Slowly, surely--and I peg it to the rise of Whitney Houston in the '80s, with her superb voice but distracting, ostentatious leaps of register, drawn-out syllables, and excruciated facial expressions intended to signal how hard she was working to achieve her effects--we ended up with hideous stars like Christina Aguilera, all squinched eyes, fluttery hands, and taffy-pulled syllabics. Recognizing that America was now a safe haven for florid hacks, producer Simon Fuller brought the Idol franchise to the network owned by the schlockiest mogul, Rupert Murdoch, and Fox premiered American Idol in June 2002.

I quote that paragraph, from page 92 of Ken Tucker's Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Thing to Love and Hate about TV, for two reasons. Firstly, Tucker has managed to sum up exactly what's wrong with both TV and pop music circa 2005 in just two sentences. Secondly, this is one of the few coherent paragraphs in the entire book, so long as you're willing to look past words like "excruciated" and "squinched."

Tucker's idea of writing a book-length version of a VH1 'Top 100' marathon is impeccably timed. It seems we just can't get enough predigested opinions broken down into manageable chunks, and Tucker's experience as TV critic for the nonmagazine Entertainment Weekly certainly qualifies him to provide us with such. Tucker performs a variety of public services in this book, like pointing out that the "Seinfeld" theme is awful, and both "The Brady Bunch" and A Charlie Brown Christmas fall well short of the exalted places they occupy in our psyches. He also throws out a huge valentine to Aaron Sorkin's "SportsNight," which is always a shortcut to my good side. With a nice mix of goring sacred cows and praising pap unironically, Tucker takes the reader on a tour through TV-land's good and bad neighborhoods.

But you won't enjoy the ride.

I won't mince words: this is one of the worst-written, most atrociously edited books I've ever had the misfortune of spending money for. In fact, if I'd merely checked this book out of the library, I'd still feel ripped off. Some of Tucker's run-on sentences are spliced together more than a past-due film school project, which explains why there are multiple sentences in this book without either a subject or a predicate. If the author can't keep track of what a sentence is supposed to be about, how is the reader supposed to?

This book's copy-editing sins go far beyond tortured grammar, however. Who signed off on a chapter heading like "Schlock Forgotton: Silk Stalkings"? The factual errors in this book range from mild (referring to the detectives on "Miami Vice" as "Crockett and Stubbs") to preposterous (referring to one of John Larroquette's "Night Court" co-stars, who is still very much alive, as "the late Richard Moll"). Crikey, Mr. Tucker, IMDB is free. It would have confirmed Richard Moll's continued existence. It would have confirmed the correct names of the characters on "Miami Vice." It would've even confirmed that Michael McKean had not "been a Spinal Tapper" at the start of "Laverne & Shirley" as you claim, since This Is Spinal Tap was released a year after L&S went off the air.