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As of today, our fantasy of an exotic lifestyle of TV criticism is officially over — beaten, bloodied and left for dead by Ray Richmond, who compares the debauched good old days of the Television Critics Association press tours to the nearly irrelevant confab starting tomorrow in Beverly Hills. It's the first such event since July 2007, back before last winter's conference was scuttled by the writers strike and mainstream media had begun shearing critics and culture writers from their ranks like slabs of fat.

But these days, it seems, you can't even throw an empty highball glass (or a full one, for that matter, which is way more fun) without hitting some dork fucking around on a computer:

The networks no longer cover anyone's travel and lodging, and the sessions too often devolve into a two-pronged affair: those who are too consumed with their live-blogging to participate in an intelligent discourse and those repping lightweight blogs whose queries are of the trivial, "Have you always been so hot?" variety.

With several major newspapers refusing to send anyone to TCA because of the expense, the registered attendees now feature the likes of BuddyTV.com, Bullz-Eye.com, AfterElton.com, GirlPower.com and Visimag.com. Given the precarious state of print journalism, we're seeing a rapid shift to the online world, and its impact on the quality of TCA attendance — and indeed, its newsworthiness — has grown exponentially.

Thus, Richmond concludes, the end of TCA press tours as we know them and, perhaps, the end of the events altogether: "TCA has made it tough to differentiate a media event from a straight-out promotional tool. ... Given the gathering's longtime value as a setting for the vigorous exchange of ideas and a means for keeping the networks honest, it's a sad day indeed." But honest about what? The quality of steroids on American Gladiators? The temperature of the soul-deadening vacuum where they shoot The Moment of Truth? What ideas are left to exchange, and who wants to spend two-and-a-half swimming in that briny pit? Anyway, the dream is dead — we'll probably never even watch TV again. Thanks for nothing, Ray.