'Dragnet' (the 1951 original, transferred nearly intact from radio) served as a veritable template for all cop shows to come.

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• Tom Shales:

  You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on

• Tom Shales:

  Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reass

• Tom Shales:

  Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a real

• Tom Shales:

  By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major i

• Tom Shales:

  Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit i

• Tom Shales:

  Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the t

• Tom Shales:

  The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged

• Tom Shales:

  Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menager

• Tom Shales:

  Maybe Larry Kings cannot thrive or even survive in a world where the norms for discourse are rage,

• Tom Shales:

  'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most dist