The A.V. Club - TV

Newswire: A&E cancels Intervention, sending it hurtling down a drug-riddled path to destruction

Jess Greene — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:55:00 -0500

After 13 seasons, 246 interventions, and years of viewer I’m-addicted-to-Intervention Twitter puns, A&E’s Intervention is ending. Five final episodes will air on Thursdays at 9PM ET starting June 13.

Throughout its tenure, the show has featured addictions to substances and experiences ranging from heroin to plastic surgery, and, according to a network press release, has a hand in the current sobriety of 156 people. It has also been part of a group reality television shows focusing on severe mental illness that toe (and sometimes stampede over) the line between genuine depiction of sickness and exploitative emotional voyeurism.

In recent seasons, Intervention has recently been largely outperformed by A&E’s Duck Dynasty, a reality show that toes the admittedly much lower stakes (and seemingly uncrossable) line between not enough duck calls and too many duck calls.

TV Club: Does Someone Have To Go?

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:15:00 -0500

Does Someone Have To Go? debuts tonight on Fox at 9 p.m. Eastern.

Of the many fascinating anecdotes that came out of the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the most memorable came not from a marquee name like Barack Obama or even Sarah Palin, but from a behind-the-scenes player who was out of the mix by the time the general election kicked off. According to widespread reports, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, shocked his peers in a meeting by attempting to assuage their concerns that Obama was picking up primary steam by explaining that all Clinton would need was the 370 delegates from California to cinch the Democratic nomination. But as everyone else knew, and Penn somehow didn’t, Democrats allot delegates proportionally, unlike the winner-take-all system employed by Republicans. It was a pivotal moment in the campaign’s working dynamic.

That story got so much traction ...

Great Job, Internet!: The Godfather and Arrested Development collide head-on to create Arrested Godfather

Danny Gallagher — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:50:00 -0500

Once again, the Internet has taken two pop culture behemoths, thrown them in a blender and posted the hilarious, pureed mess on YouTube for our amusement. This time, the folks at Slacktory used their mutant editing powers to celebrate the return of Arrested Development by smashing them together with another famous dysfunctional family. They took portions of the audio from Mitchell Hurwitz's cult sitcom and synced them up with selected scenes from Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy. Netflix really should consider contacting Coppola to turn this into a series instead of the other Italian-American family saga he's got in the works right now. [via Warming Glow]

Newswire: R.I.P. S.W.A.T. star Steve Forrest

Phil Dyess-Nugent — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Veteran he-man actor Steve Forrest, probably best remembered for starring in the TV series S.W.A.T., has died at 87. Forrest, who was the younger brother of the actor Dana Andrews, labored in movies for a decade, in tiny, mostly uncredited bit parts (including, among others, the 1943 Val Lewton production The Ghost Ship, Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 Hollywood expose’ The Bad And The Beautiful, and the Minnelli-Fred Astaire musical The Band Wagon) before winning a Golden Globe for Most Promising Male Newcomer for his performance in So Big (1953). Movie stardom failed to materialize, but he worked steadily, on television and in such films as George Cukor’s Heller In Pink Tights (1960), the Elvis Presley Western Flaming Star (1960), and the epic D-Day recreation The Longest Day (1962). In 1966, he had his first regular role on a TV series, starring in 30 episodes of the ...

TV Club: Save Me

Todd VanDerWerff — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Save Me debuts tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. Eastern.

Reviewing Save Me is like admitting the whole game of reviewing TV pilots is a sham. It’s all rigged, because it’s supposed to be possible to draw conclusions about what will happen to a show based on only one episode, a task that’s well-nigh impossible, particularly for comedies. What’s more, there’s plenty of room for circumstance to creep in around the edges, for which this show is an excellent case in point. The material in the pilot is about equally split between good and bad. There are jokes that work and jokes that fail in about equal measure, and for every good creative decision—like some genuinely complex relationships between some of the characters—there is a mind-bogglingly awful one—like the overbearing musical score that saws away in the background throughout. Yet put ...

Newswire: Spell-Mageddon to descend on ABC Family this summer

Jess Greene — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:20:00 -0500

How does ABC Family spell original summer programming? S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G B-E-E R-E-A-L-I-T-Y S-H-O-W. (Used in a sentence: “I had hoped this spelling bee reality show was a documentary-style look at the trials and tribulations of those intense Scripps kids, but it’s not.”) The network has put in a summer order for Spell-Mageddon, a Wipeout-style spelling reality series created by Thinkfactory Media, the producers of Preacher’s Daughters on Lifetime and the upcoming Marriage Bootcamp: Bridezillas on WEtv. Spell-Mageddon will feature, in a likely impressively literal take of the old storytelling formula of desire + obstacle = drama, contestants trying to spell increasingly difficult words while taking on “hilarious distractions.” The series debuts on Wednesday, July 24 at 9PM. Padded thinking caps on now.

Great Job, Internet!: Quick! Watch a supercut of every Arrested Development chicken dance before you get sick of the show

Marah Eakin — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:15:00 -0500

The new Arrested Development episodes premiere in a few days (duh), and that means it’s time for all the Internet’s content producers to cram in all the AD related content we can before everyone gets too burnt out. Thus, why not watch this supercut of all the Arrested Development chicken dances, put together by the fine people at Flavorwire? Nothing will get you prepped for Sunday night like a few dozen hours of strutting and caw-ca-cawing, so take a page from GOB’s playbook and get stomping.

All the 'Arrested Development' "Chicken" Dances from Flavorwire on Vimeo.

Gilmore Girls, “Sadie, Sadie”/“Hammers And Veils”

David Sims — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

“Sadie, Sadie” (season two, episode one; originally aired 10/9/2001)

A lot of shows enter their second season with caution, maybe trying to integrate new audience members by going slow or repeating a lot of their original premise. Gilmore Girls (which debuted in a new timeslot for year two) is much bolder, diving right back into the plots it left dangling and showing off its Stars Hollow set with a fun shot of the whole town following Lorelai and Rory as they walk to Luke’s diner to break the news of her pending marriage.

That neither “Sadie, Sadie” or “Hammers And Veils”—which aired back-to-back on the same night run smoothly into each other—deal with Lorelai’s pending marriage is a problem. It’s not even a slight against the Max Medina character to say that it’s obvious there’s no way these two are going ...

Newswire: There's a Girls porn parody now, because of course there is

Marah Eakin — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:25:00 -0500

Hustler has announced plans to release its own Girls porn parody, prompting those who might care to shrug their shoulders and mumble, “wow, how did that not exist already?” This Ain’t Girls XXX reportedly stays very true to the original series, with its “provocative” tone and “very well written” dialog, the existence of which already marks it as different from most skin flicks.

Actor Richie Calhoun, who plays the Adam Driver character in This Ain’t Girls, says that while he’s not a fan of the original Girls, he did everything he could to make the parody “as weird as possible,” which apparently means saying “really weird things” and doing “really weird positions.” Faux-Hannah apparently dabbles in lesbianism in the film and there’s a candy ball gag involved, but no Cabbage Patch Kids lunchbox, so let’s call the whole thing a draw.

Great Job, Internet!: Celebrate the 1-year anniversary of Journey To The Center Of Hawkthorne by playing a much more immersive version of the game

Kevin McFarland — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:15:00 -0500

Just over a year ago the third season of Community ended with three episodes on a single night, beginning with “Digital Estate Planning,” which took place largely within Journey To The Center Of Hawkthorne, a retro-style video game. Shortly thereafter, an intrepid Redditor recreated a small, explorable version of the game that attracted a small group of dedicated developers, who have continued to update the game over the course of the past year.

The group recently celebrated their one-year anniversary, and though the game isn’t complete, it’s a much more immersive and game-like experience instead of a few different environments to look at. Various contributors have produced over 200 costumes for 20 different characters, including just about every possible permutation a fan could want. The levels have expanded to cover not just New Abedtown and Gay Island, but connector environments that require much more skill, and a weapons ...

Newswire: CBS also picked up Bad Teacher because it’s CBS and can do what it wants

Kevin McFarland — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:05:00 -0500

With How I Met Your Mother entering its drawn-out wedding weekend of a final season next fall, CBS is on the hunt for a new show to fill its place in the schedule. To that end, the most watched network tripled its comedy order for next season to six new series, the last of which is a late order for Bad Teacher a week after the network’s upfront presentation.

Hilary Winston—a writer on the first two seasons of Community and the last two seasons of Happy Endings—penned the pilot adaptation of the film of the same name, and will executive produce with Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who wrote the original, $100 million grossing film. Ari Graynor slides into the Cameron Diaz role, which kind of makes sense since she played a younger version of that type in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and The Sitter, and ...

Newswire: You probably shouldn't watch all the new Arrested Development episodes in one sitting either, says Mitch Hurwitz

Marah Eakin — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:55:00 -0500

After stating that no, the new episodes of Arrested Development aren’t meant to be watched out of order, creator Mitch Hurwitz is now also saying that they’re not meant to be watched all in one sitting either. Good luck with that, buddy. Take it up with Netflix and whoever invented Memorial Day weekend.

Hurwitz told Vulture that he strongly suggests fans break their viewing of the seven-and-a-half-hour season into a few chunks, saying that “you can’t take it in all at once.” Hurwitz told Vulture about one of the show’s producers who tried to watch the whole season in one go and couldn’t, saying that he was “getting a little tired,” like some kind of comedy baby. Hurwitz also says there are a ton of sight gags in the episodes, and that they’ll reward attentive and repeat watching, so don’t blow your eyes ...

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, “A Simple Investigation”/“Business As Usual”

Zack Handlen — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:00 -0500

“A Simple Investigation” (season five, episode 17; originally aired 3/31/1997)

In which Odo has an adventure (adventure meaning “sex”)…

(Available on Netflix and Amazon.)

When you’re socially awkward, one of the dreams is that someone will find you. This isn’t true of everybody; there are plenty of introverts and shy folks and flailers who would be perfectly happy to stay in the shadows, pining at the stars. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that large numbers of folks who fumble through conversations terrified that everyone can see them sweat, yearn for some magical stranger to remove them from their largely self-induced corner. That’s what so much of the romantic myth that drives our culture is based on. “Love” becomes less of a mundane, reliable connection between individuals, and more of a panacea that can cure the ills of insecurity, loneliness, guilt, embarrassment, self-loathing, and ...

Psych, “Nip And Suck It”

Kevin McFarland — Thu, 23 May 2013 05:55:00 -0500

My father has started to discuss his retirement, openly enough that I can share that information with strangers on the internet. His group of anesthesiologists has a mandatory retirement age, but he doesn’t want to hit the age where he’s forced to leave, so he’s planning on leaving early and taking some time to travel more with my mother. After that, though, I think he’ll go into teaching. He talks about that idea fairly frequently, helps conducts boards for residents in their final year, and most of the human biology knowledge my younger brother and I soaked up at the dinner table as children comes from his brief lectures when describing his various cases at work. Active people like my father don’t take well to a sedentary retirement, where the thrill or excitement they get from their work, however mundane or enthralling, occupies them in ...

Nashville , “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive”

Todd VanDerWerff — Thu, 23 May 2013 04:00:00 -0500

There’s something beautiful about just how mercenary this season finale is. Nashville spent the better part of this season only grudgingly accepting that it was going to have to become a soap if it wanted to survive, and by the time this episode ends, there are surprise marriage proposals and people falling off the wagon and horrifying car crashes no one would ever walk away from surely and letters sent from beyond the grave. (Okay, they were just sent through the postal service, which might as well be the same thing, and I think I just wrote a Mallard Fillmore strip.) This was my favorite episode since the pilot, but it also feels like a very different show from the one we were promised in that first episode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—soap with occasional, acutely observed family drama looks good on this show—but it ...

TV Club: Chicago Fire — “A Hell Of A Ride”

Carrie Raisler — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:18:00 -0500

Of all the various stories from this network television season, Chicago Fire’s is the least likely and perhaps the most interesting. It began the season as almost an afterthought on NBC’s schedule, dismissed as competently bland nothingness and overshadowed by the splashy premise and good reviews of its timeslot-mate, Nashville. It was practically designed to fall victim to NBC’s recent inability to launch, well, anything; a lamb offered up to the slaughter of an entire network’s downfall.

But a funny thing happened as the season progressed. While Nashville’s creative trajectory and ratings steadily fell before stabilizing at a tepid level one could only call “meh,” Chicago Fire’s ratings actually rose, regularly drawing at least a million more viewers than its competition and winning the timeslot. More importantly than the ratings—at least for viewers—was that creatively the show grew as well, so much ...

What's On Tonight?: Save Me was one of NBC’s most intriguing pilots of the season—so, naturally, it’s premièring after that season has ended

Erik Adams — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Thursday, May 23, 2013. All times are Eastern.

TOP PICK

Save Me (NBC, 8 p.m.): In a year when NBC’s comedy strategy aimed wide—and missed across the board—the story of Anne Heche having a modern-day Joan Of Arc moment just didn’t fit anywhere alongside guys with kids, Friends with issues, normals with news, presidents with kids, and monkeys with medical degrees. Honestly, this kind of thing would’ve fit better on Showtime circa 2008, what with a heroine seeking redemption and showrunners who previously worked on United States Of Tara and The Big C. Todd VanDerWerff checks in at the top of the show’s burn-off, to determine if this programming curiosity belonged anywhere other than the back on the shelf.

REGULAR COVERAGE

Hannibal (NBC, 10 p.m.): The case of the week involves ...

Interview: Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor on the show’s return and inevitable movie

Will Harris — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

After numerous false starts and far too long a wait, Arrested Development will finally return with 15 new episodes on May 26, but no one in the cast has been resting on their laurels since the show’s 2006 cancellation, least of all Jeffrey Tambor. While waiting for the opportunity to reprise the role of George Bluth, Sr. (and presumably Oscar Bluth), the actor has starred in no fewer than three short-lived sitcoms (Welcome To The Captain, Twenty Good Years, and Bent) as well as a fourth that was picked up by NBC, actually went into production, but was then dropped from the schedule before a single episode saw the light of day (Next Caller). Tambor spoke to The A.V. Club in advance of Arrested’s return, and he also spoke about being a part of Amazon’s Onion News Empire pilot, closing out the Hangover saga, and how ...

MasterChef, “Auditions #1”/“Auditions #2”

Phil Dyess-Nugent — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:00:00 -0500

The three Musketeers of MasterChef, Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastionich, and Graham Elliot, begin their fourth season looking surprising eager and full of pepper. Nobody would blame them if they were a little out of breath, considering how much time they must have recently spent doubled over laughing at The Taste, ABC’s misguided attempt to get into the celebrity-judge-driven cooking-competition game. Generally speaking, there aren’t many people playing themselves on TV who I’d rather watch than The Taste's chief judge, Anthony Bourdain, and the first season of his new CNN series—which, admittedly, is just his old Travel Channel series with a different network logo in a corner of the screen—shows that if you dispatch him to any city in the world with a camera crew and a research team, he can still be depended on to return with good TV. I don’t know I ...

Modern Family, “Goodnight Gracie”

Donna Bowman — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:30:00 -0500

From time immemorial, sitcoms have been packing up their characters and sending them to Hawaii or France or Disneyworld or wherever, hoping to get a little network promotional boost from the novelty, and to discover new comic possibilities by dumping the fish out of their usual bowl. I don’t know that many sitcoms have managed to do it better than Modern Family. For some reason (and the question does deserve analysis), what would be a transparent gimmick on another show here becomes the impetus for some of the best episodes of the entire run.

Here’s a working hypothesis to explain why changing the scenery seems to step up this show’s game: When writing for the characters in and around their homes, the thought process starts with situations. What can happen to these characters that will lead to comedy? When writing for the characters in an exotic locale ...

The Middle, “The Graduation”

Will Harris — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:30:00 -0500

Whether you agree or disagree with the premise that this has been the strongest season of The Middle to date, it seems more or less inarguable that it’s at least been the most rewarding for regular viewers in terms of ongoing storylines. Granted, some ultimately worked better than others—Frankie’s departure from Ehlert Motors was effective as far as getting her out of Chris Kattan’s clutches, but going back to school and starting a new career as a dental hygienist has yielded mixed comedic returns—but when viewers become invested in the various aspects of the characters’ lives over the course of a season, there’s more of an emotional impact when those stories come to their conclusion.

Be it because she’s taken it so many times or simply because she can’t help herself, Sue is optimistic to a fault that she’s absolutely, positively ...

Don’t Trust The B---- In Apartment 23, “The Leak”/“Teddy Trouble”

Emily Guendelsberger — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:00:00 -0500

The Bitch is dead.

But I’m here to review the last eight episodes of it, two per week for the next month. Starting, appropriately enough, with an episode in which JVDB's still on Dancing With The Stars, June’s still at the coffeeshop, and Krysten Ritter’s acting is oddly stilted.

I’m not sure whether ABC’s weird scheduling of this show with total disregard for whether the timeline made sense had a causative or correlative relationship with the show never finding an audience and getting cancelled, but starting out with a bizarro leap back into the first season is morbidly appropriate. I’ve done my best to figure out the order in which these last episodes were intended to go, and I’m going to review them in that order; it seems like the least I can do.

So first there’s “The Leak...,” a first-season ...

Newswire: Ke$ha drank her own pee on TV, and The Parents Television Council is not cool with it

Austin Bernhardt — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:35:00 -0500

It isn’t particularly surprising that on last night’s episode of her MTV show, Ke$ha: My Crazy Beautiful Life, the world’s premier Gross-American pop star drank her own urine. While this is most likely not the most disgusting thing she’s ever done (or, quite possibly, not even the most disgusting thing she did that day) it is the first time she’s done something like this on cable television, and the conservative activist group The Parents Television Council is hilariously upset about it.

In a press release issued in advance of the show’s airing on Tuesday, PTC President Tim Winter declared, “It is an outrage that this kind of disgusting, vile content is being subsidized by each and every cable subscriber.” He also questioned why consumers should be subjected to this “just so [they] can get access to Disney, Discovery or the Golf channel”—a ...

Newswire: Finally, fans can make money from their Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries fan fiction

Caroline Siede — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:15:00 -0500

Fan fiction has long thrived online where writers don’t need to worry about pesky things like intellectual property rights. A new deal from Amazon could change all that. Kindle Worlds will be the first commercial publishing platform that allows fan fiction authors to earn royalties from their work. Kindle Worlds has already teamed up with Warner Bros. TV’s Alloy Entertainment to secure licenses for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries. Let the brainstorming begin! Chuck and Blair in the White House? Ezra has been “A” all along? Stefan and Damon give up all that brooding and decide to go into show business where they star in an all-vampire revival of Sweeney Todd? The sky's the limit.

Authors that publish through the self-service submission platform will receive 35% of the net revenue for works over 100,000 words (compared to 70% for writers that self-publish ...

Slings And Arrows, “The Promised End”

Todd VanDerWerff — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

“The Promised End” (season 3, episode 6; originally aired 8/28/2006)

In which our little life is rounded with a sleep

(Available on Netflix and Amazon.)

If you are lucky, you will get to be a part of something you truly believe in. If you are lucky, you will find a place you belong. If you are lucky, you will find a person who makes you better than yourself. If you are human, you won’t realize what you had until you don’t anymore. Suddenly, the thing that was at the center of your existence will become its opposite, an absence akin to a star collapsing in on itself and forming a black hole. There will be a chalk outline where once there was a thing, a photo negative where once something brighter and better existed. And your life will be changed, and you will keep chasing that ...

Newswire: Critic's Choice TV Awards nods at The Big Bang Theory, Bunheads, Ryan Murphy, and more

Caroline Siede — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:35:00 -0500

Nominations were announced Wednesday morning for the third annual Critic’s Choice Television Awards. Proving there is nothing television critics love more than nerds and Ryan Murphy, The Big Bang Theory and American Horror Story: Asylum tied for most nominated program with six noms each. HBO and FX lead the network pack with 21 and 19 nominations, respectively.

While Parks And Rec, Game Of Thrones, New Girl, Louie, The Americans, and Breaking Bad were among the shows earning multiple nominations, Modern Family and Mad Men each earned only one acting nod. Modern Family has won the Best Comedy Emmy three years running, and it’s absence in the Best Comedy Series category means this competition is about to blow wide open. Get your bets ready.

The award show will air via live webcast on June 10, hosted by stand-up/Parks And Rec cast member/Twitter VIP Retta.

The full list ...

Great Job, Internet!: The cast of The Middle have their own 10 favorite episodes, thank you very much

Will Harris — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:05:00 -0500

When the decision was made to shine the TV Club 10 spotlight on The Middle, a great deal of thought and consideration went into selection the episodes that would make it into the final list. There was also a great deal of hesitation and procrastination, however, along with many occasions amidst the bursts of uncertainty when the question was posed to others, “So, uh, what are your favorite episodes?”

Among those asked: Patricia Heaton, Neil Flynn, and Eden Sher.

Heaton and Flynn each offered up a list of their 10 favorite episodes, along with a one-liner explaining either what the plot was about or why they liked it. Sher’s enthusiasm, however, could not be restrained to a mere single sentence: not only did the plucky young comedienne quickly whip up her own list of 10 favorite episodes, but she dedicated a paragraph-long love letter to every single one of ...

Interview: Katie Aselton on going from mumblecore to thriller—and directing her own nude scenes

Sam Adams — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Katie Aselton’s second feature as a director is just about the last thing fans of her debut, The Freebie, might have expected—which is exactly why she did it. Rising out of mumblecore—she starred in 2005’s The Puffy Chair—to a spot on FX’s The League, she’s stuck to stylistically subdued, character-driven work, or at least she had until she filmed the new girls-in-trouble thriller Black Rock. Working from a script by her husband Mark Duplass, the movie reunites onetime BFFs Aselton, Lake Bell, and Kate Bosworth for a weekend campout on a Maine islet. But their attempt to work out longstanding grudges in the isolation of nature is foiled by the intrusion of three young military veterans whose time in combat has left them dangerously off-balance. Given that Deliverance was one of Aselton’s models, it’s not surprising that, before long, survival takes ...

TV Roundtable: Boobies, pee-pees, codependence, and grounding the shenanigans with heart

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Welcome to the TV Roundtable, where some of TV Club’s writers tackle episodes that deal with a central theme. The next five installments focus on episodes featuring “interlopers.”

Friends, “The One With The Boobies” (season one, episode 13, originally aired 1/19/95)

In which everyone ends up exposed…

David Sims: When watching Friends—and any show like Friends (Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, the original Coupling, a thousand others) where a bunch of people hang out as the premise of the show—a question quickly has to be asked: What’s with these people? They really hang out with each other all the time, have unlimited access to their apartments, eat and drink at the same three places, discuss every minute detail of their lives, and eventually end up sleeping with each other (probably)? It’s what we want to see, but if you sit and think ...

Newswire: CBS no longer just for the olds, according to ratings system skewed toward viewing habits of the olds

Erik Adams — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:55:00 -0500

In a development that’s being trumpeted in newspapers, broadsides, and other forms of media no longer preferred by the viewership of CBS, preliminary reports have the Tiffany Network unseating Fox from the ratings throne it has occupied for eight years. As reported by Entertainment Weekly, CBS will take the Nielsen crown among adults under 50 for the 2012-13 season—a victory that will definitively put an end to years of jokes about CBS being watched exclusively by the old and irrelevant. Yes, this confirms that the network of Blue Bloods, 60 Minutes, and the silver-fox triumverate of Mark Harmon, Ted Danson, and Morley Safer is the choice of a new generation, with their skateboards and hip-hop raps and standing appointments to watch NCIS at a time appointed by CBS. (EXTREMELY RIGID VIEWING HABITS! [Guitar lick.]) The victory certainly has nothing to do with the fact that the Nielsen ratings ...