Dateline ran this ridiculous fluff piece last night about how everyone on TV is talking fast nowadays.

They drew the usual conclusions from this - there are more commercials now, people have shorter attention spans, everyone is copying off each other and trying to seem "smart and hip". But I'm not sure I was ever willing to grant their premise.

The examples they showed were specific scenes from a handful of shows, in many of which a character in the scene actually commented on how fast the other person was talking. They also showed a couple of clips from the 50s where people were talking very slowly and deliberately, but one of these was a John Wayne movie, and another was a comedian, I think Benny Hill, talking slowly for comedic effect.

Then they got Larry Gelbart on there to lament the increasing number of commercials and make all kinds of doomsday predictions about half-hour sitcoms soon being reduced to 15 minutes of actual content. But this is where they screwed up inexplicably - to underscore Gelbart's place in the pantheon of old-school slow-talking TV, they showed a clip from M*A*S*H where Hawkeye was having a total Groucho Marx moment.

It's amazing how neatly they managed to torpedo their own argument there. Groucho Marx was talkin' fast before Aaron Sorkin was even born. They seemed to be completely ignoring the screwball comedies of the 30s, a genre based almost entirely upon fast-talkin' dames.

So, like just about everything else in entertainment today, this isn't anything new. These things just move in cycles. Cynicism aside, what's wrong with being smart and hip? Isn't it possible that everyone's talking fast, not because they're being squeezed out by their encroaching corporate sponsors, but because writers and directors are starting to give their audience some credit for being intelligent enough to follow it?

Not that Dateline would ever give anyone credit for possessing intelligence.