James's top 5:

1. "Parks and Recreation" (NBC)
2. "Louie" (FX)
3. "Homeland" (Showtime)
4. "Breaking Bad" (AMC)
5. "Mad Men" (AMC)

Special Categories:

1. What was the show of the year? It was No. 6 on my list, because of an uneven first season, but the show that will play on my mental highlight reel as defining 2012 will be "Girls." Great TV is about voice above all, and not only does Lena Dunham have it to spare, she found a way to translate it into a brutally funny, messy, moving treatment of a comedy antiheroine.

2. What was the best scene? Can I have more than one? Drama category: Carrie's devastating, intimate interrogation of Brody in "Homeland's" "Q&A." And comedy division: Leslie Knope and her campaign staff mincing across the skating rink at her campaign event in "Parks and Recreation's" "The Comeback Kid." Gloria Estefan's "Get on Your Feet" will make me laugh on command the rest of my life.

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It was a week to boggle the mind, a week to make history -- a week, in short, to totally fuck up year-in-review roundups. Forget politics stopping at the water's edge; the principle that was truly upended this past week is that no real news should occur between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2. Then again, the last week in the news really was the year in the news, what with the simultaneous climaxes of the impeachment story and the bombing of -- oh, you know, that luminous green country with no people in it. Why bother rounding up 1998? We spent a year there last week.

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The dying, however, at least have the excuse of ill preparation and understandable stress. The living, compelled to offer a sign-off, are on the hook. All of which is to say that I have no proper, Wildean or Wellesian last words to offer you in my last media column for Salon: no big catchy answer, grand wrap-up, fiery, Old Testament jeremiad. Partly because I'm too young to have the perspective and too old to have the arrogance to do it. Partly because I'm not retiring, just moving on to do related writing for a different master.

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This is not a lament: The IPO was announced long before I jumped, and I was hardly going to buy a country -- certainly not a good country -- with my minor stake in it. What's a little sad, really, is that I'll be missing out on my little piece of the 1999 Zeitgeist, the chance, when I'm gray and doddering, to be like one of those old guys who really did do the Charleston and swallow goldfish in the '20s. More important, even though I wouldn't have been Croesus-ized, I could have at least let people think I had. Now I will not have the chance to be mentioned in a Dave Kansas conversation.

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O.J. Simpson, Mr. Higgins reported, was slumped down in his Bronco in the driveway of his home; we couldn't see him, from our helicopter-cam vantage point, but Mr. Higgins said he could. Was he still alive? Did he really have a gun? Was he pointing it at anyone? "I see O.J.," Mr. Higgins told Jennings. "He looks scared." Then he announced, "Baba Booey to y'all!" and cut out.

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EW isn't alone; the show's just-opened curtain call is receiving perhaps the greatest huzzahs ever to greet a summer of reruns. (The Washington Post's Tom Shales writes, "Some reruns do seem too grand for the term 'rerun.'") Tom Carson in Esquire hailed the rer -- sorry, encores -- last month; more recently, Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times, "It just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century," which in turn may be the greatest work of critical hyperbole in, oh, the past couple weeks.

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Her love life notwithstanding, Coulter has been busily flirting with political office, giving substance to long-flying rumors that she would challenge Connecticut Rep. Christopher Shays in the Republican primary. She declared May 24 on C-Span's "Washington Journal" that "someone will run (against Shays), and it might be me," and her July column, George editor Richard Blow said, will be "about the temptations of running."

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So imagine our surprise that a year later the headlines are filled with media enterprises cleaning up their acts, or at least being handed a mop by the judge. Police perp walks for the cameras were struck down in court. Jenny Jones was hit with a $25 million judgment. The Supreme Court prevented reality-TV shows from accompanying police into private homes (and, just Tuesday, rejected a related appeal from CNN). TV episodes and entire series have been yanked for violence, while TV wrestling was essentially accused of murdering a man when wrestler Owen Hart died in a stunt accident: "Fatal fall blamed on competing cable shows," read one headline.

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People have always collected and traded; what's different today is the degree of intensity and
mercantilism. Everything -- Grandma's punch bowl, the kids' Furbies -- is now a potential profit source;
everyone either is a seller or ought to be thinking damn hard about it. When "The Phantom Menace" came out, for instance, collecting experts advised not to expect a big payoff from saving Darth Maul figurines in the original packages -- because everybody else has already had the same idea. Twenty years ago, relatively few people kept unopened Star Wars toys; today, why else would you buy one? (Think how many fools bought Pet
Rocks and actually opened the boxes!)

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I'm not saying there's no decent radio in New York, though its quality is inversely proportional to its receivability in my apartment (like free-form WFMU, which I have to catch online). And I freely admit I'm making gross generalizations. But gross generalization is what makes or breaks radio, by its passive nature: You turn on the radio to leave it on, so if you find a station -- or the entire radio palette -- disappointing in general, you're not going to turn it on at all.

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It was only minutes after news of the shooting broke that news outlets started turning to Conyers students for their voices and details. What was the kid like? "He always talks in class, and he's always disturbing people." Yet, "He seemed quiet. He'd never do anything like this." But of course, "We weren't surprised." Cable-news reporters reached out to teens in Georgia and even in Columbine for quotable, Trench-Coat-able details: Who were his friends? What were his interests? Why is this happening to your generation?

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I know you're busy people -- what with the businesses to run, the employees to surveil, the FBI disrupting your children's weddings and so forth. But have you at least considered a third-party run for president? You there! Reading "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"! Have you no sense of civic duty?

You may never see a better opportunity. Since the impeachment drama ended, leaving a news vacuum for a long-running story, the political media has confronted the possibility that the designated substitute -- the 2000 primaries -- may be over months before they technically begin. Amid the ensuing ennui, which will only get worse, any half-interesting freelance loon will receive a grateful groundswell of attention that will make Colin Powell's near acclamation in 1996 look like a public stoning. Your only limits are your bank account and your willingness to go off your medication!

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The filmmaker and satirist, as is well known to fans of his films "Roger and Me" and "The Big One," has made a career of speaking truth to power -- well, not usually to power, but to the professional punching bags with whom the wise power surrounds itself. With the advent of his new TV show, "The Awful Truth" -- in which, notably, he confronted an HMO with a mock funeral for a patient for whom it had denied coverage -- one would assume a heightened readiness among the public relations profession, given Moore's weekly platform from which to make them take bullets for their bosses.

"It didn't take long to come up with a number of PR pros who had encountered him," said PRWeek's Jonah Bloom, who wrote the feature. "To be honest, experienced crisis PR pros are very unlikely to panic about an essentially humorous program -- it's their clients that panic."

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Jones went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times media reporter, author and host of public radio's "On the Media" (1993-97) and PBS's "Media Matters." But he started his career literally making the news: keying in "slugs" when the term meant a metal bar of type and not a short phrase summarizing an article. I thought about this a little when I shook his hand at the end of our lunch, realizing that I was going home to type my account on a nicely cushioned keyboard, in an ergonomically correct chair, where I would risk, at worst, a cramp, but not, oh, let's say, a searing geyser of magma.

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It's not quite made clear what precisely pains Schell about USA Today's decision, but we can venture a guess. Ads on Page 1 are no different, in terms of editorial corruption, from ads on Page 2. But they're pink flamingos on the steps of the Met. They're unseemly. They're not what our kind of people do. They appear -- to quote the coverage in both the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune -- "cheesy." And I for one applaud USA Today for introducing them.

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There is no global panic in Kurt Andersen's year 2000, just more Internet IPOs, reality television and a successful new theme park called BarbieWorld. No famine, just a general anomie pundits in USA Today are calling "third millennium malaise." No Rapture, just a Dolly-like science scandale involving electronic brain implants to make cats telepathic. And there's no riot and revolution (except for a bit of unpleasantness in Mexico that barely grazes the American consciousness), but the New Yorker columnist and Spy magazine founder has set this hyper-sharp satire of business, media and manners among that class of people who, had they come, would have been first up against the wall: the broadcasting, finance and technology professionals who through lunches and pulled-from-the-ass brainstorms determine the obsessions and dreams of the global consumeriat.

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Fast Company understands this. And that's why Fast Company is one of the smartest -- and scariest -- magazines around.

The National Magazine Award Fast Company received last month capped off an incredible first three years. The month before, Advertising Age named it Magazine of the Year; its ad pages jumped more than 50 percent in a year, and its circulation jumped from 100,000 to over 250,000. And like any hot start-up nowadays, it may cash in while the cash-in's good; owner Mort Zuckerman is reportedly shopping the magazine around, possibly to Condi Nast or another empire.

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