There seems to be a general idea that reading is better for you than tv, which I'd tend to disagree with. Both can be junk. My kids watch tv and know how to watch tv, better than many adults, I think. My son was playing nintendo games quite a lot, then without any prompting from us, started reading books instead--dozens of them, the magic treehouse chapter books, which are good (I read a couple, since he was delighted that he saw me lookiung at one). He's in first grade, and I'm proud he can manage his interests like that without my making rules about it. When he got home from halloween he counted his candy, then charted it in bar graphs by class and type. He enjoys his candy museum and has no plan to eat any of it.

    Excuse my admiration of my own kids. But I think it's a worthwhile excercise to try to find the good in things, leave the rest, rather than set yourself above it all. And trying to keep pop culture from kids is a losing battle--I try to innoculate them, let them learn to digest it. We're in a good phase now, and enjoying it, since there's always some trouble to come.

   And I really think it's shallow all the British stuff people put above American tv. It only looks more elevated, imho. All that Howard's End type garbage, those guys who wrote about English real estate. E.M. Forster's reputation grew more the less he wrote. And there are things in Brideshead Revisited that seem to have come from a How To Write A Novel textbook (although it's still better than any Forster stuff). Green Acres was a very sophisticated and deep comic premise, by comparison. There's good stuff nearly everywhere people are making stuff, but you have to look to find that out.