Orin's survey with the wheelchair man
‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’
Context
Phoenix, 7 November: Orin, post-coital with the Swiss hand-model, gamely answers a legless survey-taker's questions about broadcast TV (the surveyor is A.F.R.; Orin no longer cares about the ruse). The litany of first names — dead shows' characters invoked one by one — reads like a summoning of the culture's household dead, and DFW supplies the theme's own diction for them: "the syndicated airwave-haunters."