A few years back, I was given a writing assignment from a nationally known publication. They wanted me to write a humorous essay about the then-hit TV series, Sex and the City. I watched a few episodes, fought back the bile creeping up into the bottom of my throat, and then watched them again just in case I had missed something, like maybe the humor. With my deadline approaching, I finally sat down and wrote, “I’m sorry; I thought comedies were supposed to be funny.”

I sent it in and, amazingly, they paid me. (And yes, I’ve written for them since.)

Having said that, I would hereby like to announce that compared to Girls on HBO, Sex and the City (which I still despise) is the Citizen Kane of comedy series. “Girls” came to the small screen with advance fanfare rarely seen anywhere. The critics heaped praise on the show’s 26-year-old creator/writer/star, Lena Dunham, and called the series “groundbreaking.” It’s groundbreaking like if you dropped a bowling ball off a tall building.

When it comes to television, I don’t have particularly high standards. A comedy has to be funny, which is why I haven’t watched “The Office” ever since the cringe-to-laugh ratio tilted over in the wrong direction. I won’t watch any “reality” show about stupid white people. (Do you notice that there aren’t any such shows about stupid black people? Studio execs don’t want to be called racist, but it’s okay to put on all types of white trash.) And, as I’ve mentioned when it comes to Mad Men, I won’t watch a show where I want to punch every leading character in the face.

When it comes to Girls, I would gladly punch every slimy, wormy, scheming, lame-ass guy on the show and, for the females, I would hire Giada De Laurentiis to handle my business. (I love watching Giada cook, but she’s got some serious man hands going on there.)

Ending the day with a clip DELETED from the show, filled with pitch-perfect physical comedy, was a good way of re-exciting me. #tca13
— Todd VanDerWerff (@tvoti) January 9, 2013

I give up. I tried to pretend to be cool and indifferent about the 14 new episodes of Arrested Development coming to Netflix. After this tweet (and many others) from the Television Critics Association gathering, I give up.

My wife watches "Cake Boss," which means that if I want to share the living room with her on those evenings, I have to half-watch it, too. It's an innocuous little show about a guy who runs a bakery, Carlo's Bake Shop, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Bartolo "Buddy" Valastro has been working in the bakery since he was 17. He took over from his dad, Buddy, Sr. and is married to the former Elisabetta "Lisa" Belgiovine. They have four kids—Sofia, Buddy III, Marco, and Carlo Salvatore. It's really not stereotypical of New Jersey at all. For example, his wife, who speaks perfect Italian, has blonde hair.

The show revolves around the workings at the bakery, which has now become a sensation and a place to which people make pilgrimages. One of my basketball players, Maya, asked, for Christmas, to get Buddy's book and a bunch of baking pans. When she went to visit NYU last spring, she made a side trip to the bakery.

Buddy has a fun-loving crew who play pranks on each other and then they make cakes. That's about it. Believe me, I wouldn't be watching it if my wife weren't watching it, although he did make a bitchin' life-sized cake of Betty White for her 145th birthday. I love Betty White, especially as mega-aggressive cougar Sue Ann Nivens on the old "Mary Tyler Moore" show.

Anyway, the problem is that this sweet little nothing of a show has taken a dark turn. Buddy's mom, Mary, has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known colloquially as Lou Gehrig's Disease), for which there is no cure. The other night, they showed her sitting down for dinner; oddly, some doctors think that a high-calorie diet may stave off the symptoms, at least for a while. Mary Valastro is thinner than the Republican platform on immigration and she has to force herself to eat. The scenes of her trying to handle silverware were gut-wrenching.

I don't know how long this is going to go on. It's the choice of Buddy Valastro and his mother, I suppose, but you just know that there is some snot-nosed TV executive fresh out of Business School who is salivating over the prospect of watching this women waste away, as ratings soar.

As someone who spent far too much time watching the antics of the Bluth family during my college years, I'm unhealthily excited about the future prospect of watching the return of Arrested Development this May.

From CraveOnline.com:

Fox briefly posted the 14 episode names and the premiere date of May 4, 2013 on their press website before quickly taking it down. (Via Oh No They Didn’t)

Each episode of the fourth season has the name of the central character that it will follow. Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman), Gob (Will Arnett), Lindsay Fünke (Portia de Rossi), George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera) and George Bluth Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) will each get two spotlight episodes, while Tobias Fünke (David Cross), Maeby Fünke (Alia Shawkat) Buster Bluth (Tony Hale) and Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) will each get a single episode.

Because Netflix will premiere the entire season on a single day, fans will be able to watch “Arrested Development” in any order that they choose.

For the episode order and speculation as to the show's future, check out CraveOnline.com.

Although the show has seemingly been wiped off the pop culture map (there are very few clips on YouTube and episodes aren't available on any of the streaming services to my knowledge), the two seasons of the Joe Schmo show were among my favorite television experiences. I'm entirely sure that's a great thing to admit, considering the show was essentially an exercise in torturing an unsuspecting regular person (hence the title) by placing them inside a fake reality show where everything is scripted and the rest of the cast are actors (Kristen Wiig was one of the cast members during the first season). Still, I watched every episode, laughing uncontrollably at the reactions of someone trapped inside a televised world where everything has seemingly gone mad.

After nine years, the show is coming back, this time as a fake game show to find America's next bounty hunter (sure) and Lorenzo Lamas is among the contestants (OK, why not?). I generally assume that the cable network Spike's programming schedule consists of one constant marathon of Deadliest Warrior, so now I'll have a reason to figure out what channel it occupies on my cable lineup by January 8th.

Guess what? Wayne LaPierre made his first public appearance since Friday's total debacle of a press conference and yeah, he's not going to give an inch on any sort of gun control or restrictions. Meet the Press' David Gregory actually seemed irritated by LaPierre's stubbornness, getting into it with the NRA head over regulating high-capacity magazines.

Also, if you were wondering if LaPierre recognizes the cognitive dissonance of claiming that armed guards would stop school shootings even though Columbine had one on duty in 1999...nope, he's not bending on that either. Sigh.

I just got horrible news. I've learned that I will have to wait until the end of 2013 to find out how Sherlock Holmes (SPOILERS!) survived the leap from that tall building at the end of the last season. And, to be sure, I'm talking about the magnificent BBC series, Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch in the starring role, not the CBS cutesy knockoff, Elementary, which, by comparison, is paler than Newt Gingrich's latest wife.

The BBC series is just stunningly good, meticulously written and brilliantly acted. Best of all, at 90 minutes each, the episodes play more like movies, with time for subplots, dead-end clues, and lots of character development. Cumberbatch's Sherlock is dead-on haughty, clever, and in a constant state of annoyance—all at the same time. He seems permanently befuddled by the fact that not everyone in the room (or in the world) is willing to bow down and/or kiss his ass. In a real acting coup, Cumberbatch manages to be simultaneously endearing and off-putting.

The series is the work of Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis, two writers for the ridiculously popular Doctor Who series, who came up with the concept of bringing Holmes and Watson into the 21st Century during their long train rides to the Doctor Who set in Cardiff, Wales. They have created a monster, one equal in excellence and popularity, that has people all over the world screaming for more. They, however, will not be rushed—nor could they be, even if they wanted to.

The current delay was caused, in large part, due to the absence of Martin Freeman, who plays Dr. John Watson. Freeman was away starring in the title role of The Hobbit, a movie you couldn't get me to see with a promise of a trunkload of money and a new head of hair. Freeman, whom some might recognize from his role as the porn-star stand-in (or lie-in) who, through clever, detached chit-chat, falls in love with his naked co-worker in "Love Actually," is up to the task as Watson. A war veteran who doesn't like to talk about his past, Watson suffers Holmes semi-gladly, but bristles at Holmes' unwillingness (or inability) to express any sort of human emotion, or even acknowledge his bond with Watson.

Special credit goes to Andrew Scott, who plays Holmes' arch-nemesis, Jim Moriarty. Totally obsessed with Holmes, Moriarty is sniveling and whiny, yet always at least one step ahead of the sleuth. If anything, Scott's acting job surpasses even that of Cumberbatch.

There are women in Holmes' life, although he does his best not to notice. Una Stubbs plays Mrs. Hudson, the landlady to Holmes and Watson, and Louise Brealey portrays Molly Hooper, a pathologist who has the warm, trembling thighs for Holmes. Co-creator Mark Gatiss plays Holmes' brother, Mycroft, who alternately clashes with and helps his brother. Mycroft claims to hold a "minor position" in the government, but Sherlock is having none of it.

For instance, in one scene:

MYCROFT: For goodness sake! I occupy a minor position in the British government!
SHERLOCK: He is the British Government—when he's not too busy being the Secret Service or the CIA on a freelance basis. Good evening, Mycroft. Try not to start a war before I get home. You know what it does for the traffic.

Do yourself a BIG favor. Watch just one of the six episodes (yeah, only six) that comprise Seasons One and Two of the series. They're available on DVD at Amazon or you could probably catch them on Netflix or one of the eight million other websites—legal and otherwise—that stream TV series. If you don't think it's absolutely amazing, you can go back to watching Honey Boo-Boo and I'll never bother you again.

If you don't have any positive feelings toward "A Charlie Brown Christmas," I'm relatively certain that your heart is made out of wood—or you don't celebrate Christmas. Either or.

The fact that it has been as successful as it's been over the past 57 years wasn't a slam-dunk, however. Even the men responsible for it, Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson, were afraid that it was going to be a complete failure after its first screening. In fact, according to Mendelson, it seemed like the entire room watching that screening felt the same way.

Except for one animator.

What the roomful of executives saw upon the first screening was a shock—a slow and quiet semireligious, jazz-filled 25 minutes, voiced by a cast of inexperienced children, and, perhaps most unforgivably, without a laugh track. “They said, ‘We’ll play it once and that will be all. Good try,’ ” remembers Mendelson. “Bill and I thought we had ruined Charlie Brown forever when it was done. We kind of agreed with the network. One of the animators stood up in the back of the room—he had had a couple of drinks—and he said, ‘It’s going to run for a hundred years,’ and then fell down. We all thought he was crazy, but he was more right than we were.”

PopMatters has a spectacular article on the history of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," written all the way back in 2006, but like the movie that is its focus, it's near timeless. Give it a read at PopMatters.

For years, I've managed to avoid blogging. It just seemed like a whole lot of people, shouting to be heard. I guess it's better than leading one's life in quiet desperation and going to your grave with the song still in your heart, but even the word "blog" sounds like the noise one makes when removing his shoe from the pile of crap he just stepped in. I have softened my stance over the years. For example, I read Charles S. Pierce's wonderful Politics Blog in Esquire. And, in the coming New Year, I might try reading somebody's else's, as well.

I wanted to write a semi-regular column about television for The Weekly but there's no room. I figure we could get rid of the Mexican guy, but that's an executive decision.

There's an old saying that one's IQ is in inverse proportion to the amount of TV one watches. If that were true, I would be whatever's below an imbecile. Although, in recent years, I find myself watching less and less. I'm not sure why; I certainly hope that it's not a sign of maturity. That would screw me up big time.

I'm going to try this TV blog thing for a while and see how it goes. If it's not right for me, I'll just go back to getting rich off writing my column. (That's an inside joke. See, I write for an alternative publication in a really bad economy, one in which the internet is sucking the life and all of the profits out of newspapers around the world.)

I'll just watch the stuff and let you know what I think. I'll try not to waste your time with dreck, which means most of what falls under the category of "reality TV." I pretty much hate almost all of that stuff, partly because it's not real and also because I wouldn't want to stand in the same line at Walmart with those people. Why would I want to sit in my living room and waste a half-hour watching them do staged stupid stuff for the cameras?

There is a growing sentiment that some of what's on television has zoomed past much of what's in the movie theaters, in terms of quality. I'm not making that statement, mostly because I hardly ever to go a movie any more. I simply can't stand the knuckleheads who can't go 15 seconds—let alone two hours—without checking their phones. People are jackasses. However, I can say that there is a lot of good stuff on TV, and even a handful of shows that are great.

I'll let you know.

Ever since they stopped showing Emmy-winner Will Vinton's A Claymation Christmas Celebration on TV each holiday season, I've felt a little lost without a televised holiday special to call my own. However, any network TV Christmas special which includes the line "He needs a penis" and possibly includes racing vibrators is bound to be a perennial favorite for the Gibson family. Well, maybe not the whole family, but definitely me.