Speaking of intellectual snobbery, at Jimmy's last night (random call from the Strategist) I found myself once again having to hear someone say

"I don't watch television."

Not "I don't watch much television" or "I don't get cable," but "I don't watch television." A wall in the conversation.

I have to agree with my fellow preceptee: there's almost always a holier-than-thou feel to that statement. It's both incredibly irritating and completely ridiculous.

Television in the only popular entertainment medium that you can just summarily dismiss without having intelligent people think you're either uncultured (e.g. theatre) or completely old-fashioned (e.g. the computer).

Well, I suppose there are people who might say "I don't read comic books" or "I don't listen to the radio" with the same restrained huffiness, but it's not the kind of thing that comes up often, if at all.

Yet I seem to run into these kill-your-television types — whitedotters? — just about everywhere.

And by everywhere, I mean academia. Some students really seem to hang part of their identity on not watching television, probably because there is a bit of intellectual cred (and perceived originality) attached to the idea.

Should I have children, I'm sure that I'll try to limit their exposure to television. I don't have cable here because I couldn't justify the expense, and because there are very few channels I watch with any regularity. But defending television doesn't mean defending television's excesses or excess television.

As Gene Roddenberry put it, "They say that 90 percent of TV is junk. But 90 percent of everything is junk."

The central anti-television argument is that television is a waste of time, standing in the place of qualitatively better activities. I don't know how true this ever was — I was one of those teenagers who spent more time with his family on T.G.I.F. night — but it's not true any more.

The incredible ease of timeshifting has effectively exploded this theory. TiVo will record your favorite shows for you to watch at your leisure; for the computer literate, bittorrent downloading through Azureus or some other program is effortless.

I watch about three to four hours of television a week, whenever I feel like watching television. I don't have to schedule my life around shows, and there are no commercials to warp my mind. So what's the problem?

Presumably that there isn't anything worth watching.

As far as comedy is concerned, I've no idea when was the last time that was true... Seinfeld was both amusing and required pop culture viewing, in its heyday the Simpsons had episodes far better than anything you'll find in this, the 17th and worst of seasons — like Mark Liberman, I'm shocked, shocked that only 51% of Americans knew that Homer is a Simpson — and there's Arrested Development and the up-and-coming My Name is Earl.

And those are just the comedies that get all the attention. If you share my taste, then you too will shed a tear for Home Movies and Andy Richter Controls the Universe, both taken before their time.

People expect comedy, but more important for my argument is the fact that, especially recently, there seems to be a lot of great drama on television.

I remember watching ER back in high school, before it went downhill. And then there was Freaks and Geeks, which had the kind of honest, bittersweet view of high school you rarely find anywhere. I don't watch any of the movie channel shows, but the Sopranos seems to get consistently good press.

And then there's Lost. I don't know anyone who watched the first episode without getting hooked. Lost has mystery, drama, comedy, and suspense, with an emphasis on dynamic, fully-realized characters. (What Prof. Fritzell might call the "novelistic" as opposed to the "romantic.")

In due deference to postmodernism, the show plays with media, incorporating film, books, and music as plot devices and extending the story into media outside of the show. The writers even throw in bits for the viewers with TiVo, in the same way silent films sometimes added dialogue for the lip-readers.

This is, in short, television's best case for being taken seriously as art.

And yet for some people, willful ignorance of all this is still a badge of honor. It's time to start recognizing that the sweeping anti-television attitude is just as foolish as any viewpoint which denigrates an entire medium.