If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.

Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.

If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.

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.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, it stopped being hip to say you never watched TV. Adults are much more likely to find something to engage them on television than they are at the local multiplex. Edges are being cut on television all the time, but at the movies only now and then.

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.

The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.