Mark Dawidziak is as comfy and entertaining a tour guide through the world of Mark Twain as Twain himself was a tour guide through the world. In other words, Mark Twain’s Guide is such a fun read that the only thing dry about it is the ink.

I'm such an old fart that I started buying books on film and TV and radio and music when, for television, the entire shelf of books was only a couple of them. You go into the '70s before you start getting books on TV that you start wanting to collect. And by the time that you get to something like the Brooks and Marsh book it's invaluable. My house got hit by lightning in 1989 and burned down. And I got more than a half dozen Brooks and Marsh books sent to me by friends immediately, as though that's what you need more than clothes or food. That's how treasured that book was.

I'm trying to accept the idea that there's a different definition of what matters now. The rating for James Corden at 12:30 at night doesn't matter as much as the number of hits he gets on YouTube when he goes driving around with Adele. There are old dogs out there doing new tricks, and I got to recognize them.

I wrote my own first book about the defense of television as an art form in 1992. It was harder to make the argument then. Now it seems absolutely a given. You can argue about when the Platinum Age Of Television begins, but I don't think that anybody can argue that it's not here.

I would not even attempt to do a history of world television. I did a half dozen years where I was a juror at the Banff World Media Festival, and you get the best TV in the world there, and I was astounded at my ignorance. I would be watching a documentary made in Japan, and it was astounding, and I would never have heard of that otherwise. We're seeing more and more imports in the last years, and my dream for the next generation of TV is that somehow we get to tap into all of that.

The idea that you waited for that particular issue to come out, but then you planned your TV viewing for the coming season, it was a completely different world. And I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, so there was a TV critic writing for the Miami Herald, Jack Anderson, that was very influential. Just to read, every morning, somebody who cared about TV as much as I did - they were an adult, and they were clearly being paid for it. That was an "a ha!" moment for me before I was even 10.

"Transparent" is a drama slash comedy series that could, in theory, make the Emmy nominations next year in either of those categories - it's that good.