So this sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it does: Esquire‘s Joshua David Stein took it upon himself to create a Venn diagram of every single show in prime-time TV. While usually I post infographics and suggest ways they fall short, I find it hard to think of any possible way to improve this one. The more you look at it, the more accurate it becomes. And the picture of our collective zeitgeist is nothing short of amazing:
The one glaring omission would be Lost, which we suppose would be something like People-Being-Crummy (Ben Linus, et al.) meets Fat-People (ie, Hurley) meets People-Saving-People-Meanly (the Others, et al.) meets People-Would-Can’t-Save-Themselves-Saving-People (the Oceanic passengers, and Jack in particular) meets Vampires–and-other-Supernaturals. Then again, Lost probably isn’t here because cares about Lost anymore.
If you’re having trouble making out the details, check out the full-size version.