I am not American. So maybe I'm just out of the loop. But I never realized that Stephen King had much of a profile as a pop-culture commentator. I knew he wrote pop horror novels. I knew they were occasionally adapted into feature and TV movies. I didn't know we were supposed to care what he thought of Michael Jackson.

Stephen King has been producing his back-page column for Entertainment Weekly since August 2003 -- which means, I think, that he's outlasted "The Joel Stein Show." Which deserved the longer run? It's hard to say. Both relied entirely too much on the columnists' opening USA Today on deadline day and muttering, "What's in the paper? Bell Biv Devoe..." and turning in something so meandering and random -- lacking any thesis and generally any immediacy -- that it read like a months-old post on a crappy blog you might never visit again. Both writers were equally convinced -- equally mistakenly -- that we looked forward to their back-page musings to get a window on their interesting personal lives, but that wasn't necessarily their own fault; getting a back-page column in a national publication would naturally give one that impression, whether or not it was true. But if the alternative is Stephen King, then I actually miss Joel Stein, for one simple reason:

Joel Stein wasn't so goddamn folksy!

I read a lot of King's novels in my youth, which is probably the right time to read them: they're lurid and scary and sometimes contain sex; they're the perfect gateway drug to the comparatively more respectable genre of true crime. Back then, I would defend his reputation as a storyteller, possibly because when I was in grade eleven, I didn't know that The Tommyknockers would have had the same impact if it were a few hundred pages shorter. His novels did contain tonally variant colloquialisms, true, but maybe they didn't bug me as much when they showed up once every fifty pages or so; in a single-page column, you can't help noticing them. A sampling:

"I can take it; that's why they pay me the big bucks ($25 a column, and buddy, that ain't hay)." - 08/22/03

"My answer is you bet your sweet round fanny." - 11/05/03

"They're thus apt to rhapsodize over narcissistic stuff like 'Kill Bill,' which announces itself as Quentin Tarantino's Fourth Film, ain't we la-di-da." - 11/19/03

"The brain is the most obedient organ in the body; if you tell it to shut up awready and stop bothering you, it will. I hope you don't do it. Fifty-five, even 60 isn't too old to rock & roll; you're still young enough to boogie." - 11/25/03

"...is this just a 21st-century American barnyard where we all feel free to turn on the moonwalking rooster...and peck it to death?" - 02/13/04

"I saw it at a screening of The Butterfly Effect, and it looked great. The trailer, I mean; Ashton Kutcher don't do much for me, baby luv." - 03/05/04

"Those last four episodes sure are fine, though -- for me, they pay off like a jackpot in Vegas." - 07/09/04

"...I sneer at people who sneer at entertainment for entertainment's sake. I feel sorry for them, too. Riding that high horse has got to be uncomfortable, especially with a stick up your butt." - 08/20/04

"[Dr. Phil] never fails to make me want to dance around the television in my underwear, sticking out my tongue, making arm farts, and yelling 'Phil the pill took a spill, slid on his fanny down the hill!'" - 10/29/04

"Of course, I'm jealous that ABC has a hit show with a strong suspense element after mine flopped last season, but Lost is pretty great. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'." - 11/11/04

"No one has done film this noir since John Boorman made Point Blank, and that be many moon ago, podner." - 12/20/04

"Those tracking satellites are especially pesky, but the darn computers aren't much better; they always seem to be full of worms and viruses. I often wish that stoner guy would stroll in and say, 'Hey, CTU dudes, don't worry! You're all gettin' Dells!'" - 02/14/05

Half the time he doesn't even make sense. "Podner"? Is Point Blank a western? Is Collateral, the movie he was comparing it to? Because I thought you just said it was a noir. The other half, he's making references that are not just months but years out of date -- making a point of calling Jennifer Lopez "J.Lo" (in 2003), or mocking the Dell stoner long past the time he was even appearing in their ads, or writing "Been there, done that" as if it were an exceedingly clever or withering putdown (in this week's column).

I might suggest that King most needs to write his columns without his cloying tics so that he can get out of the way of his own good arguments, except that half the time he's not even making good arguments. He's snootily reminding us what "innocent until proven guilty" means when applied to Michael Jackson, as if the purpose of his column were to give us a civics lesson. Or he's complaining about commercials that run in movie theatres before the trailers...in 2005! When the rest of us who live in the now had made our peace with them when they started showing up in cinemas back in the 20th century. Or Dr. Phil? The man's in his fourth season on the air, Steve. If you're just now taking notice of him, it calls into question your fitness as a pop-culture commentator.

I might also be more kindly disposed to King if so many of his columns weren't about himself. And not just in the way that Joel Stein would pretend to talk about reality TV but really bring the subject around to how clever he was; several of King's columns are explicitly about himself. There was the time he spent a whole back page bitching that his latest book was probably "only" going to sell about 600,000 copies, down from the million he sold of It. Then there was the time he spent a whole back page bitching that America didn't care to watch his ABC TV series Kingdom Hospital (and we recapped the first three episodes on TWoP; America really didn't care). Oh -- and in both those instances he was gracious enough to blame his own professional disappointments on the audience that had elected not to consume them: "[M]ost novels offer readers a deal: If you give me some time and effort, I'll pay you back double...or triple...or, in the case of the great ones, maybe a dozen times over. With KH, I realize now, we were asking viewers to give us a week or two, maybe three, and that was more time than most were willing to give. Am I putting TV viewers down, accusing them of being dumb? I am not. You come home tired, you want something that's fun and familiar? That's fine." It's fine, is it? Gee, thanks, Steve! "At a time when we should be approaching our mental peak, the baby boomers are settling for laugh tracks instead of literature, and supermarket Muzak instead of something by the Strokes or the Hives. The boomers no longer need a babysitter if they want to go out stepping, but they still don't go out. It's so much easier to sit home in front of the TV with the remote in one hand and a can of Bud in the other." Wouldn't it be more useful, though, for him to focus on pleasing the audience he does have, that is loyal to him, instead of morbidly focussing on the people who already aren't reading his books? "If you've read this far, you've reached the end of the column, and the end of this week's EW. Why not put it aside, therefore, and visit the nearest bookstore? Buy a novel with interesting stuff on the dust jacket." A professional novelist can't think of a more persuasive way to encourage infrequent buyers of books to spend $25 on a hardcover book than "interesting stuff on the dust jacket"? And furthermore, how predictable that the whole column should boil down to "Pop culture is suffering and baby boomers are squandering their mental energy because fewer people are buying my books."

But that's not enough: like Stein, King writes about himself even when he's not writing about himself. His first two columns name-checked The Stand and Stand By Me, but others have focused on his fame, his family, and his equally folksy Maine friends (such as his "longtime caretaker," "a late-forty-something pickup-truck guy, a gun guy, a woods guy, good husband, good daddy; a taciturn Maine Yankee, yes, but an all-around straight shooter"). Oh, and I'm not even going to catalogue the instances where he refers to himself either in the third person or, even more gratingly, as "your Uncle Steve." The instances, however, are myriad.

King's latest column advances the non-revolutionary notion that movies don't need to have stars to succeed, provided that they tell a good story. Oh, no shit? And also, that's a pretty safe position for a writer to take. And also, some of the authority of his assertion is undercut by his referring to Will Smith's I, Robot as a success. King also doesn't follow his point to its logical conclusion, which is that it isn't stars who make (or break) movies -- it's movies that make (or break) stars. He gives examples of several comparative nobodies -- "Sanaa Lathan in [Alien vs. Predator]; Jon Heder in Napoleon Dynamite...and, of course, Kimberly Elise in Diary of a Mad Black Woman" -- without adding that, due to all their celebrated performances, all of the above are very likely going to be vaulted to a higher pay grade and get offer bigger, if not necessarily better, roles. Cillian Murphy shone in the tiny 28 Days Later..., as Rachel McAdams did in Mean Girls and The Notebook, and they're combining their newly acquired star power in the service of Red Eye, and that is the problem. But did your old Uncle Steve arrive at that entirely logical conclusion? No: he preferred to end by pulling a Sunset Boulevard quotation out of his ass, whether or not it made sense in context.

Ah, but he is a bad writer, of course.