21.   Ability to book profits to invented companies, create swaps for imaginary services, hire fictional characters.

22.   After all, they are fictional characters created by a man, Darren Star, speaking lines usually written by another man, Michael Patrick King.

23.   Almost since its inception, television has gotten laughs because of a peculiar ability to confuse fictional characters with reality.

24.   But black-and-white inserts of the fictional characters seem pompous and silly rather than convincing.

25.   But Ms. Mazet contended that this was acceptable because the inspector is a fictional character, created by the writer Georges Simenon.

26.   But that was the only reference he made to Murphy Brown -- or any other fictional character.

27.   But this weeper about relationships is saved by strong acting and one memorable fictional character.

28.   By contrast, Cyrano Sciences, named after the French fictional character with an outsized nose, aims to produce more versatile noses.

29.   Claire Bloom did, and her ex-husband, Philip Roth, retaliated by turning her into a vindictive fictional character in his next novel.

30.   Does an enduringly successful movie or television mini-series of a novel determine our perception of a compelling fictional character?