Schlock TV, Buffy’s religion, superheroes

Just because Howard Rosenberg has won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism doesn’t mean you should hold it against him. The longtime TV critic for the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Rosenberg exhibits all of the markings of a certified Pulitzer winner: cynicism and populism mixed with a healthy dose of liberalism.

Not So Prime Time: Chasing the Trivial on American Television (Ivan R. Dee, $26, 257 pages) is a collection of Mr. Rosenberg’s newspaper columns, cut into sections dealing with TV news, schlock television, and politics.

Of those three, it is his obsession with TV news that gets Mr. Rosenberg most exercised. He laments the state of local newscasts, the dilution of network news by its “infotainment” stepchildren (such as the “Today” show and “Prime Time Live”), and the steady merging of tabloids and traditional journalism.

Taking a decidedly fatalistic view, he laments, “If Lincoln had issued his document that freed slaves in rebelling states in the era of all-news channels instead of in 1863, they would have granted him half the screen, the rest to Laci Peterson’s memorial.”

And, “If Saddam Hussein and Michael Jackson had been taken into custody on the same day in 2003, the twenty-four hour news channels, local news, and perhaps the major networks too would have assigned the stories equal weight by splitting the screen and showing them simultaneously.”

Mr. Rosenberg should be forgiven if he sounds overly pessimistic. After all, he has to watch this stuff for a living.

On politics, he does many of the things one would expect of a West Coast liberal. He takes shots at Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and Fox News Channel. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political dominance clearly bothers him and, because he’s against the death penalty, he argues that executions should be televised.

But the charm of “Not So Prime Time” is that Mr. Rosenberg often strays from the liberal script and comes in at off-angles. He resents the rude treatment the media gave to Paula Jones and argues that private infidelities can yield important insight into the character of public officials.

Further, he is initially heartened by George W. Bush’s lack of eloquence on television, saying, “A president who is awkward and relatively transparent on camera is preferable to one willing to use his pizzazz and TV mastery to potentially deceive the public.”

At the end of the day, Howard Rosenberg loves television more than he loves political ideology. He believes in television’s importance and capacity to do good — so much so that he thinks of the president as “America’s Anchorman.”

It’s this love that causes him to hate most of what’s on television. And it’s what gives “Not So Prime Time” its pleasant and tangy bite.

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The one glaring area of omission in Mr. Rosenberg’s book is entertainment television, which he touches on only fleetingly. If he had dealt more extensively with TV fiction, he almost certainly would have come to the best show in the history of television: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

During its seven-year run, “Buffy” earned critical praise from the far corners of the land: TV critics, academics, theologians. The show spawned college courses and books such as James South’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale.”

The latest contribution to the raft of Buffy literature is Jana Riess’ What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide (Jossey-Bass, $14.95, 183 pages). The author sets about decoding and interpreting the religious symbolism and moral messages of the show. It is not a book for the uninitiated.

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