Water-cooler moments are great, one of the coolest things about TV.

Too bad TV critics miss out on most of them. Courteous ones do, anyway.

The problem for us is that we see a lot of the big shocks and "very special" moments early, before they’re aired. Networks send us advance tapes and DVDs, so that we can watch a show and write about it on or close to the day it appears. So you wind up with situations like this recent one:

After days of waiting, a package finally arrives from HBO. It’s the first four episodes of the new season of The Sopranos. This is as close to a kid’s Christmas morning as it gets for grown-ups. You drop everything, pop the DVD into the player and watch.

Lots of relief - after nearly two years off, it’s not just as good as when we left it, but better. Good, good, jot down a few notes, think of what to write, mull over how to . . . OHMYGOD JUNIORJUSTSHOTTONY!

Rewind. Yep, an addled Uncle Junior just shot Tony Soprano, right in the gut. This is big. This is huge! Whom can I tell?

Nobody. You’d have to be a king-size jerk to reveal such a shock to your friends, and you’d be a pretty lame critic to reveal anything to your readers.

You could search out friends who aren’t fans of the show, but what’s the point? The whole idea of a water-cooler moment is sharing it with like-minded fans of the show. So if they don’t watch, you might as well talk about how it snowed in Virginia last night. Interesting to people who live or have family there, maybe, but to everyone else? Not so much.

So instead you couch things. A lot happens in the new season. There are big developments. That kind of thing. I saw some reviews that went so far as to say that something shocking happens at the end of the first new episode, but even that’s giving away too much. The trick is to contain your excitement yet somehow let it leak through into what you say about the show.

And then the thing finally shows up on TV, and everyone wants to talk about it and it seems like yesterday’s news. Ah, well, at least we’ve got blogs.

But make no mistake, even if they’re a little harder to come by now, water-cooler moments are what make television, and writing about it, so much fun. Walking into the office or school or the gym or wherever the day after Bob Newhart woke up and his entire second series turned out to be a dream and talking about how shocked we were - Emily, in bed with him! - is that elusive shared experience pop culture so often seeks but so rarely finds.

They don’t have to be huge shocks, like when Janice shot Richie in the chest on The Sopranos (and one that’s hard to top, frankly). They just have to be memorable moments. Remember the episode of The X-Files with Charles Nelson Reilly as the sci-fi writer? Or the one with the inbred family? Fantastic water-cooler moments. Ditto the death of Buffy’s mom in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Which reminds me. I can’t wait to tell you what happens next week in the première of Pepper Dennis.

Sigh. Never mind.