Time & Perspective Quote by Art Buchwald

Buchwald’s line lands because it flatters the reader’s disgust while quietly indicting the ritual of disgust itself. The joke is built on a neat reversal: “lowest ebb” is supposed to be the bottom, a fixed point. He turns it into a moving target, a comedy of false floors. The laugh comes from recognizing how cultural pessimism works in practice: we announce we’ve seen the worst, then keep watching long enough to be proven wrong.

The intent isn’t just to dunk on television; it’s to expose a cycle of moral and aesthetic panic that mass media reliably triggers. The subtext: taste is fragile, broadcasters are shameless, and audiences are complicit. “A new program comes along” sounds like an accident of scheduling, as if mediocrity is an act of nature rather than a marketplace response. That’s Buchwald’s cynicism: the medium doesn’t merely decline; it innovates in decline because attention is the only metric that pays.

Context matters. Buchwald wrote from an era when network TV was a shared national campfire and a shared national complaint. That monoculture made it easy to treat “television” as a single, lumbering entity capable of sinking. His quip anticipates the modern content deluge: infinite channels, infinite niches, infinite opportunities to feel superior and entertained at once. It’s not an anti-TV rant so much as an anti-complacency warning shot: if you keep measuring culture by how low it can go, you’ll miss the more unsettling point that “the bottom” is whatever we’re willing to accept next week.