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ON THE EDGE: Watch and learn

TV writer defends tube

Originally published 04:10 a.m., September 5, 2008, updated 02:56 p.m., September 5, 2008

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There's wasting time [-] and then there's wasting time productively. We all could use a little advice regarding the latter, uh, inactivity. Happily, Jeff Alexander, author of "A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know From Watching Television," is here to help. The book is not, to be sure, an empirical, data-bolstered attempt to upend conventional wisdom, a la Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter."

Rather, it's a comic history of scripted television, parceled out in neat little life-application chapters: among them school, work, relationships and death - what Mr. Alexander, 38, calls the "life cycle of a human being."

The book is a "A Purpose-Driven Life" for TV junkies.

It did require extensive research, of a sort.

Mr. Alexander, who writes TV criticism for the blog Television Without Pity, has an unnervingly encyclopedic memory of a lot of terrifically bad TV shows. Readers, how many of you remember the one-season-only CBS series "Whiz Kids," about a group of teenage computer hackers?

Anybody?

How about its network-mate of a similar vintage, "Square Pegs," starring a young Sarah Jessica Parker?

The book's epigraph is a quote, via the movie "Good Night, Good Luck," from a frightfully portentous Edward R. Murrow to the effect that the worthiness of television will turn on the question of whether it can do more that just entertain us. It has the potential to teach, illuminate and even inspire us, provided that "humans are determined to use it to those ends."

With his tongue pointed toward, if not planted in, his cheek, Mr. Alexander says we humans have met the Murrow standard - just not in the earnest, C-SPAN-y way the famed journalist imagined.

What was "Beverly Hillbillies" fame have experienced far less culture shock if they had owned a television?