Lileks has a way of tossing off a trenchant little nugget of arts criticism right in the middle of a Bleat about something completely different. Like yesterday:
People talk about the golden age of television (grainy, overexposed hard-to-watch kinetescopes of big braying vaudevillians in drag) or the golden age of sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family) and I suppose that’s correct. But TV today is better than TV ever was. There was never a show like “The Wire.” There was never anything as brutal and knowing as “The Office.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would have made no sense in 1967. It makes perfect sense today.
For the most part–with some exceptions–I think he’s right. But the exceptions are important, and worth remembering. It’s true that the Golden Age of Television was mostly Milton Berle and low-budget westerns and mysteries. But it was also Ernie Kovacs, An Evening With Fred Astaire, No