Katie's too late.(CBS Inc. CBS News' Katie Couric)

Katie Couric has brought a sense of excitement to the world of TV evening news. And you could say the same thing about a new candy striper in the geriatric ward. Oh, it's possible we'll remember her as the salvation of CBS--but we barely remember the names of those who held the anchor slot when the genre was in its prime. Ready for a roll call?

Harry Reasoner, remarkably well named to be a guide to his fellow man: the hirsute thinker. NBC had John Chancellor--sober, vaguely egg-headed, projecting an air of Measured Concern. You might recall Frank Reynolds, the first anchor of ABC World News Tonight; he co-chaired with Howard K. Smith, a Murrow-era legend with a cranky, flinty streak. It would be wrong to say these names are forgotten, but like dead senators their names fade fast.

Of course we remember the Titans. There was Uncle Walter, who defined the medium's hubris with his tagline, "And that's the way it is." If you say so, Walter.

Cronkite was an archetypical authority figure, Captain Kangaroo's smarter brother. Dan Rather, on the other hand, always seemed to be auditioning for history's clip reel. As a one-man simile generator he could be surrealistic. This race could be close, but as they say in Texas, if a frog had pockets, he'd walk barefooted through an Indiana nail factory.

And then there was Peter Jennings, whose Anglophone Vulcan reserve made him the anti-Rather--he could have spoken Rather's lines but made them sound like Voltaire. One found him amusing, if a bit much.

No one remembers much about Huntley and Brinkley anymore, except that they had the intellectual gravitas bestowed by thick glasses and black-and-white TV. Brinkley, of course, went on to everlasting fame as the vinegary cynic of Sunday morning pundit yak-shows, slumped in his chair with a sardonic wince. If they brought him back to life through computer-generated images and made him the anchor of the evening news, some of us might actually watch it once in a while.

For many, the evening news is an ossified relic of the dim misty days before the information age. The formula is always the same: International news (shouting men in the streets, things blowing up); pointless domestic ...