<rant>A quick followup to yesterday’s post about the fan campaign to save the canceled TV show Jericho. The campaign got Slashdotted. There are TONS of comments. And what do they say? Things like:

It’s a TV show. Get over it. They cancelled Firefly, now Jericho is gone. As an alternative, these people should consider:

1) Going to the gym
2) Taking a loved one out to dinner
3) Taking up art
4) Relaxing with friends over the internet
5) Fixing some of those pesky things around the house
6) Getting a dog for companionship instead of a television
7) Volunteering for experiments on drugs to treat obsessive compulsive disorder
8) Going for a walk in the woods and experiencing nature
9) Getting a tan

There are so many other things to do in life that worry about a man soap opera.

or

Wow. Thousands of Americans are dying in a foreign war that by all accounts we are not doing well in, and the opposition party is much less concerned with fixing the problem than making political hay. Our health care system is a shambles. A major American city is also still in shambles more than a year after an enormous natural disaster.

After all that, what makes Americans stand up and say “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” but a canceled television show.

My fellow citizens, and all you others, I fear that this may be a grave sign of the failure of the American Experiment.

I’m ok with the comments that say “Jericho went downhill half way through the first episode” or make critiques of the show to argue that its cancellation was ok. Criticizing the show’s quality is fair game.

But this kind of criticizing the fan to get-a-life response is so patronizing and misguided. It assumes that people who campaign to save a show don’t care about or do anything else. As though fighting for a TV show cannot possibly be done by a person who also fights to stop wars, or to clean their house, or to have loving relationships with people around them. As though it takes 16 hours a day every day to ship some peanuts to CBS.

I know. Stereotyping fans as pathetic losers with no lives is an old one and it’s not going anywhere, but, you know, it’s so logically and empirically flawed. And what do the people who espouse it get out of it? They’re way superior because they… fight against fan campaigns by posting comments on Slashdot? Wow. Way to be an activist!

</rant>