I just have to link to Chris Anderson's juxtaposition of David Foster Wallace and The Long Tail, simply because I love the referred to essay: E Pluribus Unum: Television and U. S. Fiction. The essay appears in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, an exceedingly mind bending series of essays, of which the eponymous one is ridiculously dense and convoluted. And one which I never finished.
Anyhoo, after reading E Pluribus Unum... you'll have a whole new perspective on TV. Suffice it to say my takeaway was that TV is an endless vortex of cooptation. TV culture inhales irony for breakfast and is essentially unassailable with that device. Rebel through conformity.
Haven't quite figured out what this has to do with the long tail though.