programs and commercials) to groups of people throughout the country. The groups evaluate what they see, and television preview tabulates and analyzes these evaluations. Then, we pass them along to the people who decide whether the material will be televised.

Kind readers, this is participatory democracy at its best! The bit that says “we sell neither products and services to the public” is misleading, because I’ve never seen more television commercials in one night than when I participated in this event. They may not be selling anything, but they’re helping people sell stuff, and the difference is negligible when you’re sitting there watching TV.

So there we were, at a tacky hotel in Burnsville, waiting in the hallway as our emcee, Frank, explained to us the nature of the event. Amy immediately dubbed him TV’s Frank (after the Mystery Science Theater 3000 character) ‘cause he had the same bumbling numbskull demeanor, and he was forcing us to watch crap TV. According to TV’s Frank, we would be watching a drama about reincarnation, and a sitcom starring “a famous actress, who we already know.” (Who? Was it Mary Lou Retton? Jean Stapleton? Christina Applegate?) When I asked TV's Frank whether or not this could be a riotous heckling session, he became very stern, and stressed the key fact that we must all keep our opinions to ourselves during the show.

At last, the doors were opened to the hotel ballroom, and we silently entered -- awed by the spectacle of four fairly large tv sets facing north, south, east, and west like a comical Foucault panopticon in reverse. This was going to be strange. I was immediately put into the mind of an SAT test, when we were handed large leather folders which we could not open until the emcee instructed us! I obeyed. We had a chance to win a door prize -- a grocery bag full of stuff -- but first we had to circle the pictures of the products we wanted in a handy booklet that looked like a schematic layout of Walgreens: one page of toothbrushes, one page of denture products, one page of bleaches, etc. It didn’t take me long to fill it out, since there was not a single product in the booklet that I wanted or needed (well, except maybe the page full of caffeine pills). But that made it twice as fun, as I gleefully circled random brands of mascara and dog food. (I didn’t win a door prize, but, to everyone’s surprise and excitement, Amy did!) TV's Frank kept trying to hurry us along by cracking horrible jokes, and generally sauntering in circles -- head bowed, loose tie, weary demeanor -- almost begging us to finish by dumping another bad joke on us ("I was in a bank once and the guy ahead of us was trying to transfer funds from the Bank of Jupiter to the Bank of Venus"). I kinda felt sorry for the guy, really. After countless slowpokes were finished frowning over their booklets and circling their brands, we finally got to watch some TV.

The first show, entitled Soulmates, was a horrifying pastiche featuring greasy unsympathetic actors, scenes cadged directly from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Pearl Harbor, and an unintentially comical plot that revolved around reincarnation. It was clearly written by the most cynical, embittered scriptwriters the studio could hire, and the only saving grace was that the protagonist rarely wore a bra during those scenes when she wasn’t playing an unconvincing WWII war bride. (Yeah yeah, I know. But what was I supposed to be doing, following the plot?) Let me tell you the memorable tale of Soulmates: a braless hypnotist therapist takes on a new patient who is trying to quit smoking. When she meets him, she immediately has a black’n’white flashback with this same guy in a 1940's GI uniform and smoke wafting all over the place. She falls in love with him (even though he’s butt-ugly, sinister-looking, and a manipulative idiot), then she has a buncha nightmares where she’s in the 1940’s dancing with him (or another nightmare where she's dancing with some other guy that’s not him but then she turns around and he's there). Turns out the guy is in some secret computer organization with a cheesy logo that looks like it got lost on the way to a Get Smart episode. (Note: this plot element seems to have no meaning whatsoever.) She goes to Hawaii for some reason. He follows her there. There’s another guy there who looks like the other guy she was dancing with in her 1940’s flashback dreams. There’s also a hypnotist with curly REO Speedwagon hair who takes her back to the 1940’s using a fancy past-life hypnosis method.

Are you following this so far? Good.

In her past life she was a war bride, and her fiancé is a general, and the slimy guy is a 1940’s slimy guy who somehow beds her down anyway. Then the slimy guy killed her 1940’s famous-general husband, because he was selling secrets to the Japanese and here they all are standing around at Pearl Harbor. Grief-stricken, she calls the police, and the show implies that this phone call starts World War II. Somewhere along the line, slimy guy takes her to a waterfall, where he tells her that “they say if you jump off here your soul will live forever,” and he jumps off. (Yes, the scene is swiped directly from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and no, it doesn’t make any sense in the context of Soulmates). I think the plot continued after that, but I kinda got a bit confused. It was a horrible show, but quite entertaining in its squalid cynicism and blatant thievery. Still, I hope I've kept it from being inflicted on the general public. TV's Frank asked a bunch of questions about it, and we had to write down the answers in the secret booklet that we weren't allowed to open until he said so. One of the questions asked our opinion about alternate titles for the show (since Soulmates was already the title of countless books, TV movies, and films). Of course we couldn't be creative and input our own suggested titles, but one of their choices (the one I picked) was dumb and hilarious: Portals in Time.

The next show was the sitcom that featured “an actress we already knew.” Turned out she was ... wait for it... Valerie Harper! The room was electrified by this exciting revelation. The sitcom, entitled "City", had a strange retro feel to it, and if I could carbon-date Valerie Harper, I’d say she was not much older than Rhoda in this incarnation. (Turns out the show was a pilot made in 1990 -- so I wasn’t far off.) She plays a city government functionary -- a single mom with an annoying loser 19-year-old daughter, wacky stereotype co-workers, rakka rakka rakka. It was definitely a generic sitcom (I use the word "generic" in its strictest sense), with lots of door-slamming, implausible repetition, and minute-long gimmicks (including one mildly amusing but incongruous gimmick in which an anal-retentive office worker has to knock once on the table for "yes" and twice for "no"). I have to admit I did laugh more than once. Still, I don’t think I would ever watch it again. Why were we watching a 1990 pilot anyway? Has Television Preview been polling audiences about this show for eleven years? My guess is that they’re going to cobble together a new sitcom with the same premise.

The rest of the night is a blur. We had to take a lengthy poll about products we used and TV commercials we’d seen. I seem to remember a very long questionnaire about the brands of bleach we bought. When we were on question nineteen or twenty, I thought: “I really do not want to enter the bleach wars.” Then we had to watch some more tv commercials, and write down our thoughts. There was one excellent dog food commercial (I don’t remember the brand, thus the commercial was a failure really) featuring an amazing batch of cute puppies clamoring onto high surfaces and romping authentically as the camera positioned them at heroic angles. I really want to see that ad again, believe it or not.

In our little poll booklet, we were asked to provide any final thoughts about the evening. I wrote: “More puppies; less reincarnation.” Not once did I let on that I don't actually own a TV.

All in all, I had a lot of fun, and I highly recommend that if Television Preview collars you and asks you to come in to watch some TV, definitely jump on the chance. You won’t regret it, and you might win a bag of denture cream and toothbrushes.