Books feel weighty, television feels ephemeral, but as more and more books are pulped, and go unread, TV shows enter rerun heaven, and hang around forever. The author of a collection of learned, unabashedly literary essays about television — “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Iron Chef,” etc. — is therefore in the position of someone who uses words to chase after images produced for people who care less and less about words. Unless, that is, they’re spoken by actors.

“The marketing people are going to kill me when they read the following,” Lee Siegel writes in his introduction to “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television” (Basic Books, 304 pages, $14.95), “but if you’ve picked up this book looking for straightforward television reviews, you’re going to be disappointed.”

My first reaction to that sentence was to think Mr. Siegel has a curious faith in the willingness of the publicity department to spend its time hunting down critics because of a few stray sentences characterizing their own brand of criticism. (“Television inspires me to talk about a lot of things outside television.”) So few people will read this book in comparison with the number of people who watch the shows that inspired it, it seems conceited to bring up the market in the first place. As introductions go, it doesn’t quite inspire trust.

A collection of essays, originally published in the New Republic, divided into categories such as “Cops,” “Comedy,” “Religion,” “Personalities,” “Drama,” etc., “Not Remotely Controlled” is often stimulating but rarely charming, and even more rarely humorous. Television is in many ways an extraordinary medium in its ability to invite both our admiration and contempt, our awe and revulsion, that at least a little humor is called for, if only to provide some perspective. The often hilarious reviews by Clive James about British television in the 1970s are the gold standard as far as that goes. Unlike Mr. James, Mr. Siegel is not a critic who wears his learning, or his ambition, lightly. He is a master of the truly awful opening line, such as: “Whither the American imagination?” Or: “Where is the great essay on the Young American Woman?”

Nonetheless, Mr. Siegel has written a number of essays that are worth reading whether or not you’ve seen the shows under discussion. This is partly because he is engagingly old-fashioned in his desire to link television to the culture at large, rather than treating it as a self-contained universe in which any connection between the home entertainment center and the street is either severed or ignored.

“We hardly think about television as formative in any way now,” Mr. Siegel states in one essay. “Cool, unflappable people don’t. But once upon a time, the coolest and most unflappable people had utter disdain for television’s greedy appropriation of the viewer’s imagination.” Reading that brought to mind “Watching Television Come of Age,” the posthumous collection of reviews by Jack Gould, the New York Times’s first television reviewer, and the odd juxtaposition between his writing — clunky, moralistic, square (by today’s standards) — and the photograph of the author on its front cover — handsome, debonair, with an unfiltered cigarette burning between his fingers. This was a man who probably drank three martinis at lunch, smoked two packs a day, but worried about Elvis Presley’s effect on teenage morals. Today’s counterpart might as well belong to a different species.

It’s to Mr. Siegel’s credit that he does not always appear to belong to a different species. He is particularly good when dissecting the hipster smugness at the core of a cable show such as “Weeds,” a judgment you may find yourself agreeing with even if, as I do, you rather enjoy “Weeds.” Likewise, his critique of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” in which, after noting the way more and more comedians — Mr. Stewart, Al Franken, Dennis Miller, and Bill Maher — are pledging allegiance to a political party, and tailoring their jokes accordingly, he writes: “For the first time in the history of comedy, you have to register to laugh. … With the comedians’ solemnity about their politics, with their grave concern about the direction the country is headed in, comedy is fast becoming no laughing matter, either.” Since Mr. Siegel shares Mr. Stewart’s politics, his insistence that “laughter is the essence of individuality” seems all the more praiseworthy.

When Mr. Siegel really gets on an intellectual roll, as in a long essay about reality TV, he lurches from the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman to “Are You Hot?” from Herman Melville to “Fear Factor,” from “The Gong Show” to T.S. Eliot. The range of reference is impressive but soon feels like the print version of a multimedia blizzard — something from which you want to take cover. To pull off this sort of thing successfully you either need to be witty, like James Wolcott, or possess an utterly distinctive voice, like George Trow. Otherwise you are in danger of sounding merely like someone who is very smart — and who watches way too much television.

Mr. Bernhard last wrote for these pages on European television.