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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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. "
Tom Shales
City
Sometimes
Nobody Cares
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Tom Shales
Law
View
Point Of View
" '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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess. "
Tom Shales
American
Living
Come
" 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
" 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
" 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' occurred in real time and was a benign and bewitching example of pure television. "
Tom Shales
Example
Television
Time
" 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
" '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
" 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
" '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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 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
" 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