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IT HADN'T OCCURED to me to pick on "Felicity" for being unrealistic. Who wants television to be realistic anyway? As David Foster Wallace has pointed out, television isn't about reality, it's about how we wish reality to be, "what Americans want to regard as normal." Besides, "Felicity" had blundered into fantasyland even before it aired, with subway posters picturing its ringlet-crowned ingenue carrying two suitcases down the middle of a New York street. Presumably, they were filled with packing peanuts.

But despite the lightness of her trousseau, "Felicity"'s emotional baggage has a heft which begs examination. Indeed, begs to be taken seriously, to be treated -- dare I say it -- for real. The furrowed-brow intensity of its actors, the way it treats sort-of ubiquitous dorm room squabbles ("that was my apple in the fridge!") with autumnal-toned solemnity, and -- perhaps most interestingly, in the way the "Felicity" web site draws in posters to its message boards not by asking them to talk about the show, but by asking them to talk about themselves -- less "What should Felicity do?" than "What would you do?" "Felicity" is a show that creaks under the weight of its ambitions, and some have taken its lumbering pace and its penchant for lingering close-ups as a sign that wooden-ness is really just the best possible alternative to smirking. Earnestness is back. Irony, we hear these days, is over.

We should have seen it coming. There was the much-heralded rise of the anti ad, accompanied by pronouncements that television had become so self-conscious as to corrupt the very fabric of reality. Wallace's own lamentations reached a fevered pitch: "the ironic tone of TV's self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody... [M]ake no mistake: irony tyrannizes us." Such trends begged the subsequent announcement of The New Earnestness. And this fall, the Noxema'd visage of the WB was the perfect blank slate upon which eager zeitgeist theologians could posit the New Sincerity, no doubt unaware that the New Sincerity itself was old hat: Esquire had us believing in belief back in the '80s.

But for all the attention given to the soft-light sentimentality of "Felicity" and the "like, duh" emotional eloquence of "Dawson's Creek," this wave of teen-beat thirty-somethings actually shows us that, for adolescents, irony and earnestness are forever locked together in a sweaty embrace. The predictability of adolescent rebellion is not, after all, lost on adolescents. Even the Sputniks, a twenty-something Montana punk band that consented to having The New Yorker's William Finnegan tag along on part of their DIY summer tour, described themselves alternately as "petite-bourgeois capitalists ourselves" and "probably the most apologetic punk band ever to play in New York City."

What rings false about this new batch of stridently earnest shows, then, isn't the banality of their familiar dramas ("Felicity" has lifted not just actors, but whole plotlines from "My So-Called Life"), it's their lack of self-awareness about that banality. Raised in a culture that watches and rebroadcasts their every move, kids understand what their script is supposed to be. Teens today are perhaps even more aware than the characters of "Felicity" are of their lives' distressingly regular slide into melodrama.

However, most television shows, and an overwhelming percentage of popular television shows, don't concern themselves with the irony/earnestness continuum at all. Trying to define the set of nonemotions evinced on a sitcom as either "ironic" or "earnest" is a surrealist joke in search of a punchline. Television's dominant mode of discourse is "ironic" only insofar as it without sentiment. Television is earnest only insofar as it pursues its only goal with unblinking zeal: to be watched. Television is indifferent to our approval or our love, it wants only our time.

This blatancy, this existence beyond (or perhaps below) irony or earnestness is why reruns work, and -- more harrowingly -- why reruns and today's shows are, for the most part, interchangeable: because the lingua franca of television doesn't change. The same proportions of interoffice intrigue, mistaken identity, and preposterous plan gone awry fuel the same basic plots now as they did twenty years ago. What changes the most is set dressing and the references --"Dharma & Greg" is, at its heart, an update of "Laverne & Shirley." It's this fundamental consistency in tone and content that makes "That 70s Show" this season's most bizarrely original entry onto the airwaves. It's period-piece aesthetics seem to confront the truth of television's timelessness head on, even if it does wind up losing, since its admission of defeat in the wardrobe department hasn't necessarily given them extra energy in their battle for original plots. (A secret party while the parents are away! A first-job fiasco! They might consider changing the lead character's name to "Richie," just for convenience's sake.) Still, the show's one, overarching joke is one that couldn't be told without twenty years of television behind it: the idea that what the characters say isn't supposed to be funny because it would be funny to a teenager in the '70s, it's funny because it just simply is something a teenager would say in the seventies.

There is nothing ironic nor earnest about this sensibility, and there's nothing particularly funny about it either. It's merely vaguely disquieting, a peak into some pop-culture abyss only to find the abyss staring back at you, wearing clothes you recognize and a dope-smoking grin. In fact, in trying to break apart the irony law of earnestness (for each pendulum swing in one direction, there is an equal and opposite response), perhaps it is most useful to look at what makes us laugh. Comedy often seems to move more quickly than the culture at large. (Even "Seinfeld" seemed to be less a vanguard than the crescendo to years-long build-up in a previously discerned irony gap.) Adventurous comedy today isn't ironic, and it's not exactly earnest. The mockumentric "Daily Show," the revenge fantasia of "Celebrity Deathmatch," the wry (sometimes I swear even wistful) "Conan": obviously, we have entered the era of deadpan absurdity -- an appellation just as suited, in its own way, to describe "Felicity."

Ana Marie Cox is an editor at Mother Jones in San Francisco.

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