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TV happens. And once it's happened, it's gone. When it's gone, you move on, no tears, no tantrums, no videotape.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.

I find that on serialized television it's wiser to hit the ground and look forward, and take the cues from the writers and the events happening, otherwise you just tie yourself in knots.

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.

With the DVR, I was mostly writing about it as a good thing in giving us the choice of when and how to watch things. But there's what we lose in the bargain, which is the collective spectacle. 'Did you see Jay Leno last night?'

The idea of a 'happening' is that there is little distance between the viewer and it, whatever 'it' is. It's an experience that's on-going and evolving.

The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.

Life is so fast these days, and we're exposed to so much information. Television makes us a witness to such misery.

With TV, you're in people's houses every night. And you have so much time to tell stories. I don't know why I didn't do it before.