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.

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.

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.

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.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, it stopped being hip to say you never watched TV. Adults are much more likely to find something to engage them on television than they are at the local multiplex. Edges are being cut on television all the time, but at the movies only now and then.

In the realm of pop celebrity, the bar has been lowered so far that there is no bar. People can be famous for being famous, famous for being infamous, famous for having once been famous and, thanks largely to the Internet, famous for not being famous at all.

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

No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It's feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web.

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.

The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys. Has anyone ever stopped to think how cranky, if not downright vicious, a barrelful of monkeys would be, especially once released from the barrel?

A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.

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.

The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged in pop culture, but very infrequently by TV.