Born 500 years earlier, he'd have been working for Torquemada. I allow myself one sitcom, though sitcoms are going through a dry patch at the moment, and nothing has really taken my fancy since the demise of my beloved Married With Children back in 1997. Christina Applegate is 40 times better looking than Nicole Kidman, and about 200 times better at acting. That's about it for my TV viewing. Not watching much TV creates problems.
TV is now the principal vehicle of our popular culture.
Anti-TV snobbery has pretty much disappeared, even among the intellectual classes. Believe me, I hang out with these people. The writer-hero of Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale was surprised, when he began mixing with writers, to find that they never talked about literature. What they mostly talked about, he learned, was money, and their wrangles with publishers. I was vouchsafed a similar revelation when I ascended into the exalted company of NR staffers, public policy intellectuals and cultural commentators.