“A television critic inevitably spends a fair amount of time bemoaning what is on television. My mother, especially after illness made it increasingly hard for her to read novels, was a reminder of the immense gift television can be. She had friends, visitors, and telephone calls, but there was also a continuous visual (she was a painter) and informational thirst that only television could assuage. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without television,’ was a sentence I often heard her utter.”