Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair.

A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.

Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair.

'American Idol' is sometimes lumped with reality shows and it has that element - folks-next-door battling it out in a contest. But instead of fighting leeches, bugs, parasites and each other, as on CBS's 'Survivor' and other shows that imitate it, the 'American Idol' contestants, of course, sing.

'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age.

ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals.

Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.

Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.

In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not.

In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.

Jerry Seinfeld is amazing in many ways, not the least of them his ability to find humor, and convincing us to find it, too, in the million-and-two details about modern life that under different circumstances might send us into paroxysms of rage.

Larry David's armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won't win, but he'll enjoy losing.

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots.

Late-night television is like the cereal aisle in the supermarket: too many choices. Also, too many 'different' brands that really aren't different at all.

Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive.

Maybe Larry Kings cannot thrive or even survive in a world where the norms for discourse are rage, vehemence and character assassination. King wanted to be liked, not feared; admired, not loathed.

People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns.

Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.

Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed.

Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.

The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.

Tom Snyder was big enough to fill the night with talk and his own persona. The Snyder we saw on TV was not a replica of the real guy; it was the real guy.

Tom Snyder was born to broadcast. He loved television and it loved him back. In that, he was a member of a vanishing breed, especially as narrowcasting displaces broadcasting, 'online' replaces 'on the air,' and any Tom, Dick or Mary can be monarch of a desktop domain, uplinking themselves to satellites in space.

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

You know you're getting older when - well, first off, when you read almost any story that begins 'You know you're getting older when.' But you also know it when you not only never heard of the musical guest on a given 'Saturday Night Live' but never heard of the host, either.

Your humble critic confesses that he has been wrestling with 'weight issues' since leaving college lo these, uh, several years ago, so it's hard to be receptive to the moralistic scolding and patronizing encouragement offered endlessly by the allegedly well-meaning.

Mortals must do what they are here to do creatively or they will become cranky.

I recorded my hair this morning, tonight I'm watching the highlights.

Hair is also a problem. I remember once, when I was reporting from Beirut at the height of the civil war, someone wrote in to the BBC complaining about my appearance.

I hated Chris, my brother. I would pull his hair and kick him, until one day my father gave him permission to fight back. I'll be apologizing to him for the rest of my life.

I really don't like when things are all polished and perfect - the perfect love story and the hair is perfect.

I dyed my hair blonde in that movie, so my head doesn't match my grill.

I like to sing in the car with the windows rolled down and hair blowing all over my face.

When I was 12, every little girl in Russia was trying to wear her hair like mine and playing tennis.

I have the biggest hair in the world - and that's official!

You know, I do not think it is necessarily looks, I do not think I am the prettiest girl... Everyone has something that is their asset, some have the hair, some have the cheekbones, others have the lips. But once you know what is your asset, then you should capitalize on it.

If you look over the years, the styles have changed - the clothes, the hair, the production, the approach to the songs. The icing to the cake has changed flavors. But if you really look at the cake itself, it's really the same.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

I was going to buy a book on hair loss, but the pages kept falling out.

Martin Jarvis was to have played the part originally but I think I had longer hair or something, I know not.

It was just using the liquid shampoo - the Russians have one very similar to the stuff we use on the Shuttle - you just wet your hair with it and then wipe it out.

I've been burn when it comes to my hair that it ain't no joke.

I really fought to make my character not a stereotype. I play a soap star with dyed blonde hair.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

I grew up in Dallas, with cowboys. I was the only guy in sixth grade with long hair and an earring. Let's just say I got a lot of, er, flak for being different.

My singing is part of me, like my stoutness, or my light hair, or my poor eyesight.

Benji usually tries to match his hair with his underwear, and you know how he had the pink hair for a while well we caught him in a pink thong one day!

Yes, exercise is the catalyst. That's what makes everything happen: your digestion, your elimination, your sex life, your skin, hair, everything about you depends on circulation. And how do you increase circulation?