You know what, let’s set aside the whole late night fiasco for a moment. Let’s set it aside in favor of something as close to its televised opposite as one can possibly find. Let’s watch a little PBS.

Have I mentioned on this blog that I like PBS? I do. What’s more, I am a giant sucker for BBC productions, especially those that involve corsets, small English villages, gossiping ladies who wear fetching bonnets, the Industrial revolution, orphans, aristocracy, farming humor, public schools, ill-fated matches that cross social hierarchies, widows, babies, mysterious magicians, seamstresses, scoundrels, choreographed social dance, India, Manchester, and Dame Judi Dench. That’s right: I am a nineteenth-century junkie. And you know what has all of those things? Cranford.

More specifically, Return to Cranford, the recent sequel to the excellent BBC miniseries based on the works of Elizabeth Gaskell. (I am also an enormous sucker for Elizabeth Gaskell). In spite of what is clearly an unchecked bias toward costume drama, I was initially hesitant about Return to Cranford because sequels can so often fail miserably at what made the original good. Worse, while Cranford was an interesting combination of several of Gaskell’s shorter, lesser-known works, Return to Cranford jumps in at the point where Gaskell leaves off completely, and I was afraid it would abandon the themes that make her work so appealing. I am thrilled to report that my fears were completely unfounded, and that Return to Cranford is lovely.

The sequel begins much where its original ended and picks up many of the same themes and concerns. Love, class divisions, education, and the lives of unmarried women provide the minute-to-minute subjects, while the arrival of the railroad and ensuing social change thrums steadily in the background as the dominant issue. In spite of what feels like reasonably familiar territory, Cranford and its form of miniseries provide a refreshing, even unusual presence in an otherwise bland television landscape. As is appropriate in a story about a small village, there is a significant amount of tragedy in Return to Cranford – so much that I was almost surprised by how readily the writers were willing to move away from its previous comfortable, cheerful characters. Life was not easy, and Return to Cranford finds room for dramatic disasters as well as smaller, sadder, more mundane loss. At the same time, it is as joyous and funny as ever, and it’s out of this deftness in combining both emotional extremes that Cranford excels.

Much of that relies on Judi Dench as Miss Matty Jenkyns, the main character in Return to Cranford. Matty’s character grieves and laughs with equal readiness, and she’s the lynchpin around which all the other plot points and swift emotional reversals can pivot gracefully. Her seeming childishness is made ambiguous through her love affair with Thomas Holcomb in the original series, and Matty’s resilience throughout the several losses and developments in the new series defines her as a figure of strength as well as silliness.

Moving away from corsets and spinsters, though, what makes this and other similar BBC/PBS productions seem like such television oddballs is not their content, but their tone. They are sentimental, almost entirely devoid of cynicism or melodrama. The world is still just as cruel as it is on The Wire or Law and Order – there is as much death and poverty, and even less reassurance in a myth of social progress – but the core of the show relies on an essential optimism and goodwill that is not that easy to find elsewhere. As this week has made abundantly clear, terrible things happen in the world, and it may seem more and more like David Simon’s depiction of life is the best fictional portrayal of the current moment. Maybe. It doesn’t mean I can’t continue to hope for a little Cranford.

Say what you will, NBC has done a great job of suddenly making late night television fascinating.

• This piece by Alan Sepinwall is a great overview of the whole situation and Conan’s standpoint as the wronged party in his contract with NBC.
• The Hollywood Reporter’s legal blog takes a more direct look at the specific legal implications of changing The Tonight Show‘s airtime. Apparently unlike Letterman and Leno, Conan’s deal doesn’t include careful language about the time his show will appear, which gives NBC more wiggle room than it would have had with Leno. While the blog post doesn’t comment on the argument that a Tonight show which doesn’t air until tomorrow is an essentially different show, it suggests that the timeslot argument has more to do with the show’s position relative to nightly local news.
• NBC has released its post-Jay Leno Show, post-Olympics primetime schedule. It looks like it will rely heavily on the Law and Order franchise, whip up a few reality shows, and then plug the gaps with repeats, the Jerry Seinfeld project The Marriage Ref, and the much-delayed, Maura Tierney Lauren Graham show Parenthood. Best news of the schedule is a solid return date for Friday Night Lights.

Couldn’t care less about this debacle? Please to enjoy this musical clip from the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother. (It’s mirrored, but you get the idea).

In all the kerfluffle over the late night change-ups and my own particular inclination towards all things Chuck, I neglected to mention that Showtime had a pretty big premiere this weekend as well – the beginning of the fourth season of Big Love.

The show centers on Bill Hendrickson, a man raised on an ultra-conservative Mormon compound in Utah, then abandoned by that compound, and then after his first wife’s struggle with cancer, Bill is drawn toward polygamy as the true will of God. Big Love splits its time between the complicated home life of a guy with three wives and a gazillion kids, and the politics of the Juniper Creek compound where Bill grew up. It’s been an understandably controversial program in its willingness to pierce or at least speculate about the inner workings of the Mormon church, as well as its occasionally unflattering depiction of both mainstream and unsanctioned expressions of Mormon faith.

Bill Paxton as Bill Hendrickson on Showtime's Big Love

The primary technique that structures Big Love’s form as well as its content is a tendency towards excess and overkill – there are wives and kids coming out the wazoo, and each episode is crammed full (and frequently overwhelmed) with plots and subplots that jostle against each other with varying degrees of discord. The content of those plots, particularly when the show deals with the Juniper Creek story, pushes against the boundaries of realism and reason. The whole compound is depicted as a corrupt, backwards frontierland, where the lack of computers and modern conveniences is used as a fictional justification for extreme, unrecognizable human behavior. In this opening episode of season four, Nicki Hendrickson (Bill’s second wife) returns to the compound to help her mother, who stages a no-holds-barred freak out over some bacon so that Nicki will go downstairs and discover her father, the compound’s prophet, frozen upright in the basement walk-in. There he is, eyes wide open, staring at Nicki from among the hanging slabs of beef. As if that isn’t bad enough, Nicki’s half-brother then drives the corpse out onto the construction site of Bill’s new casino and props him up for Bill to find.

Nicki discovers her father frozen in the basement, next to the bacon

At the same time, the storyline that deals with Bill’s struggle with his faith and the complex relationship between a man and his three wives almost always looks like real people coping with an immensely difficult situation. The politics and drama of Bill’s home can be funny, poignant, and frequently gutwrenching, and despite infrequent dips into crassness or absurdity, it’s fascinating to watch alliances, betrayals, and grudges unfold between these three women.

The pieces all make internal sense – you’ve got your completely crazy, unreal Mormon compound on the one side, and your unusual but believable family on the other – but if you take a step back, Big Love looks increasingly odd as a single unit. Harnessing a realistic portrayal of family life to a storyline that assumes an aura of fantasy and making each plot duke it out for primacy begins to look more and more like a stand-in for the bigger fantastic problem at the show’s core. Big Love struggles to connect the miracles, the discord with modern belief, and the utter, unshakable faith of Mormonism with its very real main characters. By tying Bill and his wives down with the totally bizarre, surreal Juniper Creek story, I think Big Love is attempting to use a defined, fictional way of yoking realism and mysticism together.

Margene, Barb and Nicki Hendrickson

It doesn’t really work. This latest episode had mere seconds to pivot from a jaunty, upbeat rendition of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” during Bill’s big casino opening, to a vocal adaptation of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” while Bill disposes of his father-in-law’s body. The episode also featured Nicki’s daughter from her previous, illegal marriage, Margene’s new career as a TV saleswoman, Bill’s new church, Albie’s secret gay life, and Bill’s mother’s wild bird resale scheme. It’s fascinating, and maybe even a laudable attempt to do the impossible. But it’s too much.

Doo dee doo… I wonder what’s happening in the television world today. I hear one of the contestants on this season of The Bachelor may have hooked up with one of the producers. FOX has renewed Glee, to no one’s surprise, and is planning a reality show about selecting a few new Glee cast members. According to Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof at today’s Television Critics Association meetings, apparently the teasers for the new season of Lost will actually start to contain footage from the new season some time in the coming weeks. It seems like there was something else, today… huh…

Oh right.

People of Earth:

In the last few days, I’ve been getting a lot of sympathy calls, and I want to start by making it clear that no one should waste a second feeling sorry for me. For 17 years, I’ve been getting paid to do what I love most and, in a world with real problems, I’ve been absurdly lucky. That said, I’ve been suddenly put in a very public predicament and my bosses are demanding an immediate decision.

Six years ago, I signed a contract with NBC to take over “The Tonight Show” in June of 2009. Like a lot of us, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night and the chance to one day sit in that chair has meant everything to me. I worked long and hard to get that opportunity, passed up far more lucrative offers, and since 2004, I have spent literally hundreds of hours thinking of ways to extend the franchise long into the future. It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule. Building a lasting audience at 11:30 is impossible without both.

But sadly, we were never given that chance. After only seven months, with my “Tonight Show” in its infancy, NBC has decided to react to their terrible difficulties in prime time by making a change in their long-established late night schedule.

Last Thursday, NBC executives told me they intended to move the “Tonight Show” to 12:05 to accommodate the “Jay Leno Show” at 11:35. For 60 years, the “Tonight Show” has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the “Tonight Show” into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The “Tonight Show” at 12:05 simply isn’t the “Tonight Show.” Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the “Late Night” show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy.

So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard, and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of “The Tonight Show.” But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction. Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet, a time slot doesn’t matter. But with the “Tonight Show,” I believe nothing could matter more.

There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.

Yours,

Conan

It’s hard to argue with a few of his major points here, namely that his Tonight Show was never given the benefit of a strong primetime lineup, and that he wasn’t given enough time to grow into his new job. The overwhelming opinion as Conan shifted from Late Night to Tonight was that he could be good at it, but that it would take a while for the show to really start working. Clearly the transition has not gone as well as NBC would have liked, but its unwillingness to foster growth and gradual development over a long period of time makes one wonder how seriously it cares about quality programming.

The other point that Conan didn’t mention, but NBC will certain have to weigh, is the way his audience skews in comparison with Leno’s. The median age of the Tonight Show viewer is a decade younger than it was under Leno. Does NBC want better ratings now, or does it want a loyal audience in the long term? Who knows how this will all shake out, but I will certainly be watching Conan tonight. My guess is today’s Tonight Show is going to have some pretty good ratings.

I left NBC on a bit of a down note last week, and while the whole Leno-Conan fiasco continues to unravel (with official news from NBC that Leno’s moving out of primetime and reports surfacing Conan’s well-deserved displeasure), I can’t dismiss the ol’ Peacock out of hand. Last night, with a two-hour premiere, Chuck came back for its third season, and at least on this couch, there was joy abounding.

If you are one of the many people yet to enjoy Chuck (and there are many of you out there, according to the show’s ratings), a few words of introduction – Chuck is a goofy, funny, action-adventure spy-thriller with a hefty dose of pop culture references, a star-crossed lovers plotline, and an open-arms attitude toward product integration. Its premise is that our intelligent, unlucky everyman hero, Chuck Bartowski, has been implanted with a top-secret computer that gives him access to all CIA intel. Much to his dismay, Chuck becomes an unwilling CIA operative with a serious crush on his talented blonde CIA handler. Wackiness ensues.

The first two episodes of season three (warning – now come the spoilers) find Chuck after the implantation of a new top-secret computer which comes with built-in spy skills like kung fu and several lovely mariachi guitar numbers. Much of what has made Chuck work is its premise of a normal guy thrust into crazy spy missions and behaving accordingly, but three seasons in, there’s no longer any use pretending Chuck is going to be freaked out by a little gunfire. Especially after these first two new episodes, we know that Chuck has had some actual training, and so we expect him to be a little less of a spaz than he used to be. While this does force the show to move out of its initial character comfort-zone, Chuck has been excellent in the past about allowing its characters to grow in believable ways, and I’m looking forward to what happens when Chuck gets to act like a real spy. We saw at least some of this in these first two episodes – if nothing else, Chuck now seeks out missions rather than resents them, and his emotional maturity and selflessness in choosing to keep the intersect in his brain despite the personal sacrifice feels like a well-earned payoff for Chuck’s original good natured but clumsy character. Plus, we got a lot of all the side characters that make the show awesome. Jeff and Lester are creepy as always, Morgan as usual comes within a split second of sudden death and walks away cheerfully unaware, and Casey has a grand old time with his mini-gun.

Gotta love that classic zipline maneuver

My frustration with these first two episodes came in the moments when Chuck was held back from that kind of growth, which largely came out of the romantic bits with his handler Sarah. It’s frustrating to watch Chuck ignore a major spy crisis because he’s so intent on explaining to Sarah why he didn’t run away with her. She’s a little busy crawling through inevitable ventilation ducts to turn off the deadly gas, you idiot! Can this very special episode of Dr. Phil wait until you’re no longer trapped in a villain’s vault with a top-secret weapon?

Sarah crawls through the inevitable ventilation ducts while Chuck chooses a terrible moment to talk about his feelings

Despite the silliness of that entire scene, though, I’ve got to hand it to the writers. Chuck is as much about the Chuck-Sarah relationship as it is about spy nonsense, and they absolutely had to give us some explanation and starting point for this season’s development for those two characters. They could have dragged it out forever and waited until five episodes from now for us to realize that Chuck left Sarah not because he wanted to be a hero, because he felt an obligation to humanity. It would have been a super sappy, drippy, drawn-out revelation, and it would have been obnoxious. Instead, that whole process was crammed into two introductory episodes and cut down to its emotional bare bones, so that we can feel that discovery and now move forward with the new season.

Thankfully, we already have an opportunity to do that with another new episode tonight! Hooray for Chuck 2.0!

I am definitely not a journalist and this is really not a TV news blog, but it’s hard to ignore the craziness that’s swirling around right now. There were rumors flying around the internet willy-nilly yesterday, and twitter lit up like a Christmas tree, and the result of it all seems to be that NBC is admitting defeat on the Jay Leno Show experiment. Although the exact nature of the new schedule is either still undecided or unconfirmed, the majority opinion is that Leno will move back to 11:35, do a half-hour show, and then Conan will start at 12:05.

The problems have been building for a while now, with complaints most notably coming from local NBC network affiliates. Local news programs have had seriously anemic ratings with Leno as an 11 o’clock lead in (as opposed to such stirring 10pm programming as Law and Order and CSI reruns), and have been bemoaning the lost eyeballs. Add to this the NBC-Comcast deal and NBC’s weakness in almost every other timeslot, and it’s not hard to see the pressure building to make some changes.

Sitting on my couch yesterday and flipping back and forth between my computer and Vanity Fair, it’s hard to know what the final straw was. Still, a few blogs posted stories about how NBC has ordered a whopping 18 pilot episodes for next season, and wondered when they could possibly be planning to schedule those new shows with Jay Leno clogging up every 10pm weeknight. All of a sudden everyone was wondering about Leno and NBC. Jay actually did a few jokes about it last night, including the somewhat lame line that he’ll now have time to do some travelling and that he hears Fox is nice this time of year.

I feel some schadenfreude toward NBC. Cost and changing landscape and personality battles aside, from a purely good vs. bad television standpoint, The Jay Leno Show at 10pm was creatively empty TV pabulum. Not that my opinion has much do to with anything, but I’ll admit to some small feelings of pleasure that a network that chooses to replace Southland with a daily reading of stupid newspaper headlines is now in trouble. So little bad TV is punished; at least this decision seems to be headed toward the crash and burn it deserves.

At the same time, it’s easy to see that Conan O’Brien has been seriously shafted, and it looks like nothing good for him can come out of this network implosion. He’s got more as a comic than just floppy hair and oddly long limbs, and NBC and Leno seem to be doing their best to keep that secret under wraps. I also can’t help but hope NBC manages to keep its head up somehow. Whatever other disasters they’re currently airing, they are also the home to shows like Chuck, so somebody over there has got to have his or her head on straight. (Have I mentioned yet that Chuck is coming back on Sunday night? Because it is. And I am psyched. Do people still say that, “psyched”? Anyway.) So please deal with this terrible Jay Leno show idea, NBC, and then get back on the horse. Just don’t do it again.

While I wait with baited breath for the arrival of new television (and not, for instance, last night’s episode of I Get That A Lot where Rachel Ray pretends to work in a laundry mat and then assures disbelieving customers that she is not actually Rachel Ray), I present you with a few things for your reading and viewing pleasure.

• Yesterday, Linda Holmes posted a great blog piece on her NPR TV blog Monkey See about the changes that have occurred on The Big Bang Theory over the past three seasons. The bottom line, for Holmes, is that Penny is transformed from the mere object of a male gaze in the beginning to a thinking, laughing, functioning human being later in the show. It’s really worth a read, and a great example of how seemingly silly academic cliches like the “male gaze” can actually go a long way toward explicating vague ideas like “The Big Bang Theory is way better than it used to be, but I’m not really sure what’s different.”
• The People’s Choice Awards were last night. I did not watch, but apparently the people are largely in favor of things to do with vampires.
• I’m still stuck on the David Tennant era of Doctor Who, and how much I’ll miss his odd face, awesome overcoat, and nerd glasses. I’ll also miss his willingness to do things like this:
• In case you’re not really up on your technology news, there’s a big conference going on in Las Vegas this week to announce all sorts of exciting gadgets and proof-of-concept devices like a see-through screen and ereaders and…3D television?
• New television is coming back, and along with the deluge of new shows and returning classics, we will soon get the triumphant premiere of the final season of Lost. The first new episode will be on February 2nd. Unless, that is, the White House decides that February 2nd would be a good day to hold President Obama’s first State of the Union address, which is one of its two possible dates. Heh.

The last few weeks were a bleak and barren televised world, but one of the few notable bright spots was the significant and strange two-part Doctor Who Christmas special. In general, the first part was pretty bad, and the second part was pretty good.

David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor

More specifically, these were the last two episodes of David Tennant’s reign as the Tenth Doctor, as well as the end of Russell T. Davies’ dominance over the Doctor Who reboot. Both of these facts were leaked long ago, which robbed the Christmas special of some of its impact and forced Davies to build up the inevitable death scene to the point of an operatic farewell, but my love for the Doctor and for David Tennant’s portrayal of him made the whole thing palatable, if not uniformly satisfying. As always happens with the Doctor, the best scenes were those smaller moments between the Doctor and whoever happens to be standing in as his human conscience, and the two-door nuclear meltdown bit with the Doctor and Wilf was an unexpected and gracefully small-scale way to complete the Tenth Doctor’s tenure. After all the fizzing wizbangs and defrazzled lasers and “I’m the END OF TIME,” – no – “I’M the END OF TIME” shenanigans of the first half of part two, it was nice to see the scary prophecy (“he will knock four times”) end up with gentle Wilf as the awful “he” and the ominous knocking merely a request for some help opening a door. The Doctor may have hesitated for a long time about sending the Time Lords back through the magical diamond heartbeat bridge thingy (plot has never been this show’s strong suit), but once we realize that he has to kill himself to save Wilf, there’s never a doubt he’ll do it.

Timothy Dalton's Death Glove, the Master picks up a few tricks from Iron Man, and a suddenly appearing planet

Once all the explosions, excess Time Lords, and Timothy Dalton’s Death Glove were dispensed with, it was really just a two part special about saying goodbye to David Tennant. It was lovely to allow him to do a Tenth Doctor reunion tour before succumbing to regeneration, and the highlight was certainly stopping by the Mos Eisely Cantina to help Captain Jack hook up with Alonso from “Voyage of the Damned,” but the whole exit was also overwrought. I couldn’t help but think back to the previous regeneration scene, when Christopher Eccleston made that stupid joke about dogs and then suddenly disintegrated, and I think what made this exit so much clunkier was the lack of a companion figure. Wilf was a good stand-in, but without a constant partner to reflect the audience’s feelings of shock and grief, Davies had to work us all into an emotional lather by revisiting the ghosts of companions past. Rose’s presence was a gift in the previous transition, when our wariness about exchanging actors was filtered through her mistrust of the new doctor. Without that nagging reminder of the previous Doctor, I worry we’ll lose some opportunities for character development when Matt Smith takes over.

Nevertheless, the whole show is about saying goodbye to one Doctor and greeting the next one. Goodbye, David Tennant. I didn’t want you to go, either, but maybe it was time.

Hello, blog! I know I was gone for a little while there, but I’m back now, and I missed you. It was a great vacation, but I learned that it’s essentially impossible to write anything while perpetually surrounded by huge gleaming surfaces on which one can cook many things at the same time. And let’s be honest, if I had to take some time off from constant TV-blogging, the last few weeks were a pretty great time to do it. There was nothing on. I would scan down the night’s TV guide and when presented a variety of action movies, Jersey Shore marathons, and a few scattered episodes of King of Queens, I’d just abandon the whole venture. Seriously, it was bleak.

Things are looking up, though. January is going to be a good month for new television, and I am super excited about a lot of the shows coming out over the next few weeks. Big Love, Damages, LOST, 24, Burn Notice, Caprica, and did I mention Chuck?! There will also be several newcomers, including a new FOX show called Human Target, which I know nothing about except for the millions of ads plastering the NY Subway system. So, blog ahoy.

Before jumping ahead into the midseason premieres, I want to mention one television experience of note over my break. After discovering that the day’s tickets for the Tim Burton retrospective at the MOMA were sold out, my family and I ended up wandering around looking for something to do, and ducked into what was anachronistically labeled the Museum of Television and Radio on my sister’s NYC map. We soon learned that the museum is now defunct, but is now the site of the Paley Center for Media. We walked in, headed up to the front desk, and the woman behind it started to explain what the Paley Center is all about. “This isn’t like a regular museum,” she said. “This is mostly a museum where you’ll sit and watch television.”

I know. I nearly laughed out loud. The building is full of screening rooms where they play a variety of historical and otherwise notable material from their archives, and a scan of that day’s schedule offered everything from the candy conveyor belt episode of I Love Lucy, to a special on great television moments of the last forty years, to an episode of the original Batman featuring Julie Newmar as Catwoman, to a showcase of Super Bowl commercials. We ended up ducking into the pilot of Bewitched, where Samantha waits until their wedding night to tell Darrin she’s a witch, vows to give up witchcraft for good, and then inevitably succumbs to temptation and terrorizes an awful woman who invites them both to a dinner party. The episode is pretty cheesy, and there are some seriously stilted timing issues where Samantha wrinkles her nose and then it takes a surprisingly long time for the door to fly open. Still, the experience held up quite well even once you consider that you can just watch that same pilot episode from the comfort of your couch – sitting in a screening room and watching it in the context of a museum makes you think about it a little differently.

The other great thing about the Paley Center is their enormous collection of archived television, which you can browse and watch whatever you like for an hour and a half in their fourth-floor library. Among other things, I flicked through an episode of The Muppet Show with John Cleese as the guest star, an old episode of The Defenders (because they talk about it on Mad Men), and the Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld. My mom got caught up in a decades-old documentary about school life. I saw someone next to me engrossed in My So-Called Life.

If you’re ever in New York and feel a hankering for some television, the Paley Center is the place to go. It’s an amazing resource for any kind of television you can imagine, and probably innumerable things you would never even think of.