Nothing on TV

I haven’t had a television for more than fifty years, and though some people tell me that I have missed much of value thereby, which I do not doubt because it would hardly be possible to produce so many tens of thousands (or is it millions?) of hours of television without producing at least something of value, I do not feel that my life has been very much impoverished by the absence of the screen that dominates many people’s living rooms and is as much the focus of their devotions as was the icon in the isbas of the Russian peasantry before Bolshevism got going. My brief appearances ...

Dr. Phil McGraw

Dr. Phil’s Drunken Sex Escapade

I"€™ll admit it: I"€™m unfashionably fond of Dr. Phil. At least early on"€”before he got caught up in shady stuff such as trying to brand his family as the Osmonds of ...

How the Love Boat Ruined My Life

A relic of a long-gone era of “happy endings” and “family viewing,” the real-life Love Boat’s final voyage was marred by a perfectly po-mo, Irony Age ...

Jay Leno and Johnny Carson

Leno’s Last Laugh

Yes, there really is a Burbank. As a kid, I assumed that the smallish California city with the “beautiful downtown” was just a cheesy Tonight Show punch line, not a ...

Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro’s Imaginary Neo-Nazi Gangs of Boston

What's the female equivalent of "€œI"€™ll never get an erection again"€? That happened to me when I found out actor Alan Rickman"€”upon whose lap I’d often ...

Amish Mafia

Too Much Reality

I get called a “racist” a lot, but one offhand remark I made during Obama’s 2008 campaign drew more flak than usual. I had simply wondered why the ...

Here Comes Honey Jigaboo Boo

Cable TV's Oxygen channel was founded in part by Oprah Winfrey, but it appears to have finally jumped the shvartze with a proposed program called All My Babies"€™ Mamas. ...

Let Them Watch Crap

It’s happening again. Once more I begin to like a new TV show and it is canceled in a single season. My affliction goes back to the mid-70s, when Kolchak: The Night Stalker ...

Mob Wives

Keepin’ it Real (Cheap)

When MTV’s The Real World debuted in 1992, people saw it for what it was: a silly bit of voyeurism for a bunch of stupid kids. Twenty years later, the genre it hatched is ...


Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!