And now the big wrap-up; roll credits

Farewells are rugged. They usually disappoint and fall short of expectations.

I thought about paying Larry David to write this one. You know, on the sly, with my name at the top so I would get credit for his trademark funny lines and neuroses. But I couldn’t afford him, and besides, he didn’t do that well with the last episode of “Seinfeld.”

Writing a tell-all was another possibility, but I have nothing to tell. I could have exited sort of like Jack Paar and his dog did from “The Tonight Show” many years ago, telling my cats, “Time to go home, Sport and Percy.” But we are home.

I also considered having myself wake up at the end of this column and discover the last quarter-century had been a dream. Or copying the “Dallas” finale with a reverse of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

You can see the problem. Columnists and their regular readers have a special, almost familial relationship, even though the communication is largely one-way. So leaving isn’t easy. There are consequences to weigh.

The likelihood of Gray Davis and me vanishing in the same year, for example, might be too much for Californians to handle. What am I, stone? I feel these things.

I worry, too, about bailing before President Bush starts flying around the track like Seabiscuit with panting Democrats in pursuit, before NBC reinvents Pfc. Jessica Lynch as Sgt. York and before television’s talking shrunken heads have solved the JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant cases. All of their gratuitous, fruitless round-table squabbles, their contentious exercises in futility, and me not here to mock them? I don’t bear that guilt lightly.

On the other hand, I’ve kept at the wheel and hung on against all odds, even when irate readers tried to have me recalled after some of my most provocative think pieces (I didn’t really mean it about “Laverne & Shirley”).

So this is it, the big drumroll, an announcement that I’m making and explaining here instead of on Jay Leno’s show, where much of America’s business is now conducted:

This is my last column as TV critic for the Los Angeles Times. Bags packed, one foot out the door, a 25-year gig ending.

Nope, I won’t have television to kick around anymore. No more torturous summer seasons, fall seasons, mid-seasons and mid-mid-seasons to blast to smithereens as they break old ground and call it innovation. No more cookie-cuttered “reality” shows to smack around. No more inane talk shows to club maliciously. No more self-parodying local newscasters to ridicule as they slip on one banana peel after another, then get up, dust themselves off and walk straight into a lamppost.

No more cheap shots from me, nor cheap jokes (please hold your applause).

By the way, no feeding pigeons from park benches, either, although I confess that when I see a stick on the ground now, my brain tells me to sit a spell and whittle it.

I’ve received quite a few e-mails from well-wishers saying I’ve “earned” retirement, as if dozing in the sun came next, en route to diapered codgerdom and getting cranked into the ground. And on the day the paper ran its story about my retirement, I received a brochure on cremation from the Neptune Society.

Don’t I get a coffee break first? Some time to recede into the darkness with my madness and memories like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard”? Isn’t this the spot in my movie where the music crescendos, the schmaltz thickens and my entire career flashes before my eyes before it all ends?

Actually, I’m just changing jobs, retiring from the paper as TV critic to join the literati as a mystery novelist (my dream occupation) and co-write with a cable news reporter a nonfiction book whose theme will be: No news is not good news. Do you and I agree about that? I thought so.

Above all, writing a column is an enormous ego thing, even when some of the e-mails advocate rearranging my anatomy. To be disliked enough to maim and disfigure? Well, what can I say? I’m mighty proud.

Then why would I abandon such a splendid line of work with great perks that include working at home in shorts and sandals, unshaven, unkempt and about as unfettered as an employee of a large corporation can be? One that I began nearly 33 years ago as TV critic for the late, beloved Louisville Times during a meteoric rise in journalism that first included memorable stops as a reporter in White Bear Lake, Minn., Silvis, Ill., and Jeffersonville, Ind.?

The greatest pleasure of this job -- I’m sure my predecessor, the esteemed Cecil Smith, will agree -- has always been exposure to work that’s good, and on occasion so extraordinary and exhilarating that I tear up with emotion in its presence. Imagine, a grown man doing that. I’m speaking of TV so heroic -- given the powerful forces exerted against creativity in an industry that throws ticker tape parades for mediocrities and worse -- that it’s an honor and privilege to celebrate it.

The most painful part is encountering work that makes me tear up for other reasons, a list of lowlifes expanding by the moment, it seems, as television itself continues swelling into obesity like a fat belly tumbling over a belt buckle.

There’s no bigger bore than someone who goes on and on about “the good old days.” As someone who’s lived through a few of them, I can tell you they weren’t all that good when it comes to TV. As I’ve written many times, there is more on TV that’s worthy today than ever. It’s up to you to pick your spots.

When I first started on this beat, there wasn’t much to it -- ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, local stations and a few tumbleweeds, with cable yet to spring from a phone booth as Superman.

Now TV is so panoramic that an entire army of types like me (yes, team coverage) could not get to everything that should be written about with a critical eye.

The medium’s technology has sped forward, often faster than our ability to measure and harness it, flinging open one door after another. The wider the access, though, the more riffraff that streams in with the crowd, meaning there is also much, much more TV that is deadly.

Yes, performing autopsies on TV’s biggest stiffs can be great fun for a writer with a sharp scalpel. But first you have to watch them. All of them. And no fast-forwarding through this excruciating process, either.

Some of my present discontent is surely generational, and also the lament of someone who has simply had enough and is asking -- no begging -- to be beamed up to the mother ship.

When the pain by far exceeds the pleasure, though, and the job is no longer much fun, it’s time to leave and do something else. Regarding my successor, I can say only that Larry Flynt has not yet applied.

As my last scene ends, finally, this column is my thanks to everyone, my gratitude and my goodbye, at least from this soapbox.

Roll credits. It’s Aug. 8, 2003, and I’m out of here.