Many people I know spend a great deal of time lamenting the deterioration of our society. The news has shifted from reporting to opining and entertaining. Politicians are sleazier and sleazier. Crime is up. Education is down. And our popular culture is dumbing America noticeably.

As one who was trained as an historian, I often find it necessary to point out that these things come and go in cycles. That the so called "news" today may be bad, but the same kind of scandal-centric infotainment was all the rage back when Hearst's papers inspired the term "yellow journalism." That Clinton was hardly the first President to be accused of inappropriate liaisons while residing in the White House... nor the first to be re-elected with that reputation. That crime is always going up... and down... and up... and down. That Johnny, by and large, can read. That our pop culture is just as varied in its quality today as it ever has been... but that the good selections from the past have survived in our memories while the inane selections have been conveniently forgotten.

I stand by these observations. By and large, the world is a better place today than it was ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago. A hundred years ago, the average life span in America was what, forty-eight years old? It's now in the seventies. Sure, AIDS is bad and cancer worse, but so were polio and TB and smallpox back in the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The world political situation is a bit edgy these days (is that a gross understatement?), but do you remember the cold war and fears of nuclear armageddon a not-too-distant decade-and-a-half ago? Not so long ago, we were taught to "duck and cover" because we lived in a world gone mad. The world may not be sane right now, but my point is that not all things are always getting worse. We simply don't always acknowledge to ourselves where things have gotten better or are getting better.

Still, every once in a while, I find something to remind me that in some respects, we are in a "trough" for various quality cycles. Take television writing, and sitcoms in particular. Sure, there have always been bad shows and good shows, relatively speaking. But the writing for the past ten years has been arguably awful, and there's little sign of improvement (for now).

I want to take a moment here to talk about the Dick Van Dyke Show.

What is the best written sitcom today? I'm going to go with "Frasier." Formulaic, certainly, just like any sitcom must be. But, there's a lot of cleverness that manages to come through even within the constraints of the formula. Do you think there's better writing in a sitcom today? Please comment below, as I'd love to know.

During a recent trip along the West Coast, my family and I were staying at a hotel and we chanced to watch some television one night. We don't have a television feed at home (long story), and haven't had one for about three years. There is something very liberating about not having television at home. Something isolating, as well. So, for the first time in a while, we surfed through what cable had to offer, and found the Dick Van Dyke Show on Nick at Night.

The episode involved a golf outing where Rob (Dick Van Dyke) encountered a fellow who used to date Rob's wife Mary (Mary Tyler Moore) back in college. Unbeknownst to Rob, the fellow is now a priest. The priest doesn't realize that the Mary he talks about is the Mary who is married to Rob. As the episode unfolds, Rob confronts Mary about the priest (neither one knows that he's a priest, remember), Mary invites the priest over for dinner, Rob invites his female officemate to dinner as a blind date for the priest, and much hilarity ensues.

This is sitcom plot number five. There are only seven, I'm told. This plot is the comedy of insufficient information and incorrect assumptions.

I was expecting the withheld information (the priest's identity, Mary's identity, et al) to be kept from the participants for the duration of the episode, which is a common ploy these days. But instead, the characters figured out the errors of their respective ways pretty quickly, which was both MUCH more believable and MUCH more funny. Everyone copped to their various mistakes, and moved forward while still providing a great deal of laughs at a ridiculous-but-plausible situation. The writing was positively brilliant.

The episode then threw me for another loop in the epilogue, when Mary brings out an old shoebox of letters and poems that the priest had written her back in college. She reads Rob a sonnet. Here I was expecting the sonnet to be particularly bad or humorous. Instead, it was... beautiful. Touching. A completely non-funny, totally romantic love poem. And Mary makes a very interesting observation about the sonnet that is also not funny, but appropriate. The result? A sitcom episode that was both hilarious and deep. It was moving as well as entertaining.

And this was a typical episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show. This wasn't a "Very Special Episode, in which Rob Discovers He Has the Disease of the Week." While Frasier (or the sitcom of your choice) may have writing that is above average for today's television drivel, the characters are all caricatures. They react neither the way we would react, ourselves, nor the way we would hope we would react. As a result, they don't engage us. Without engagement, there is no tension. Without tension, the humor is forced.

(Why do I hear the voice of Yoda in the back of my head just now, saying "pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, suffering leads to pain, pain leads to codependency," etc., etc.?)

I do not subscribe to the philosophy that everything is getting worse all the time. Nor will I go so far as to say that television writing is on a one-way slide into oblivion. Except when it comes to Saturday Night Live. Nonetheless, I think television humor has become substantially less sophisticated in recent years. "Edgy" or "cynical" is not the same as sophisticated.

One thing about being in the trough, though... things will get better. Someday soon, this may even be said of the Great American Sitcom.