Newhart season 7

Of the sitcoms I’ve profiled at this blog, some emerged out of the gate fully formed (Murphy Brown, Bewitched). Others took a while to get their bearings: to figure out how to most successfully showcase the characters and mine the comedy. And that’s not that unusual. A whole lot of promising sitcoms don’t catch fire till Season 2; the first season is a bit of a learning curve for the writers, and come Season 2— if the show is filmed before a live audience — you get to share in the audience’s exhilaration, when it’s apparent to all that the show has been (sometimes only subtly, but nonetheless momentously) transformed, and the laughs have blissfully multiplied. And then there are the shows that don’t reach maturity till a little later. Both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Designing Women become the best versions of themselves in Season 3: the former through a soft reboot, the latter through a careful rebalancing act.

But how about a sitcom that becomes the very best version of itself in Season 7?

No Place Like Holmes: 2013 in review

FX reran my favorite Buffy episode the other morning, "No Place Like Home," and I had one of those "boy, remember when TV was good?" moments. And I suppose TV still is good, or I wouldn't be bothering with this blog, and perhaps as some say, it's better than ever, but man, there's so much about the current TV landscape that I don't understand.

the CBS implosion: The Good Wife, The Mentalist