I haven't felt the urge to review anything on TV in a while, mostly due to the endless reruns that only enhance the winter blahs, but also because there hasn't seemed to be anything that's particularly piqued my interest.

Granted, there are still a few shows that exhibit strong storylines and characters, but for the most part, TV has sunk into a quagmire of mediocrity. There will be some who argue that TV has been mediocre since the early days of colour, but those people generally tend to be luddite subversives and technological xenophobes with unrealistically high standards of entertainment. They are the holdovers of the Vaudeville generation that never learned to embrace the extraordinary accomplishment of the moving picture.

For the most part, I disagree that television over the last fifty years has been substandard. As the medium grew, so did the risks networks were willing to take on novel show concepts. Many of the most successful series in history were highly controversial at the time (although judged by today's standards, Mary Tyler Moore's Capri pants on the Dick Van Dyke Show are unbelievably tame).

Among the more cutting edge, highly original shows of the last half century, I count The Honeymooners (the seminal sitcom, a comedy about an abusive, drunk bus driver), Star Trek, (finally, a whole show about cheesy looking men in alien costumes), The Carol Burnett Show (a whole hour of comedy spearheaded by a - gasp - woman!), Monty Python's Flying Circus (while not widely understood or regarded in the U.S. during its original run, it remains the weirdest, consistently funniest and most original sketch comedy show of all time) Three's Company (it's ok to be confused for a gay man if you've got two hot chicks to keep you in check), M*A*S*H (probably the most important half hour dramedy ever to come on the airwaves), All in the Family (the first family sitcom to exploit the worst aspect of human nature in Carol O'Connor), Star Trek: The Next Generation (finally a whole show about Klingons and androids), Law and Order (there's nothing like Jerry Orbach's snappy one liners and Sam Waterston's carefully written cliches), Married With Children (the first family sitcom to exploit the worst aspects of human nature in every character) and The X-Files (finally, a show about "real" aliens...) and there's a whole bunch more that you all will no doubt be leaving remarks about me not including.

In the last decade, however, the biggest television hits have been Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond. Fluffy sitcoms about nothing (thank you Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David), with the occasionally "important" episode thrown in. "Edgy" programming has become a question of how much sex and violence a show can get away with, instead of providing quality original ideas. Critically lauded shows are consistent underperformers, despite their uniqueness and attention to key storytelling components. Alias and the new Fox sitcom Arrested Development continue to drop in the Nielsens while shows like "Come on guys, just give me eight more episodes to stall and I'll get you the virus" 24 and ABC abomination According to Jim continue to dominate. Shows determined to be "too edgy" (use of the word Fuck, discussion of sexual organs) for regular TV are relegated cable stations like HBO, Bravo and Showcase, leaving a large part of the population in the dark about Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm (the funniest show on TV since the criminally cancelled cartoon The Family Guy), Sex In The City, The Sopranos and Queer as Folk.