Have you ever turned on an episode of a TV series that you’ve been watching for a while and then wondered (often aloud), “Why the hell am I still watching this?”

NOTE: This doesn’t really apply to young people, who apparently have found a new way to watch TV. The girls on my basketball team wait until an entire season of a program is over and then they watch all of the episodes in one junk food-fueled weekend. That’s actually a good way to get acquainted with a new series that you had skipped (The Walking Dead or Episodes), but who wants to wait an entire season to watch something they already like?

Anyway, I turned on House of Lies the other night and came to the realization that it will be for the last time. About halfway through the episode, I thought of the classic line from Jack Nicholson’s last B-movie, Hells Angels on Wheels. Some knucklehead was holding a joint in his hand and uttered, “this shit is shit.”

And so it is with House of Lies. I watched the first season because I love Don Cheadle. He portrays an industrial-strength jackass, a tightrope-walking business consultant named Marty Kaan (which, wink wink, is a homonym for “con” as in “con man”). He’s divorced from (but still having sex with) his viper of an ex-wife, who is also a business rival. The two have a son, Roscoe, who is either gay or transgender or probably just un-parented.

Marty has a crack team that includes two guys who are over-smart and under-mature, and Kristen Bell, who is blonde. The first season was okay, as they did this cool thing where Marty would look into the camera and explain how he was going to separate some stupid corporate types from a lot of their money. There was also some sex, usually with pretty good looking (naked) women, but that’s not enough to carry a show.

In the first couple seasons, the underlying tone with Cheadle and Bell was "will they or won’t they?” Then after a severely drunken night out at the end of Season Two, it’s now “did they or didn’t they?” Really, I don’t give a crap. They both are good looking and have way more money than a human being should and all they do is whine and moan.

Now, Marty has sold his soul to a racist would-be politician as a means to start his own company, Bell’s character is sleeping with a dildo manufacturer, and the other two guys are so damn boring, I couldn’t tell you what they’re doing.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me happened when Marty’s ex, who apparently is good looking, but is way too skinny for my taste, got upset when Roscoe decided to move back in with his dad. In the span of one-and-a-half episodes, she tried lesbianism with her maid, had an orgy in the pool, had sex with Marty’s ne’er-do-well brother on Marty’s kitchen counter, and went back to snorting copious amounts of cocaine.

When it ends (and I’m betting that it will end pretty soon), let me know what happened. I don’t think I’ll care.

The Girls Finale:

There have been two episodes since I spoke to you last. Each was worse than the other. In the penultimate episode of the season, main character Hannah’s OCD gets so bad that she sticks a Q-Tip so far into her ear that she perforates her eardrum. Then she goes to Urgent Care where a doctor from India ridicules her. There were also two sex scenes, one boring and the other quite repulsive. In the latter, a guy makes a woman crawl on all fours, then roughly enters her from behind. He humps a couple times and then ejaculates on a part of her body that she had specifically asked him not to ejaculate upon. It was very ugly—borderline rape, really—and in keeping with the show’s tradition of being not funny at all.

In the season finale, Hannah’s OCD is keeping her from writing that e-book for which she has already spent the advance. She complains on the phone to her ex-boyfriend, the Ejaculator, who runs across town and kicks her door down because her various neuroses won’t allow her to get out of bed.

Aren’t you glad you don’t watch this nonsense?

...and if Ken Jennings doesn't replace him, you'll be able to hear my cries of impotent rage from here to eternity.

According to the New York Post, Alex Trebek's contract to host Jeopardy! ends in 2016, and he appears to have made the decision to retire when it ends.

The rumored top pick? The Today Show's Matt Lauer.

From the Post:

Lauer is widely reported to be on his way out at the morning show, which has tumbled to No. 2 in the ratings in the last year. He is being blamed for the show’s fall from grace after 16 years on top.

The Post reported this week that Lauer is not expected to re-sign with “Today” when his blockbuster, $25-million-a-year deal expires in 2015.

By coincidence, that’s about the time Trebek is expected to end his three-decade run as the host of the habit-forming game show.

Sony Pictures Television, which owns the hugely profitable show, has quietly been feeling out TV personalities in recent months to see who might be available and willing to take on the role in 2016, sources say.

Trebek — who suffered his second heart attack last summer — said in interviews last year that he was thinking about retiring this season.

But Sony convinced him to sign one final, three-year contract — taking him to age 76 — to give producers enough time to find a next-generation successor.

As someone who has spent either too much or not enough of his life watching TV game shows (there is no in-between), I can say that Lauer doesn't strike me as someone who would be an interesting host for the show. Sure, he's a name but can he bring the same amount of smarm, intelligence and deadpan mocking of contestants that Trebek did? I doubt it.

Why, if anyone should be in consideration for the show, it should be noted Jeopardy! conqueror Ken Jennings, famous for both his 74 game win streak and his hilarious sense of humor.

Me eating this carne asada burrito is rated PG-13 for "some sensuality."

— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) March 10, 2013

I've been there too, buddy. Mmmf.

On October 4, 2007, I wrote in my column: “There’s a new CBS sitcom that has one of the funniest pilots I’ve ever seen. The Big Bang Theory features two Star Trek/computer nerd roommates who clash when a young woman who works at The Cheesecake Factory moves in across the hall. They argue over string theory, drop the names of Oppenheimer and Huygens, and have the Periodic Table on their shower curtain. It’s very funny, but it probably has no chance.”

Rarely have I been so happy to have been wrong. The show is now in its sixth season and is often the No. 1-rated show in all of TV. It regularly drubs the once-powerful American Idol in the Thursday night time slot and is actually growing in strength, thanks (in no small part) to the fact that it’s on in syndication just about everywhere, all the time.

When the show first started, I was in rapturous love with it. Physics jokes, countless sci-fi references, and a core of geeks who were, by age, adults, but, by temperament, stuck in that place where they were getting wedgies from their respective high-school bullies. And it was consistently very, very funny. At the center of the show are the two roommates—Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) and Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki). Their names are a loving homage to TV pioneer Sheldon Leonard, who was responsible for such early sitcoms as The Danny Thomas Show (Make Room For Daddy); The Andy Griffith Show; The Dick Van Dyke Show; and the groundbreaking, multi-racial I Spy.

Both Sheldon and Leonard have Ph.D’s—Sheldon having earned his as a teenager—and both work at Cal Tech, along with their buddies (Dr.) Raj Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar) and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg). Howard has a Master’s in Engineering from M.I.T., which makes him the runt of the intellectual litter in that peer group. The “You only have a Master’s degree” jokes are still going strong after six years and show that there is a pecking order in every social group.

When the show started, Penny (Kaley Cuoco) had just moved in across the hall and Leonard immediately had the warm, trembling thighs for her. The two guys had just returned from an aborted attempt to earn money for increased bandwidth by making deposits at a sperm bank. When Penny asks what they do for fun, Sheldon deadpans, “Well, earlier today, we tried masturbating for money.”

Against all odds, Leonard wins Penny’s affection, but then loses it for a couple seasons after he blurts out that he loves her, sending her running for cover. He later has a relationship with Raj’s lawyer sister, Priya. (This guy gets waaaay more sex than the nerds I’ve known over the years.) he’s back with Penny now, but it’s shaky.

Raj, who is unable to talk to women unless he has alcohol in his system, was actually the first in the group to have sex (in the hilarious first-season Halloween episode, in which Sheldon went to a costume party dressed as the Doppler Effect). But Raj is generally cast as a lonely metrosexual who is just a bit too metro, even for his own liking.

Wolowitz is now married to the diminutive and abrasive Dr. Bernadette Rostenkowski, a microbiologist who earns much more money than Howard and never lets him forget it.

But by far the most appealing relationship is that of the completely asexual Sheldon and his “girlfriend” (by written agreement), Amy Farrah Fowler (Mayim Bialik). They met when Raj and Howard uploaded Sheldon’s info onto an online dating site and it spit out Amy. After Sheldon and Amy hit it off in an incredibly nerdy way, Howard, who was standing nearby, turned to Raj and said, “Dear God, what have we done?”

In the beginning, Amy was as uninterested in sex as Sheldon, but she has evolved to the point where she loves Sheldon and also has a crush on penny. Amy recently faked an illness so that Sheldon would have to rub Vicks on her chest every day, as stipulated in the Boyfriend/Girlfriend Agreement. They’re obviously heading in the nookie direction, but I wonder what it will do to Sheldon. Will it give him the ultimate insight into the universe or will it have the same effect as Samson getting a haircut?

The show overcame multiple obstacles. Its first season was cut short after only eight episodes because of the Writers Guild strike. It attracted only 8.4 million viewers its first season, but grew steadily from there. It dipped slightly when CBS moved it from Monday to Thursday, but it is now roaring. Many sitcoms have a seven-year run, enough for solid syndication but not so much as to get stale and repetitive. If anything, Bang may not have peaked yet. It looks like it could easily go 10 years.

It caught on a long time ago in geekdom and has spread in to the real world. Sheldon, who neither recognizes nor understands sarcasm, tries to play lame practical jokes on his friends, after which he shouts, “Bazinga!” A recently discovered species of bee in Brazil was named Euglossa bazinga and the character also has an asteroid named for him, 247247 Sheldoncooper.

It’s not the greatest sitcom of all time. It’s not avant-garde like Seinfeld or as technically excellent as The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Frasier. It’s probably not even the best sitcom on the air today (that would be Modern Family). But it’s in my all-time Top 10 and it’s going strong.

Perhaps, as Leonard likes to think, nerds will rule the world someday.

This week’s episode of Girls wasn’t completely awful, for a few reasons. We didn’t have to listen to Jessa whine about why her life sucks. Star/writer/producer Lena Dunham kept her clothes on. And Judy Collins sang “Someday Soon” at a nightclub.

We did learn that Hannah’s (Dunham’s character) OCD has come roaring back, probably triggered by the stress of having to write the e-book. She does everything in groups of eight (including masturbating eight times before going to sleep; that’s nice to know). It was probably just a coincidence that it was the eighth episode of the season. Right?

To Dunham’s eternal credit, she cast as her father the wildly underappreciated Peter Scolari, who started off his career as Tom Hanks’ roommate in Bosom Buddies and then had a brilliant run as the self-absorbed TV producer Michael Harris on Newhart. It’s good to see him, even if it’s on the unfunniest comedy in the history of television.

Daily Show host Stewart told the NY Times he will be taking 12 weeks off from hosting duties to direct the drama "Rosewater," for which he wrote a screenplay.

John Oliver, who often portrays the show's "Senior British Correspondent," will be taking over as guest host for eight weeks. The usual four-week break that the show takes during the summer will be the last four weeks of Stewart's leave.

Rosewater tells the story of Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek reporter who was supposed to visit Iran for one week and was instead imprisoned for 118 days and interrogated.

From the New York Times:

A Canadian-Iranian journalist and documentarian, Mr. Bahari was jailed in Tehran in 2009 for four months, accused of plotting a revolution against the government. Shortly before his arrest, Mr. Bahari had participated in a “Daily Show” sketch, conducted by one of the show’s correspondents, Jason Jones, who was pretending to be a spy. Mr. Bahari’s captors used the footage against him.

“You can imagine how upset we were,” Mr. Stewart said, “and I struck up a friendship with him afterward.”

Former Tucson councilwoman Carol West made her AZ Illustrated Politics debut this evening, joining former state lawmaker Frank Antenori and former Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers for a discussion about the sequester, Gov. Brewer's sales-tax and education-funding reform plans, a state bill to further regulate in-vitro fertilization procedures, the upcoming Tucson City Council elections and next year's Attorney General race.

I once had a friendly disagreement with a female acquaintance. She asked me what was so great about being a guy. Seeking, as always, to raise the level of discourse, I said, “Well, one of the great things about being a guy is that you can pee outdoors.”

She smiled and did that scales of justice thing with her hands. “Hmm,” she said, quite full of herself, “pee outdoors. Multiple orgasms.”

I’ve always felt that the whole multiple-orgasm thing was wildly overrated. I mean, if you come within shouting distance of doing it right, one orgasm should be plenty for anybody.

Which brings me to this week’s episode of Girls. The female characters on the show never have multiple orgasms, because in order to have multiples, you first have to have one and the women on the show are so jaded and so willing to hook up with just about anybody, orgasms are a distant rumor.

However, while Girls creator/writer/star Lena Dunham has taken enjoyable (not to mention respectful and responsible) sex off the table, she did do something in the latest episode to advance the twentysomething slacker post-feminist agenda. Her character peed outdoors. Twice. And they sorta showed it.

That’s what passed for the highlights of the episode, which was built around skankmeister Jessa going to visit her burnt-out hippie daddy out in the country, perchance to give the viewer the opportunity to see why Jessa is so freakin’ annoying and irresponsible. Okay, so now we know. That’s doesn’t make her I’m-pretty-so-I-can-get-away-with-anything routine any easier to put up with. And because Dunham is the creator/writer/star of the show, her character, Hannah, went along with Jessa, mostly so she could pee outdoors.

Hannah also had sex outdoors with a guy she had met earlier that day. She complimented him on the way he turned the top of his turtleneck sweater down and then jumped in the bushes with him for 30 seconds of rhythm-less humping because she didn’t know (in her words) if he was “sexy in a loser-ly way or just a loser.”

Oh yeah, Rolling Stone put Dunham on the cover this week and referred to Girls as TV’s funniest show. The entire cover story involved Dunham’s various neuroses and not one word about why the show is funny. (Mostly because it isn’t. Ever.)

I remember reading an article about Elmore Leonard (the genius behind “Justified”). He wanted to be a writer, but couldn’t find time. So, he started getting up early, but he’d make a pot of coffee and read the morning paper. Pretty soon, it was time to go to work and he hadn’t written anything. He eventually forced himself to write before he could have his first cup of coffee in the morning.

Along those lines, having painted myself into a corner by promising to re-cap each episode of Girls, from now on until the end of the season (which can’t come soon enough), I’ll write about good TV before I write the re-cap because when I do it the other way around, it scrapes the innards out of my soul.

I’ll start next week.

On AZ Illustrated Politics tonight: Former Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers, former state lawmaker Frank Antenori and former Tucson City Councilwoman Carol West join host Jim Nintzel to discuss the local impact of sequestration, the latest bills at the Arizona Legislature, this year's Tucson City Council races and more. The show airs at 6:30 p.m. on Arizona Public Media's PBS 6.

On tonight's edition of AZ Illustrated Politics: Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries and former Tucson City Council aide Miguel Ortega join host Jim Nintzel to discuss Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild's State of the City Speech; Rothschild's call for more annexation; Vail's push to incorporate into a town; the ongoing debate over immigration reform; TUSD's school closures; and the future of TUSD's Mexican-American Studies program. (Or at least that's all on the agenda. We'll see how much of it we can cover!)

With February coming to a close, we’re almost done with the second Sweeps Month of the TV season (and the cheapskates who run TV these days don’t even give us a full month of TV in May, so these are the good old days).
A few things about this season so far:

• Vegas should be better than it is. I’ve been watching it from the first episode, but I don’t know if I’ll sign on for a second season. With Dennis Quaid as the frontier-type sheriff and Michael Chiklis as the mob boss/casino operator, the sparks should be flying off the screen. They’re not.

The plots are intricate enough, but there’s just no fire.

• They brought back Body of Proof, but it’s totally changed around into more of a detective procedural. It still has Dana Delany. Most guys have a warm spot for Delany ever since she appeared as Josie Marcus in “Tombstone.” However, it’s going to take more than that.

• I tried to watch a few minutes of American Idol, but I couldn’t even make it to the first commercial break. I love Mariah Carey’s singing. Period. I like absolutely nothing about Nicki Minaj. The show is hideous and grotesque.

• One of my all-time favorite sitcoms, “The Big Bang Theory,” is now the top-rated show on TV. That’s amazing to me. It’s not the funniest show on TV (Modern Family is), but any show that talks about the Higgs Boson, has characters dress up as the Doppler Effect for Halloween, and celebrates the geekdom of comic books, sci-fi, and physics is special.

• I’m torn as to whether to read the Walking Dead graphic novels so I’ll have an idea as to what’s coming up or to just go along for the ride. I know it can’t just be about finding new and clever ways to kill zombies, but the Governor vs. the Prison Group plotline is wearing thin. More Michonne. More Maggie. More walkers.

Just over two months after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., PBS is asking America, “Where do we go from here?” with special programming aptly named “After Newtown.” The series of specials, first announced by the network in January, began airing Monday and will continue through Feb. 22.

Mixing documentary-style reports with commentaries on gun control, mental health and possible prevention of similar acts of violence in the future, “After Newtown” was designed expose the many relevant issues surrounding the shooting, as well as resonate emotionally with viewers still seeking closure, according to a PBS press release:

“This week of specials gives PBS the opportunity to take an in-depth and thoughtful look at the issues the Newtown tragedy laid bare,” said Beth Hoppe, Chief Programming Executive and General Manager of General Audience Programming for PBS. “As we mourn the lives lost in Newtown, it is important to present the facts, the science, and the history behind the issues to provide information and context as we collectively look at how better to protect and serve our communities.”