When people in the office talk about oh….American Idol or The Bachelor or The Big Bang Theory I’m the person mentally rolling their eyes and cranking up Mr iPod so high that the International Space Station is all “Hey, mind knocking up the Duran Duran fest? Got any Beastie Boys or something?” And no, it’s NOT because my co-workers have dubbed me “Girl Sheldon”…yes as in Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory….sighhh…

I do watch TV. Honestly, my Twitter feed for the last week has been ranting about The Brittas Empire on You-Tube….and yeah, okay so maybe that wasn’t the best example. I do watch Hoarders and Intervention and their ilk. But my fictional/scripted TV preferences aren’t on available with my Comcast cable package. So Jon E. Lewis and Penny Stempel’s Cult TV: The Comedies seemed like a good bet when I spied it on the library shelf. Notice the seemed? Good!

Photos of Rowan Atkinson as the Elizabethan Blackadder and a lovely shot of Red Dwarf crew circa Series 4 (so heart Chris Barrie!) aside, a large part of the entries just didn’t hit my cult tv radar. I grew up in the 1970s/1980s. I watched A LOT of television (network and PBS). I loved television. But perhaps my definition of cult tv is defective like so many other things in my life. Because have you ever heard of this tiny, barely known show called….The Cosby Show? Or The Andy Griffith Show? Golden Girls? Cheer? Green Acres? Happy Days? Barney Miller? The Simpsons? The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Bewitched? Family Ties? Night Court? The Bob Newhart Show? FRIENDS? SEINFIELD!!?!?!?! Freaking Nancy Sinatra admitted to staying home to watch the end of FREAKING SEINFIELD the night her father Frank died!

<cue Gwen’s head exploding all over 14 foot high living room walls leaving Blacklight to puzzle out how to clean them…>

How can a giant or classic hit be considered a cult? Cult because the masses adored them? That’s a major religion! Why not cull these hit entries and create a companion volume TV LAND Presents: Classic Hits or some such nonsense? Seriously? The Beverly Freaking Hillbillies? A show that had an episode that was one of the most watched television episodes until the mid-freaking 1980s? What’s next?  The inclusion of such hits totally takes away from reading about things that like Spitting Image or Dad’s Army or The Good Life that might have only hit our side of the pond thanks to public television.

The idea of a book devoted to cult television comedies is a good one, don’t get me wrong. But come up with strict guidelines (American cult television classics or British cult television classics) and then tell me all about them. Break down the shows season by season, get me to want to hunt down the DVDs on Netflix or scour the libraries ancient VHS collections or even YouTube to see what I missed. Don’t hand me something that dominated an era (am looking at YOU Cosby Show and Cheers and The Simpsons) and tell me it’s a cult thing. Turn me onto to something I’ve missed/longed for or don’t even bother. As the site tag line says “There is just NOT enough time for books…” especially when the book is a disappointment..