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" In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly. "

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" Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing. "

Tom Shales

Down

Detail

Losing

" 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

Life

" 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. "

" By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson. "

" Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort. "

" 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

People

Long

" If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too. "

" 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. "

" 'Dragnet' (the 1951 original, transferred nearly intact from radio) served as a veritable template for all cop shows to come. "

" 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. "

" Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV. "

" 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 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. "

" '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. "

" In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing. "

Tom Shales

Fun

Never

" 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 Snyder was born to broadcast. He loved television and it loved him back. In that, he was a member of a vanishing breed, especially as narrowcasting displaces broadcasting, 'online' replaces 'on the air,' and any Tom, Dick or Mary can be monarch of a desktop domain, uplinking themselves to satellites in space. "

Tom Shales

Back

Born

" Obviously neither 'American Idol' nor 'Dancing With the Stars' is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" From a producer's point of view, of course, 'Law & Order' presents an ideal - a show that is almost entirely actor-proof, that can keep going and going no matter what happens to the cast or how many actors demand raises. "

" 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. "

" Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not. "

" Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair. "

" 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. "

" 'I Love Lucy,' the first classic, really belonged more to the Wacky Woman genre than the domestic sitcom; 'My Little Margie' and 'I Married Joan' were among the shrill, coarse imitations. "

" 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. "