ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 19, 1996 TAG: 9612190021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Tom Shales
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
The first two questions people ask TV critics are ``How much TV do you watch a week?'' and ``What do you watch for fun?''
I don't know how other critics handle it, but I've never been able to figure out how much TV I watch a week, so I just pick a figure between 25 and, say, 100 hours. But as to what I watch for fun, that's easier. And yes, though TV critics may seem mean and cranky, they still watch plenty of TV because they want to and not just because they have to.
Many of the things this critic watches for fun are, fortunately, great shows that many critics, as well as viewers, have praised to the skies and made part of weekly life: ``Seinfeld,'' which is faltering without its co-founder Larry David but which still is funny in ways that seem wholly its own; ``Frasier'' with its near-perfect cast doing agile parlays from wittiness to zaniness and back again; and ``The Drew Carey Show,'' which somehow manages to be broadly goofy in subtle, sneaky ways.
Other extremely reliable sources of merriment: ``Late Night With Conan O'Brien,'' MTV's cheerfully inane ``Singled Out,'' the new season of ``Sesame Street'' on public TV, old movies on the Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics channels, Jay Leno's monologue on ``The Tonight Show,'' and the first 15 minutes of ``Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.''
For unadulterated vintage fun, there's always ``Nick at Nite'' on the Nickelodeon cable channel, though the way it mixes true classics like ``The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' with such mere outdated junk as ``Happy Days'' and ``The Addams Family'' makes it virtually impossible to spend an entire Nite with Nick. The centerpiece of its rerun schedule remains, of course, ``I Love Lucy,'' which age cannot wither nor custom stale.
The milk industry's slogan used to be ``You never outgrow your need for milk.'' Some of us never outgrow our need for ``Lucy.''
Earlier this year, Nick at Nite introduced an entire new channel devoted to reruns: TV Land, available now on many cable systems. But the results so far have been disappointing. The only classics on the lineup are ``The Phil Silvers Show'' and ``The Ed Sullivan Show,'' the latter having been sliced and diced into half-hour mishmashes that mish as often as they mash.
Merely surfing - doing laps around the channel lineup with your remote control - is the funsiest way to watch TV now, for critic or for normal person, especially during those long oodles of hours when there's nothing on worth watching in its entirety. And - now and then - the diligent and tireless surfer will come upon a complete surprise that knocks him happily for a loop.
Surfing my local cable system the other day, I experienced just such a loop knocker. I stumbled across the NASA channel (available on some systems around the country) and found that it was showing hours and hours - and hours and hours and hours - of footage of the Earth shot from an orbiting space vehicle. Now and then they'd tell you which part of the Earth you were seeing and when the footage was made, but it didn't matter. It was as close as most of us will ever get to really being up there - the ultimate act of Getting Away from It All.
I found myself watching - and watching and watching and watching - and then loading and reloading the VCR to record hour upon hour. And now I have a stack of tapes labeled ``Earth from Space'' that show nothing but our fine figure of a planet from various angles and locations and distances.
Maybe this isn't exactly ``fun'' viewing, but from now on, whenever life gets too abrasive or, for that matter, whenever television gets too abrasive, I can pop in a cassette and look at the Earth and blissfully zone out on this literally heavenly sight. It's not just peace on earth, it's peace as earth. It's earth as peace.
Thank you, Lord, for television.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB