Criminal Minds season 8

Criminal Minds debuted in the fall of 2005, as CBS was riding a wave of popular procedurals. The first of these, of course, had been CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which had premiered five years earlier to surprisingly little fanfare. It had been slotted behind a remake of The Fugitive, which CBS was pinning its hopes on — but The Fugitive never delivered on that promise, whereas CSI, week after week, built on its lead-in. So when CBS, after debuting the reality show Survivor to gargantuan ratings in the summer of 2000, decided to launch a second season the following February, they chose CSI, their most popular new series of the season, to follow it — and the pairing proved felicitous. Within a year, CSI had risen to become the #1 show on network television. Spin-offs and similar procedurals — that combined old-fashioned detective work with newfangled forensics — quickly followed: Without a Trace and CSI: Miami in 2002, Cold Case in 2003 and CSI: NY in 2004. And hot on their heels came Criminal Minds.

Maude season 2

I had occasion to meet producer Norman Lear in the spring of 1978, when I was a freshman in college. He was coming to our university to give a brief lecture, and then a select group of students were joining him at a local restaurant for dinner. I have no memory of how those particular students were chosen, but as a lowly freshman, I was not among them. But this was at a time when my ambition was to write for television, so I was not about to miss the chance to meet Normal Lear — and having been raised on ‘60s sitcoms, I wasn’t going to let anything as trivial as the lack of an invite stop me. In true Lucy Carmichael fashion, I managed to convince the school newspaper that they needed to do a story on Lear’s visit, and even though I had never written for them before, I persuaded them that I was the one to do it. And then I made the case that part of covering his visit meant covering the dinner, so they snagged me an invite.