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" 'Dragnet' (the 1951 original, transferred nearly intact from radio) served as a veritable template for all cop shows to come. "
Tom Shales
Radio
Cop
Original
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" Robert Osborne either has the best job in the world, or comes very close. As millions of viewers know, Osborne is the resident host of the great Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel, the most reliable source of pure enchantment in the cable universe. "
Tom Shales
Universe
World
Great
" Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort. "
Tom Shales
Long
Comfort
Television
" You do have to wonder how Jack Bauer, maverick hero of '24,' can stay hidden for so long when no matter where he goes, he always seems within range of a TV camera. Or six. "
Tom Shales
Hidden
Camera
Hero
" 'American Idol' is sometimes lumped with reality shows and it has that element - folks-next-door battling it out in a contest. But instead of fighting leeches, bugs, parasites and each other, as on CBS's 'Survivor' and other shows that imitate it, the 'American Idol' contestants, of course, sing. "
Tom Shales
American
Survivor
Reality
" So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth. "
Tom Shales
Fight
Life
Nature
" You know you're getting older when - well, first off, when you read almost any story that begins 'You know you're getting older when.' But you also know it when you not only never heard of the musical guest on a given 'Saturday Night Live' but never heard of the host, either. "
Tom Shales
Night
Story
Live
" People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns. "
Tom Shales
People
Simple
Back
" 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' occurred in real time and was a benign and bewitching example of pure television. "
Tom Shales
Example
Television
Time
" Maybe Larry Kings cannot thrive or even survive in a world where the norms for discourse are rage, vehemence and character assassination. King wanted to be liked, not feared; admired, not loathed. "
Tom Shales
Character
Thrive
World
" Jerry Seinfeld is amazing in many ways, not the least of them his ability to find humor, and convincing us to find it, too, in the million-and-two details about modern life that under different circumstances might send us into paroxysms of rage. "
Tom Shales
Rage
Us
Life
" Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair. "
Tom Shales
Hair
Intellect
Teeth
" Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots. "
Tom Shales
Civility
Larry
Got
" For those who don't like Dave Letterman, there's Jay Leno; and for those who like neither, there's Craig Ferguson; and if you're still feeling undertained, there's George Lopez and Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and - let's see, did we leave out a Jimmy? "
Tom Shales
See
Feeling
Leave
" Tom Snyder was big enough to fill the night with talk and his own persona. The Snyder we saw on TV was not a replica of the real guy; it was the real guy. "
Tom Shales
Own
Big
Real
" Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive. "
Tom Shales
Credit
Television
Sugar
" It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a smart, sophisticated, civilized alternative to commercial TV - not a cheap imitation of it. "
Tom Shales
Imitation
Back
Remember
" Your humble critic confesses that he has been wrestling with 'weight issues' since leaving college lo these, uh, several years ago, so it's hard to be receptive to the moralistic scolding and patronizing encouragement offered endlessly by the allegedly well-meaning. "
Tom Shales
Humble
Encouragement
College
" 'Minute to Win It' is a variation on a game show from the 1950s called 'Beat the Clock,' in which contestants won washing machines and fox stoles by doing such pointless stunts as catching a tennis ball in a paper cup or knocking a hat off one's wife's head with a whipped-cream spritzer. "
Tom Shales
Win
Clock
Doing
" Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic. "
Tom Shales
Family
Mother
Life
" The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged in pop culture, but very infrequently by TV. "
Tom Shales
Long
Culture
Credit
" Late-night television is like the cereal aisle in the supermarket: too many choices. Also, too many 'different' brands that really aren't different at all. "
Tom Shales
Choices
Television
Like
" The original and very basic 'Law & Order' series has always seemed to me to be 100-percent exposition, with no filler, no pesky nuances and almost no background about the series' continuing characters - just the hard nuts and bolts of pure storytelling. "
Tom Shales
Always
Storytelling
Nuts
" 'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age. "
Tom Shales
Leave
Television
Age
" Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities. "
Tom Shales
Go
People
Long
" By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson. "
Tom Shales
Anything
Rather
Fate
" You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime. "
Tom Shales
Crime
Law
Place
" Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed. "
Tom Shales
Blurred
Line
New
" ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals. "
Tom Shales
Human
Dare
Silly
" Making music on TV used to be as common as commercials. In the '60s and '70s, prime time was stuffed with variety shows headlined by such major and treasured talents as Carol Burnett, Red Skelton, the Smothers Brothers and Richard Pryor, who had a very brief comedy-variety hour on NBC that was censored literally to death. "
Tom Shales
Used
Death
Music
" Jimmy Kimmel still comes across like a guy who crashed a party and got caught at it, yet adamantly refuses to leave. "
Tom Shales
Caught
Party
Like