The cliché, of course, is that American television is awful.  You know the saw: bad sitcoms, predictable dramas, tame dialogue, soft characters.  About four years before it was even invented, people started hating television.  Now, not so much – there's a lot on that very good, and television's blood rival, feature films, have become mostly movies about robots, so TV – with its Mad Men and The Wire and 30 Rock and Weeds just seems more sophisticated...