By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.

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.

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

The fault is in our stars, dear Brutus: not the glass screen through which we see them.

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.

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.

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.