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...Five and Tootsie. But he hit his apex of riotous unlikability in this 1983-84 sitcom about local talk-show host Bill Bittinger. Selfish, lecherous and desperate to move up the career ladder, he irritated and deceived his crew (including a young Geena Davis) with impeccable smarminess. Bill presaged HBO's Larry Sanders and The Office's David Brent, but it took TV a decade or two to catch up with him. Thankfully...
...Henson's HBO kids' show had plenty of fun--original music, painful puns and a talking trash heap--but it also took on weighty matters (courage, honesty, self-discovery) with sophistication and tenderness. It did emotional education as well as Sesame Street imparted the ABCs. And the regular dispatches of Fraggle explorer Uncle Traveling Matt from the strange realms of "outer space"--that is, the world of humans--reminded kids that people could be the most outlandish creatures of all. --By James Poniewozik
...secret to some of the best HBO series is dirt. Not filthy language, not nudity--actual dirt. The muck in the streets of Deadwood, Tony Soprano's soldiers exhuming an incriminating body, the Fisher family tossing shovelfuls in the grave as Six Feet Under buried its lead character Nate--all this soil embodies the network's insistence on deprettifying its subjects...
...when HBO set out to make a drama about Rome in the time of Julius Caesar, Job One was to dirty up the Eternal City. Rome (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T., debuts Aug. 28) eschews the popular white-marble myth. "Part of the brief was to create an image of Rome nobody has seen before," says executive producer Frank Doelger. Historic Rome, he says, was a teeming capital full of color, pornographic graffiti and coed public latrines. It was crowded, relentlessly commercial (a town crier's announcement in one episode ends with an ad for a flour miller) and, above...
Inside Politics host Ed Henry, who said he had planned to ask Novak about Plame later in the show, won't get to any time soon; CNN quickly asked Novak to "take some time off." It may want to reconsider, though. People drop the b.s. word on HBO all the time, and the ratings are huge. --By James Poniewozik