Mad Men is back with a vengeance and (at least after one episode) hasn’t missed a step. You know you’re watching a great television program when a season gets underway without spelling out exactly what had transpired in the interim. Here, we’re (possibly) years in the future (er, past) and just flung back into these characters lives, having to a do a lot of the between-season leg-work ourselves. The show is so character based, now that we know the players the series’ creators have almost limitless room to explore.

It appears that the chief explorations this season are 1) the notion that Sterling-Cooper is slowly, steadily, becoming obsolete as new, younger, talent starts making waves in the industry and 2) Betty (and by extension Peggy) have a new sense of empowerment.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff.

That being said, both Mad Men and Damages were nominated for Best Drama, which is pretty damn cool — especially since this is the first time a basic cable show has been up for said award. The rest of the list you can probably predict. (HBO nominated for a miniseries? Now I’ve heard everything!)

Full list can be found here.

The first act of Joss Whedon’s three act web-series “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” has been posted via Hulu and available for download on iTunes. The trailer has been making the rounds for a couple weeks, though aside from glimpses of Neil Patrick Harris and the should-be leading man Nathan Fillion it gave very few clues as to what we could expect.

Having seen the first episode, now, apparently it was all in the title. There’s Dr. Horrible (Harris), he has a blog, and there is singing. Really, it’s the singing that kicks things into high gear (well, that and Fillion’s pompous super-hero character). Harris is, as expected, hilarious. It’s hardly worth mentioning the plot, but it involves super-villainy, laundry and a love triangle.

The next two acts are released on July 15th and July 17th — no need to drag things out, right?

UPDATE: Flood of Fans Crashes Dr. Horrible Website - [Wired]

Glenn Close, Ted Danson, William Hurt, Timothy Olyphant, UPDATE!: Marcia Gay Harden, etc.

The first season of Damages was one of the biggest surprises of last year, helped in large part by the strength of the cast (and the tightness of the mystery). I keep thinking there is no way the second season (which doesn’t get underway until 2009) could possibly be as good, but they keep adding A-listers to the cast making me believe otherwise.

Read the whole story over at Zap2It! (UPDATE!) …And hit up the comments with shows whose cast you feel is superior.

*On television

With the exception of Venture Brothers there hasn’t been a single thing on television this summer worth mentioning — until, that is, now. Generation Kill, the new miniseries by David Simon and Ed Burns (of The Wire) has yet to show us much of anything we haven’t already seen in the likes of Jarhead (young kids with itchy trigger fingers unable to act), Three Kings (military-civilian relations) or even The Wire (chain-of-command nonsense and the failure of institutions) but we’ve really only scratched the surface of the program’s seven-plus hours. It doesn’t hurt that proceedings are nevertheless incredibly watchable and (dare I say it) actually kind of fun (racism, sexism, and homophobia aside) — though knowing Simon and Burns oeuvre I’m sure they’re setting me up for devastation.

Plus, it looks great as this is the first time their canvas is in high-definition.

It’s a bit early to get too emotionally involved. One of the problems with movies or series like this is that when all of your characters are more or less wearing the exact same thing (and when that thing happens to be several pounds of camo and armor) it can be difficult to grab a hold of individual personalities. Perhaps that is why most of the cast is packed with That One Guys and The Dude From The Things.

Until Mad Men gets underway at the end of the month, Generation Kill is the only show on television that actually feels important.

BENTHAM!! Wait. Who?.. Why? (Spoiler-riddled Lost thoughts after the jump…)

Was it just me or was this episode funnier than usual? Perhaps it’s because Michael Emerson is so brilliant at playing Ben every single thing he says makes me laugh. In a way the general sense of whimsy I was feeling throughout most of the episode kind of got in the way of one of its best scenes. It probably wasn’t even the episode itself — more me and my school-girl like giddiness that had been brewing at work all day as I awaited the finale and then amplified exponentially when Kate’s car stops and then backs up kicking off this years finale just as last year’s season ended — I loved that.

Anyway, all of this came to a head at that point where the island disappeared and there was that *BLOMP* of the ocean as if god-almighty had literally picked it up and taken it away and it caused me to laugh, because, well, it’s just such a great visual and, well, funny. I had a similar reaction when Jack’s dad showed up and told Michael it was OK for him to die now. His out-of-nowhere appearance and frankness in his statement was just so pitch-perfect when it comes to this show and its Svengali-like control over us causing me to just smile and think, “Damn, this is funny stuff.” Unfortunately, in this case it was milliseconds before Sun lets out one of the most soul-crushing screams ever after seeing Jin presumably blown to smithereens. But that’s why this show is so great. The way they can take such a preposterous premise further and further into the absurd and yet still have us emotionally grounded to the characters. It’s a thing of beauty.

As far as Lost finales go, this one for me falls somewhere right in the middle. If this was by design or not I’m sure we’ll never know, but the decisions that were made with the story were perfectly selected, and that final shot, well, we all knew it was coming. The fact of the matter is you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere to top last year’s episode and so the misdirection with certain payoffs (primarily the apparent end of the Desmond/Penny arc) actually served as a perfect counter-weight to their own inability to out-shock us.

In a way, of the show’s four seasons, this one actually provided the most closure. Outside of the last act, it wouldn’t be too hard to think of it as a series finale, and now that we’re officially into the last third of the series, it seems only right that certain things begin to get resolved. Of course in typical Lost fashion this isn’t to suggest that everything is getting resolved. Here are a few of the new questions:

• Jeremy Bentham. Why? It makes me wonder if that really was Locke. What with all the time-travel potential, I’m curious if we have a doppleganger situation on our hands.
• Are Desmond and Penny, like, off the show now? That would suck. There was a period when I was convinced he was actually the main character.
• Is Jin dead? Seems likely, but it also seems like he didn’t get nearly the romantic death that every other major player has had.
• Is Sun a total badass in the future (present?) or what?
• Wait, why did Ben have to blow a hole in the wall? Hasn’t this process been done before? Shouldn’t the hole have already been there?
• February 2009? Really?

So what did everyone else think?

*internet-radio show

It’s the type of show MTV should have been making all along. Like the first incarnations of The Real World, The Paper doesn’t seem particularly interested in “producing-up” the action, and instead does what the reality genre was suppose to always be: documentaries with a hyper-kinetic visual style. That being said, this shouldn’t be mistaken for the early 90s alterna-rock-pesimsm from days of yore. The series is Gen-Y to the max, and perhaps that is also what makes it so relentlessly watchable. The tone of the show is super-upbeat, but the characters are just vicious. It’s packed with eye-rolls and secret-laughs and plotting and back-stabbing and ad sales and layout and editorials and sports coverage. I guess in other words, it’s just like a high school.

Check out the show while you can (there are still two episodes left and the first six are available online). Future seasons will suffer from the kids having seen the previous slowly morphing the drama from reality to “Reality.”

*speculative

The real news is that the networks have finally caught on to the fact that leaving their schedules more or less empty (save for reruns and fourth-rate-reality) during the summer months simply will not cut it. Instead, the typical September/May television season is going the way of the tight-rolled-jean to make way for the 52-week season. Clearly the networks are going to have to start programming all year long if they want to keep up with cable et al. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean we will suddenly get Lost or Friday Night Lights in July, but will instead translates to American Gladiators. In other words, they’re still not going to try particularly hard, but at least the cheap reality crap will be their A-list crap.

Perhaps the real question is what could the networks (any networks) possibly do to make us excited to tune in? I think the answer is: not a damn thing. I say this because no one cares about networks anymore. There is no “Must See TV.” People care about shows, and since more and more people are time-shifting or getting their content online, the actual channel on the cable box no longer matters. Right now I watch at least one, but rarely more than two shows on just about every network (cable and broadcast combined) — this in addition to web-video and podcasts. My fear in all of this is that the amount of great programming on the networks will be watered down with product placement or simply never make it to air. I know I shouldn’t care. I know the most interesting stuff will always be on cable, but there is a part of me that is still attracted to the idea of tens of millions of people all tuning into the same show at the same time every week and then talking about it the next morning. There is a cultural currency there that highlights the very best of television has to offer. I always go back to Lost. Like the show or not you have to admit it is unsalably cool that in its first season 20 million people were watching something so inherently weird. It will be a long time before so many people rally around something so demanding.

Young men make up the bread and butter of the economics of the late night universe, and all business decisions seem to be made in efforts to court them. What is most curious about the Jimmy Fallon decision is their assumption that Fallon is some sort of hero to the dudes. Common sense would indicate that this couldn’t be further from the truth. Was he successful on SNL because of his characters and comedic sensibility? Hardly. He was popular because he was cute. This leads to the question: could a Fallon-helmed Late Night actually attract a female audience, and wouldn’t such a development actually be more significant than simply winning over — as Maebe Funke said — “[that] idiot demographic.”

In the end I’m sure he’ll do fine. Hell, Carson Daily is still on the air — clearly the key to succeeding in Late Night is wearing down your audience to the point of acceptance. Still, I wonder if any of this really matters? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m inclined to say the whole talk-show medium is on its way out, especially with Stewart and Colbert continuing to go strong in alternative formats. Then again, I can’t imagine a world where there isn’t late night talk. Perhaps the ratings will continue to erode but then plateau. Maybe it is a program-type that will always have an audience, so long as the person behind the desk isn’t absolutely repulsive. I think the difference is the notion of a “Late Night King” might be a bit outdated, but don’t tell that to Jay.

Always more at the NY Times