In a darkened part of the room I saw a small iridescent square of almost unbearable brilliance. It was the last episode of Matt Houston, the final segment of practical detection in a world gone magick. Paradoxically each episode is a series of events that can’t be recalled like the first time you must’ve noticed the delicate bone structure of your hand revealed in the television’s glow. Houston and the suspects cum victims are trapped in the tower of power, each saturated with suspicion and each unerringly scrambled by a magician’s murderous zeal. See it or miss it in a rapid acceleration from the immediate past to the present, Houston teases out a solution that threatens to escape into the domain of the fantastic. Who did it? But the first suspect returned to life from his own simulated death Matt Houston the series is thus terminated (why?), while Magnum still blots out precious Saturday nights. Matt may have collapsed under its own stylistic flexions, rendering itself unable to communicate with its generic imperatives. A genre that has wasted itself on Matt Houston’s last chance power drive and that now repeats itself ad infinitum in the maximum interchange ability of the Magnum format. Maximum interchange ability need not be confused with speed. Interchange ability guarantees a house production style while speed has unpredictable consequences. Speed is dynamised by an expansive stylistics. Matt Houston’s transgression was that it ignored the halting edges of the TV detective genre and flirted outrageously with the fantastic, with futuristic technology, pizza pie stereotypes and old boy humour.
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 The television. Ghetto-blaster has leopard skin upholstering, an ice dispenser and a telephone answering system that ensures the uninterrupted flow of Entertainment this Week, Rip Believe for riot, Countdown and so on. The TV dandy, having overshot the orbit of street credibility, risks everything by watching without a guide, in search of TV’s instant lotto effect. At certain times of the year social relations are consigned to a system of ratings wars. Alt conventional attacks upon the institution of television have revolved around the unilateral nature of TV’s communication. It transmits but brooks no reply. ‘There is no need to imagine-it as a state periscope spying on everyone’s private life -the situation as it stands is more efficient than that. It is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other, that they are definitely isolated in the face of a speech without response.” 2 But isolation is no longer one of the effects of television. It tends instead to a neo-tribalism, a delirious and communal revelling in special effects, the gathering and sharing of gossip and data, the proliferation of cross as pure fascination. (Did you know that Rich Little, America’s premier impressionist, was called in to dub over David Niven’s voice in his last three movies because David Niven was so ill that he sounded like someone else?) Previously only the star or auteur attracted investigation in depth, now every credit from producer to makeup artist yields its own momentum, pushing enquiry into other serials, other networks and other media. Delineations and interfaces between programmes and media are scanned and wiped as rapidly as the lines of the video image itself.
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