But Not on This Planet

If I have anything to say about it, come January “Survivor” will die, “Temptation Island” will sink without a trace into the sea, and Capt. James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock will be suiting up for their imminent return to prime time.

And who, you may ask, am I?

Until recently, I was just like you, one of millions of faceless American TV viewers resigned to griping uselessly about the sorry state of the art and muttering about how much better television would be if I were in charge.

Then early last month, a postcard arrived telling me I’d hit the jackpot.

It was the next best thing to a Publishers Clearing House payoff big enough to let me start my own network and change society through Randyvision.

My household had become one of the lucky few anointed by Nielsen Media Research Inc. to keep a diary during November’s ratings sweeps of what we watch--and what we don’t--and thus help create that holiest of entertainment holies: the Nielsen ratings.

I felt endowed with a power I’d never dreamed of: the power of life and death over what’s on the tube.

Inside I’m laughing one of those mad-scientist laughs as I thought about getting even for every wound ever inflicted by network morons who do call the shots.

Cancel “Star Trek,” will you? Yes, it’s been 32 years, but I haven’t forgotten. So on goes the Sci-Fi Channel every night at 6 for “Star Trek” reruns.

I don’t love, or even like, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but I adore Stan, Kyle, Eric and Kenny. I envisioned Comedy Central’s “South Park” rocketing into the Top 10 after Nielsen sees how I tuned in not only on Wednesday at 10 p.m. but also to the Saturday and Sunday night repeats so I could list it three times.

True, we were just one of about 60,000 households nationwide that get diaries each week of the major ratings sweeps periods every February, May, July and November. But considering that a mere 0.057% of the 105 million U.S. households with televisions get diaries, winning one struck me as akin to hitting the lottery.

Lottery winners often boast that the money isn’t going to change their lives, but the arrival of a Nielsen diary for each of our two sets instantly changed mine.

I typically skim through the TV listings each Sunday to see whether any movies I’ve been dying to see will turn up during the next week, but for the most part I know the air times and days of the few shows I watch with any regularity.

Now, however, I was poring over the guide to see what was on every hour of every day for the week our diaries covered.

Some idiots might really use it as a diary and simply write down only what they normally watch; I considered it a ballot, except that unlike those other ballots we all get to punch each November, this time, every candidate I decided to vote for would be a winner on some level.

I’m guessing NBC brass will give Jennifer Lopez the heave-ho and start a bidding war with ABC and CBS bigwigs over “The Mozart Church Sonatas,” which I included in my Nielsen report. I love Mozart’s music, so when I stumbled upon this concert performance one Friday at midnight on EWTN--I don’t even know what EWTN is--I figured this was the one chance the show, maybe the entire cable channel, would ever have of making a blip on Nielsen’s radar.

The moral dilemma in filling out the diaries quickly became apparent: Do I write down only what I’ve physically watched? Or do I include shows I wished I had but didn’t happen to be home when they were on?

The Nielsen folks actually try to accommodate anyone in that boat. They leave a space in the back of the diary for listing favorite shows you missed, as well as “to comment about TV in general.”

My fiancee, Cynthia, used her diary to stick it to local stations for the schlock they pass off as news.

I used mine to decry the so-called reality shows. But I feared even that wasn’t enough. So when 8 p.m. on Thursday rolled around, I switched to the History Channel--Channel 78 on my cable system--hoping that the further down the dial I ran from CBS’ “Survivor: Africa,” the faster it would be canceled. (I could have gone even farther to Channel 96, the Game Show Network, but they were showing “3’s a Crowd,” and even I couldn’t stoop that low.)

Cynthia begged me not to write down the “Britney Spears: Live From Vegas” special on HBO that I felt duty-bound to watch before reviewing her concert in Anaheim for The Times two nights later. I wanted to add a note: “Forced to watch for work,” but alas, I could find no such space on the form. Besides, who’d believe me?

My VCR became an invaluable ally during the week in which I came to think of myself as Redeemer of the Vast Wasteland.

I would record shows I couldn’t be around, or awake, to watch when they are on, and catch them later. Maybe. But even if I never got around to looking at the tape, at least I could honestly list “The Rockford Files” and “Columbo” reruns on KDOC-TV in my diary, because Nielsen allows viewers to report shows they taped but didn’t watch. Perhaps the programmers who consider “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” the pinnacle of prime-time drama would get the message.

Those programmers probably have nightmares--if not, I hope they do now--about people like me, whose Friday night viewing consists of a “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” rerun at 6, nothing between 7 and 11 and then “The Simpsons,” HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” ABC’s “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher” and finally C-SPAN’s “National ID Card Debate” special at 12:45 a.m.

Go ahead, demographic maniacs, I dare you to find a viewership profile to cover that.

My heart sank, though, after mailing off the completed diaries when I called to ask a Nielsen spokesman how the information would be used.

The diaries, it turns out, provide local-market information only. National program ratings are determined only by those 5,000 randomly selected homes with Nielsen People Meters connected to their sets.

“Survivor,” apparently, will survive a while longer in the TV universe, a grim and inhospitable place from which there’s only one escape: Scotty, get us out of here.