Smartest man alive. Right here.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

What a great article! I'm actually surprised he doesn't mention "Arrested Development," though. If there's a smarter show on tv right now, one that offers more rewards for paying very close attention to dialogue and shifting content and multiple plot lines, I don't know what it is. Shows like AD and, to a lesser extent, The O.C. not only reference plot lines that stretch back over several episodes or a season, but reference individual lines of dialogue, often quite brief. (E.g. Season 2's finale has George Michael repeating his quip from early in Season 1, "I like the way they think," when Maeby alludes to "Les Cousins Dangereaux.")
Of course, more and more Americans are spending time online these days, just as TV is becoming more cognitively engaging. Who said irony was dead?