I'm Off the Air

I have an announcement.  Beginning immediately, I will no longer comment on television shows or the television season.  I will likely include fantastically successful and incredibly disastrous TV shows on my annual list of winners and losers of the year,  but I'm not going to talk about the shows themselves in any other capacity.

Why?  Because I don't watch a lot of TV anymore.  In fact, I'm down to just a couple of aging ABC sitcoms ("The Middle" and "Modern Family") on Wednesday nights, one basic-cable series ("The Fosters," on ABC Family), CBS's Sunday news magazines "Sunday Morning" and "60 Minutes," and PBS's nightly newscast.  Now that most of its liberal commentators have lost their programs, I don't even watch MSNBC anymore.

Meanwhile, too many of the shows I used to watch have either ended their runs or gotten canceled. I spend the time I used to spend watching TV on the Internet now.  It would be silly at best and intellectually dishonest at worst for me to comment on television.  A television critic who doesn't watch a lot of TV is like an automotive journalist who doesn't drive often.

So that's it.  I won't be offering any comments on any new shows because I'm not really interested in seeing any of them, though, like most of you, I'll probably watch a few installments of Stephen Colbert's show out of curiosity to see how he does as himself, and I may offer an opinion about that, but otherwise I'm through. Fade to black. 

Or . . .