Cheryl Truman on books

I may have spoken too quickly about the last book from the arch TV site Television Without Pity. A newer try, A TV Guide to Life: How I Learned Everything I Needed to Know from Watching Television (Penguin, $14) by Jeff Alexander, a TWOP writer, arrived yesterday.

And yes, it does have the appropriately evil yet literate tone of somebody who has been through college, possibly even the wilds of graduate school, and yet occasionally lets the TV remote wander to the musings of Shanna Moakler and Chris Jericho on VH-1’s “I Love the New Millennium.” If you don’t know who Shanna Moakler and Chris Jericho are, you’re not spending enough time either Web-surfing, watching TV or reading: I can’t help you there. (Well, OK, then: the tabloid-friendly but surprisingly funny beauty queen known for her battles with Paris Hilton, and the WWE wrestler and occasional singer. A working knowledge of pop culture: so valuable.)

It’s not the book you show off with, and yet, on a Kentucky Saturday afternoon in which the humidity and the temperature are waged in a battle to your death, it’s appropriate sofa-slouch reading.

In example, this description of the Fox show “House,” starring the inimitable Hugh Laurie, who is great as the irascible doctor (I think “irascible doctor” is a trademarked description for House), but — trust me on this, as I had a lot of time to kill while housebound with two youngsters — even better as the daffy Prince George on “Blackadder.” (If you’re reading this, I’m going to trust you have either a Netflix subscription, or a working knowledge of classic BBC comedies, or both. Because while I can take a stab at explaining the appeal of Chris Jericho — which is the quality of being both fully engaged in WWE antics while at the same time viewing them from a sneering distance and wondering, really, how long he has to take these falls before some other line of work will take off — you need to do some of the lifting, or at least watching, yourself.)

In any case, the book’s description of Gregory House, M.D.:

” … House decides on a course of treatment by asking himself a series of questions, just like any other doctor. These questions are:

1. How is the patient lying to me?

2. How is the patient’s family lying to me?

3. What do the other doctors think? Because the opposite is probably true.

4. Where’s my Vicodin?

And so lives are saved. See? Being a doctor is easy!”

Of course, this is not all you get. There are elaborate notes on set construction, or why the Huxtables’ living room did not look like the Conners’, TV couples, how TV characters “work,” and of course the great TV path of instruction on the path of child-rearing:

“Arnold Jackson, Alex P. Keaton, and the Soprano kids are cautionary tales of what can happen in the homes of parents who let their kids sharpen their wits on them.

“That’s why kids should be kept away from reruns of Family Ties and Roseanne, and be steered instead toward The Cosby Show. Cliff Huxtable’s kids occasionally ventured the odd retort directed at tehir parents, but everyone in the house was fully aware that goine into a battle of wits with Cliff was like going into a firefight unarmed.”

So, are we clear?

Be this: Cliff Huxtable.

Not this: Roseanne Conner, the “Family Ties” parents of Alex P. and Mallory Keaton, Tony Soprano (although this was the first time anybody ever ventured the critical observation that young Anthony Junior had any wits to sharpen on anybody, ever, and the last time we saw Meadow she couldn’t even parallel park the luxury car Daddy bought her).