Loyal propositions

WE are in the season of the “bubble,” that time in the network year when the fates of TV series are decided, when the programming gods decree whose bubble will burst and whose will waft gently toward the new fall season -- and the next round of bubbles. Even as spring bursts its pink buds upon us, the pink slips go out in Hollywood.

Recent weeks have been tense for “Gilmore Girls” (which looked good for a return, then folded its tent, apparently in the wake of unsuccessful contract negotiations); for the small-town football drama “Friday Night Lights” (coming back despite low numbers); for the cult-beloved girl detective show “Veronica Mars,” whose fate hung in the balance as of press time. And so it is a tense time for their fans as well, who wait as a family waits, with tenderness and trepidation, for the governor’s last-minute call to reprieve a loved one they know was wrongly condemned.

It is all the more tense, paradoxically, because, having been framed so long as a demographic, viewers have come to see themselves as part of the process. They recognize that they have some kind of collective role to play -- “power” is possibly overstating the case, but we understand that our attention is a commodity the networks want to buy. The public knows its way around upfronts and back nines; the business has become part of the show, with producers and programmers as players in a side drama inseparable from what’s put on-screen.

And so threats, or even just rumors, of cancellation are met regularly with protests, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, bumper stickers, banners towed by airplanes over the targeted studio. At www.saveveronicamars.tv, fans are encouraged to contact not only the CW to keep the show going but Lifetime Television as well, to persuade that network to offer a syndication deal contingent on more episodes being made. (“Please do not tell them you will never watch their network again, if they don’t syndicate the show,” fans are advised. “We have a better chance of succeeding if we stay positive with our message.”)

There are also savefridaynightlights.com and savestudio60.com and numerous floating petitions for nearly every show threatened with cancellation, because nearly every show has some fans and the Internet has let them find one another. Bonding with strangers over a television series is a relatively new phenomenon -- though of course “Star Trek” fans found one another long ago. The original series has been said to owe its third season to a letter-writing campaign in 1968.

The process has become an institution: The USA Today “Save Our Shows” poll is 10 years old; the similarly initialed “Save One Show” campaign run by Kristin Veitch at E! Online is 7 years old -- 6 million votes were cast there this year, with “Gilmore Girls” and “Veronica Mars” being declared co-winners; the prize was an official Veitch-authored clemency plea, sent to network executives.

Relationship outside the box

WHY do we care so much about the death of a TV show? We care mostly because we care about the people in them -- the made-up people, I mean, not the actors, who can take care of themselves. (Or not.) And we care about them because we know them more intimately than all but the most intimate of our actual intimates. When they’re not expressly telling us how they feel, they embody it in ways we can clearly read. (Except, of course, when we’re supposed to find them opaque.)

We see them at their worst and their best, at work and at play and leading lives that often feel not only more exciting than our own, but sometimes more ... lifelike.

Books and movies, and the oral tradition that preceded both, are rich with returning characters and serial adventures -- Ulysses and Hercules, Robin Hood and James Bond. When you create heroes as singular and popular as Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew, it’s almost wrong not to use them again; it’s not even quite up to you. The writer proposes, and the public disposes: Having thrown Holmes off a cliff, Arthur Conan Doyle bowed to public outcry and revived him for further adventures. This is not even counting the myriad uses to which the character has been put since Conan Doyle’s own demise.

These are vital creations. But TV characters are something different. They live in real time. From week to week and, one hopes, from year to year, they come into our homes and they age alongside us. Babies grow into children, and children into teenagers, and teenagers into young adults. Older people turn into even older people. Hair grays, waistlines expand, wrinkles deepen (or sometimes disappear, oddly). Seasons change, holidays are celebrated. Characters accrue a real history that informs all their present words and actions. (Or does if the show is any good.)

Fans as cheering squad

IT’S that shared history that makes the bond so strong. Whether it’s the eight years we’ve known Tony and Carmela Soprano or the eight months we’ve known “Ugly” Betty Suarez, it’s an ongoing relationship. We become their confidants, in effect -- we know them better than they know themselves -- and so grow invested in their happiness. This is true even when, as in Tony Soprano’s case, it is a happiness undeserved, because we have been privy to his ordinary desires as well as his extraordinary shortcomings and to his very dreams.

There are obviously a lot of reasons to want good shows to keep running -- even when their own creators disagree. But even when a show turns bad, as any relationship might -- because TV is, after all, a medium of relationships -- we are often not ready to move on, whether out of stubbornness or habit or fear. It can be good again, just give it one more year. Widespread dissatisfaction with the last season of “Gilmore Girls” after the departure of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino or with “The West Wing” after Aaron Sorkin left did not discourage fans from trying to keep those shows alive.

It’s not that we can’t live without them, our fictional friends -- in the end, it’s that they can’t live without us. Thus your fan fiction, or fanfic, a kind of open-source, Wiki-like literary form wherein cherished characters of departed shows -- and shows still running, for that matter -- live on in fan-penned extracurricular adventures. (And not just the obvious candidates, such as Scully and Mulder, or Buffy and Angel. There is “Green Acres” fan fiction, “Seinfeld” fan fiction, even Muppet fanfic.)

More ambitious and strange, the reanimated corpse of “Star Trek” features in several homemade live-action, Web-based series, including the remarkably elaborate “Star Trek New Voyages,” which aims to conclude the five-year mission of the original Starship Enterprise. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” also continues in similar posthumous form. But we know from “Buffy” itself that there is a big difference between the undead and the truly living.

I too have lost shows dear to me. I have shaken my fist at an industry that seems to care only about what sells and not about selling what matters. Yet I want to say to those now bereaved or about to be that it will be all right. There is no shame in a short life lived with dignity and art -- my one-season-only “Freaks and Geeks” and “Wonderfalls” DVD sets, each perfectly complete in its way, attest to that. You will find some new show to love, and if you don’t, there’s a world beyond TV you might like to explore.

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robert.lloyd@latimes.com