Here’s a quote from Aaron Barnhart, influential TV critic, in a recent article in his home paper, the Kansas City Star:

I can’t say for sure that comedy will ever make a comeback in prime time. But I do see glimmers of hope.

This from a man who makes his living watching television and writing about it. He can’t say for sure that comedy will ever make a comeback! Is he serious? We conclude that he is.

It gets better. The reason for his optimism, his “glimmers of hope,” are four sitcoms, two of which are already airing (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Lucky Louie), one of which will air this fall (Let’s Rob…), and another sitcom that hasn’t even been broadcast or picked up by a network (Nobody’s Watching).

We’re not debating the relative funniness of any of these shows, nor do we take issue with Barnharts’s contention that they might signal a revival of the sitcom (which would be the twentieth or twenty-fifth such revival in the history of television; see The Male Half’s “Laughable Situation” column from a few years back), but we are disturbed by the fairy tale that Barnhart is perpetuating (the “backstory”) concerning the up and down fortunes of Nobody’s Watching.

Barnhart says that through the miracle of Youtube, the series now has caught the attention of network executives! That’s right. The show was rejected by NBC, then by the WB. But– Whoa! What’s this?– the pilot was uploaded to Youtube and was watched by 100,000 people (Young people!!) and now, the suits are panting and slobbering and climbing over each other to wedge it into their schedules this fall, or so the story goes.

Barnhart even has help telling the ridiculous tale from one of the show’s creators, Neil Goldman. Says Barnhart:

But the more profound lesson is this: Viewers, especially younger viewers who have grown up on a harsh diet of crime dramas, are ready to laugh again. Indeed, Goldman suspects that one of his fresh-out-of-college assistants on Nobody’s Watching was the one who uploaded the pilot to YouTube.

Indeed!

How dumb do these people think we are?

Some pertinent facts:

1. Nobody’s Watching was co-created by Goldman (one of the writers from Scrubs) and Garrett Donovan (the creator of Scrubs).

2. Scrubs aired for the past five seasons or so on NBC.

3. NBC just signed a deal with Youtube which will essentially make Youtube a promotional arm of NBC.

4. NBC owns Nobody’s Watching.

Gee, golly! says Goldman, That young whippersnapper who fetches my coffee done went and uploaded my pilot onto that newfangled website on the World Wide Net or whatever it is ya call it! Garsh! And now the big-time Tee Vee folk in their fancy clothes might change their mind and have my little show on their network after all!

What an insulting load of horse manure! Why can’t they just find funny people to create funny sitcoms and other funny people to star in them? And then present them to the public (who always appreciates genuinely funny sitcoms and has for about 50 years or so).

Postscript: NBC is thinking of pairing the new sitcom with… Scrubs.

If this is the television industry’s idea of harnessing the power of the internet in new and exciting ways, television might just go down faster than everyone is predicting. And down with it will go the TV critics.