Although the title of this book is not intended as a provocation, I am aware it could be taken as one, oddly enough, by two groups of people with quite disparate views. Noël Carroll has documented and analyzed a philosophical tradition of resistance to mass art, including television, whose exponents include critics and theorists such as Dwight MacDonald, Clement Greenberg, R. G. Collingwood, T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. I expect that, on the one hand, those who are aligned with this tradition will scoff at the idea that television can afford and...