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

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.

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

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.

In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing.

Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

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.