TELEVISION

Five years as a television critic for Entertainment Weekly has left me with a renewed respect for exercise (sure, it's a loafer's job, but who wants to look like a beanbag stuffed with Chee-tos?), for privacy (I cringe every time I flip past Sally Jessy Raphael, fully expecting that the ever-shrinking guest pool has come down to my mother, who's busy telling Sally about the time her ninny of a son forgot to cut eyeholes in a homemade Zorro mask and ran into a tree), and for craftsmanship. What I mean by that last is, watching hours of ! TV week after week, I find it impossible not to have steadily increasing respect for the thousands of talented people who labor away at stuff that will mostly be forgotten two weeks after it is broadcast. If these folks were only in it for the money (not an entirely uninspiring motivation), the shows we watch would be far more cynical and sloppy than they are. (Or is that ''already are''?) Over the past half decade we have been told with increasing ferocity that television inspires bad behavior and is generally the ruination of everything. But as the essayist and sometime TV critic Clive James has written, ''Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.'' To paraphrase a book title by the literary critic Marvin Mudrick, television is not life, but then what is? In recent years, I've done my share to contribute to the media hype surrounding such television ''events'' as Twin Peaks (1990-91) and Wild Palms (1993). These were but two productions ambitiously devised to alter the face of the medium. Yet from a distance now, the face of the medium looks a bit smug. Whenever anyone messes with the TV verities-realistic narrative, sympathetic characters, decisive resolutions-the result ends up being hailed as a breakthrough, and then people go back to watching what they always want to watch anyway: well-crafted comedies and dramas. In this sense, I fell prey to a common trap for any writer trafficking in pop culture: overvaluing novelty and underrating skill, sincerity, and technique.

When you write on a weekly deadline, television is a generous chef, offering far more than you can ever consume. Sometimes you eat without thinking-I could devise a column about David Letterman or Roseanne or The X- Files every week, because they're among my favorite, most addictive snacks. But a lot of shows are watched out of duty, the professional version of nutrition, viewed because they stretch your muscles and build stamina. And some stuff is spinach, and I say the hell with it. As for speculating on the next five years of television-the stuff filling the box until we reach a new century-I'd hazard only the notion that it'll be much of the same, but more finely tuned. That is to say, as the 500-channel America becomes a reality, the demand for programming to fill those channels may yield a wider diversity of taste, subject matter, and sophistication. To be sure, the skeptics will be proven right: Certainly, some television will get dumber and dumber. But then, it's also bound to get smarter and smarter, odder and odder, craftier and craftier. The nice thing about fracturing the culture like this is, we'll all disagree about which is the dumb stuff and which is the smart. Television will still be something to get excited about.