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" 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
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" A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck. "
Tom Shales
Fellow
Attention Span
Duck
" '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. "
Tom Shales
Classic
First
Love
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' occurred in real time and was a benign and bewitching example of pure television. "
Tom Shales
Example
Television
Time
" 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
" If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too. "
Tom Shales
Networks
Start
Get
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Tom Shales
Time
Civilization
Long
" 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
" 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
" Revisiting 'Leave It to Beaver,' and seeing it in the pristine visual clarity of digital restoration, are mood-altering if not quite mind-altering experiences, very much for the better. "
Tom Shales
Clarity
Leave
Better
" 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. "
Tom Shales
American
Comedy
Dancing
" Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. "
Tom Shales
Adult
Show
Talking
" 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
" '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
" 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
He
Back
Born
" 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
" '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
" '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
" I always thought I'd buy my mother a house if I ever became successful - a big, beautiful house on the nicest street in town. It didn't exactly work out that way. I was still borrowing money from her in my 40s. "
Tom Shales
Beautiful
Money
Mother
" 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. "
Tom Shales
Best
Traditions
Did
" 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
" 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
More
Fun
Never
" 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