This is a small, squarish book with a long, gimicky title and lots of short little essaylets (the longest ones rarely top a full page). It's written by the people who brought you the website "Television Without Pity," where you can go to find recaps of episodes from current TV series that are *so* detailed you don't really need to watch the program to know what's going on. You'd expect (given the immersion in TV that the two authors must experience) that the book would be full of minute, inside-baseball details about shows that you never heard of and actors you barely remember. You'd expect (given the smart-aleck quality of much of "Teleivsion Without Pity") a lot of pot shots at easy targets: sitcom cliches, third-rate actors, and lame shows. You'd expect, in other words, the pop-culture-scholarship equivalent of a bowl of Lucky Charms: entertaining but insubstantial.

You'd be right . . . mostly. This *is* mostly just a well-produced exercise in professional-quality snarkiness: Like sitting around talking about TV with two very smart friends with wicked senses of humor who have spent *way* too much time in front of the set. It's great fun on that level if you care about TV, and handy for reading in the bathroom or the carpool line.

What's astonishing and delightful is the unexpected discovery that it's also *more* than that sometimes. Spread out over multiple entries are paens to long-forgotten, top-of-the-line shows like "Talk Soup" and "My So-Called Life," and appreciations of workmanlike shows that unspectacularly got the job done week after week (like "Wings"). The observations are short, sharp, and often surprising. Listen to the two thirtysomething female authors explain why they dislike Sex and the City or why "classic" sitcoms from the dawn of TV just aren't funny anymore, and you're seeing more than just high grade snarkiness. You're seeing serious cultural analysis subtly disguised as goofing around. You also realize, as you read your way through the book, that the authors have a subtle, finely honed sense of what makes a TV series good and why some go on being good while others lose their edge.

I checked this out of the library just for fun, but found myself wishing that the same team would write a more conventional, more in-depth book about quality TV and schlock TV and how to tell one from the other. Here's hoping . . .