Dave on Demand: The fall forecast: A big year for Kim, 'X Factor' fisticuffs

Cue the crickets. We're in one of the TV year's dead zones. It's so slow out there that MTV couldn't find anyone to host its Video Music Awards this weekend.

Rather than stare at our navels, let us turn our gazes forward. With the new season fast approaching, I make the following fearless predictions:

The winner of Dancing With the Stars will be a professional athlete and not an entertainer (or whatever the likes of David Arquette pass for).

It will take only two episodes of Fox's new talent show, The X Factor, for old adversaries Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul to be going for each other's throats.

The cashier who works the express lane at your neighborhood supermarket will get her own reality show: 15 Items or Less.

Kim Kardashian will become the first person to win an Emmy, an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Tony despite not having a piece of work qualifying for any of these awards. When asked why they voted for her, members of the various academies will all cite Kim's "undeniable momentum."

Harry's Law will reach a product placement deal with Post requiring Kathy Bates to begin every summation by addressing the jury, "Have you tried Honey Bunches of Oats? It's the perfect combination of sweet and crunchy."

Regis Philbin will retire as planned, but will be back the next morning waiting for the studio doors to open, frantically explaining "it was all a big mistake."

Following the success of AMC's Mad Men, the networks have developed two retro series of their own, set in the '60s: NBC's The Playboy Club and ABC's Pan Am. Both will barely scrape through a single season, proving that nostalgia is not what it used to be.

America's Got Talent will continue to rise, becoming the top-rated show on TV this season. Decades from now, scholars will cite this as the first undeniable sign that the collapse of Western Civilization was approaching.

The first show to get canceled will be CBS's How to Be a Gentleman with the repulsive Kevin Dillon. The second show canceled, a scant week later, will be whichever one you have gotten most attached to.

Good, better, best. One by-product of the digital age is the advent of critical wildfires. A seed of praise gets planted for a show and it's off to the races as everyone tries to outdo the previous compliment online until we're dealing with outrageous and hyperbolic adulation.

We've seen shows like Dexter, Breaking Bad, and Parks and Recreation get vaulted from entertaining to extraordinary overnight. It happened this season with Community, which went from amusingly quirky to "genius" and a showcase for "meta-humor" (whatever that is), seemingly in the course of one commercial.

The series that is currently enjoying irrational critical exuberance is Louie on FX. Someone wrote that it was having a good second season; a few days later, there wasn't anything this show couldn't do, and now it's simply the best show on television. Ever.

Louie? That grumpy, underlit, self-lacerating display? Interesting and often funny, sure. But beyond compare?

You TV critics better slow your rolls.

Wrong coast. Two of my favorite cable delicacies, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Weeds, are having off seasons. I blame it on the fact that both these shows, which are so quintessentially Californian, have moved the action to New York City. I'm surprised Nancy and Larry haven't run into each other since they're both playing on softball teams in Central Park.

Both shows are floundering outside of their usual milieus. It's like transplanting the Cartwright boys from Bonanza over to Victorian London.