Twenty-seven years ago, a British newspaper discovered—I don’t know how—that I hadn’t watched television for twenty-five years. At the time, this seemed almost incredible, or at any rate very odd, as if I had just landed from Mars. The newspaper contacted me and asked me whether I would be prepared to watch television for a time to report on its emanations. They would send me a television; and I agreed on one condition, namely that after a week they would take it away again. The newspaper kept to the promise. The television duly arrived, and, with some difficulty, I turned it on ...
I haven’t had a television for more than fifty years, and though some people tell me that I have missed much of value thereby, which I do not doubt because it would hardly be possible to produce so ...
I"m not sure if it's connected with the whole "gates of hell" thing, but you have to credit"if that's quite the right word"the Catholic church for accomplishing the previously ...
There is often no difference between entertainment and politics. Consider recent statements by Phil Robertson, television star of the program Duck Dynasty, which airs on the ...
I"ll admit it: I"m unfashionably fond of Dr. Phil. At least early on"before he got caught up in shady stuff such as trying to brand his family as the Osmonds of ...
A relic of a long-gone era of “happy endings” and “family viewing,” the real-life Love Boat’s final voyage was marred by a perfectly po-mo, Irony Age ...
Yes, there really is a Burbank. As a kid, I assumed that the smallish California city with the “beautiful downtown” was just a cheesy Tonight Show punch line, not a ...
What's the female equivalent of "I"ll never get an erection again"? That happened to me when I found out actor Alan Rickman"upon whose lap I’d often ...
I get called a “racist” a lot, but one offhand remark I made during Obama’s 2008 campaign drew more flak than usual. I had simply wondered why the ...
Cable TV's Oxygen channel was founded in part by Oprah Winfrey, but it appears to have finally jumped the shvartze with a proposed program called All My Babies" Mamas. ...
It’s happening again. Once more I begin to like a new TV show and it is canceled in a single season. My affliction goes back to the mid-70s, when Kolchak: The Night Stalker ...
When MTV’s The Real World debuted in 1992, people saw it for what it was: a silly bit of voyeurism for a bunch of stupid kids. Twenty years later, the genre it hatched is ...