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For every generation, there's a WASPy tight-ass. For our parents (or, really, our older siblings and youthful aunts and uncles), that was John Heard. The economy was doing better then, so he got to be a bastard on a larger scale -- as a toy-company executive (in Big), a doughy, crooked FBI agent (on The Sopranos), and a tennis phenom's overly attentive father (on Law & Order; actually, that was one of about eight thousand episodes in which he played a bitchy patriarch who turns out, not surprisingly, to have killed someone in a fit of yuppie pique). As a prissy, impotent, middle management WASP, Heard is stuffy and self-important, but ultimately ineffectual.

Recently -- in the past TV season, particularly -- it's become clear that our generation's WASPy tight-ass is Patrick Fabian. You may have recognized him on 24, as the smarmy philanderer who eventually pays for his sin of adultery by dying of some kind of crazy, terrorist-engineered super-disease. You might have caught him as Sharon Tate's social-climbing hairdresser ex-boyfriend, Jay Sebring, in the recent TV-movie adaptation of Helter Skelter, in which he pays for his sin of vanity by getting murdered by a crazed cult member. Or if you're an addict of Aaron Spelling-produced family dramas that air on TV netlets and feature lots of marginally attractive people living in a beautiful house in Los Angeles (as I am), then you saw him last week in The WB's new Loughlin vehicle/Raising Helen rip-off Summerland, sexually harassing Lori Loughlin -- and doing a piss-poor job of it. For God's sake, the man didn't even know how to make inappropriate overtures to an employee. When you're making an indecent proposal to take a potentially illicit "business" trip, your destination should be, like, Paris or Rome or Barcelona or something -- not fucking Osaka. Use your head, man!

So you see, Heard and Fabian are cut from the same cloth -- at least as far as their careers are concerned, anyway. They've both had the bad luck (or maybe unpleasant real-life personality) to end up playing virtually nothing but men nobody likes. The characters they play are so pathetic, in fact, that you don't even love to hate them -- that is how much they suck. And so, it's a good thing that Fabian, like Heard before him, is so good at acting like a loathsome jackass: movies and TV shows don't just need noble heroes and interestingly complex villains; they also need infuriatingly oblivious pricks and petty tyrants, and Fabian is great at playing those. Which is why it's especially perfect that he found himself, this season, playing high-school principal Gavin Price on CBS's freshman drama Joan of Arcadia. There is no pettier tyrant (in pop culture, anyway) than a high-school principal (see also: Jeffrey Jones, Anthony Heald, and Armin Shimerman), and Fabian's Price has never let an opportunity go by for him to thwart someone -- and not just students; faculty, too. Price is such a jerk that we might have expected -- given the show's subject matter -- him to be unmasked, eventually, as the Devil; however, Price is such a boob -- all bluster, no balls -- that he's just too dull to be evil in any really memorable way.

But he does that very well, and so we salute him. To Patrick Fabian: Long may his characters wield the tiny amount of power they've got in the most pointlessly oppressive way possible.