Laurel’s TV Picks

Best Bets

Arrested Development (G4, 5pm - 7pm)
Season premiere of The Wire (HBO, 9pm)

Primetime Grid

Featured Pick

Season premiere of The Wire (HBO, 9pm).

Longtime readers may recall that Homicide: Life on the Street is my favorite series of all-time; it should not surprise anyone that I’m now in love with The Wire. [What might surprise you is that I haven't yet seen all of it; I'm working on rectifying that.]

David Simon wrote the award-winning nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets after spending an entire year with a homicide division of the Baltimore Police department. Journalist Simon captured homicide detectives like no one else has; later on Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana based Homicide: Life on the Street on the book and eventually David Simon came on board as a writer and producer of that fine series. (I think it’s awesome that so many of the storylines and lines in Homicide that have been criticized as being over-the-top or unlikely are based on real life cases and situations).

David Simon wasn’t finished writing brilliant nonfiction; he collaborated with former police detective Ed Burns on the book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (which later became an acclaimed miniseries). Burns and Simon spent a year on a drug corner in Baltimore and then told its story.

Now Simon has created a masterwork in The Wire along with Ed Burns and a team of very talented people based in Baltimore (of course).

Season four kicks off a new chapter of the show with the previous players more or less scattered to different parts of town and (in many cases) different jobs and a new story is beginning. If you were reluctant to jump into the series before because you heard so often about how complicated it is and how many characters there were to keep track of: now is an excellent time to start watching the show (you can always go back and catch previous seasons on DVD).

The four characters who are at the heart of this season of the show are four young teenagers who (as you might expect) don’t have the easiest lives. Of course the series continues to cover police, politicians, and the community of Baltimore; but this time around the focus is really on the education system and how the system fails the younger generations. A new young man is on the rise and taking over more of the drug trade in the city, he’s amassing a ton of territory and yet there are no bodies turning up and this has the folks listening in on “the wire” wondering what is really going on and what they’re missing.

Much time will be spent this season in a middle school where these four teens attend school and Prez is now starting as a schoolteacher (Ed Burns was a police detective who later became a teacher, I’m guessing a fair bit of this is based on his experiences). It’s fascinating stuff. I’ve seen the first four episodes of this season and I’m very impressed and can’t wait to see what happens next.

This is not (like so many shows) mindless fluff, this is a smart show that raises some important issues and really makes you think and educates a bit, all the while telling compelling stories that are as entertaining as anything else you’ll see in television or movies.

If you can see tonight’s season premiere of The Wire, don’t miss it (it will air multiple times on the various HBO stations during the week, check the listings). If you haven’t yet seen seasons 1-3, they are available on DVD and well worth a look. After seeing four episodes of this season and an episode or two from previous seasons, I’m ready to devour the season one set that a reader of this site sent me and can’t wait to get my hands on the other sets too.

Late afternoon & Primetime

If you missed the hilarious and brilliant Arrested Development when it aired on FOX or just want to revisit the show, it begins airing all over the place soon. The show will air weeknights on G4 at 10:30pm. The first four episodes air today on G4 (G4, 5pm - 7pm). I heartily recommend the DVD sets.

On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report (Court TV, 5pm).

Emergency workers at Ground Zero report health issues, the children of Sept. 11 victims struggle with their losses on 60 Minutes (CBS, 6pm).

Debut of Football Night in America (NBC, 6pm).

In case you hadn’t heard, Ted Koppel will now be doing reports for the Discovery Channel. Tonight’s is Koppel: The Price of Security (Discovery, 7pm). Koppel explores the tension between the need to provide security and the need to protect individual liberties in post-9/11 America.

An updated version of the documentary by Gédéon and Jules Naudet with footage from 9/11 in NYC: 9/11 (CBS, 7pm - 9pm).

Harvey Keitel, Patricia Heaton, Donnie Walhberg, and Barclay Hope star in The Path to 9/11 (ABC, 7pm - 10pm). This is part 1 of 2; the second part airs tomorrow. You may have heard a little something about this. Based on the 9/11 Commission Report and other sources. Part 1 starts with the hijackings, but then flashes back to the events surrounding the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

I’ve enjoyed The Simpsons off and on over the show’s entire run (I haven’t seen every episode, but watch occasionally), so it made me very sad that I found the beginning of tonight’s season premiere of The Simpsons (FOX, 7pm) so painful to watch that I turned it off after 5 or 10 minutes or so. I hope the episode improved as it went on, but . . . man. Very disappointing. Here’s hoping future episodes are better.

Season premieres of American Dad (FOX, 7:30pm), Family Guy (FOX, 8pm), and The War at Home (FOX, 8:30pm). I still can’t stand any of these shows though the animated ones are better than War at Home but that’s not saying much. I know lots of people like Family Guy and I know it’s odd that I don’t “get it” but I just don’t. Sorry. But hey– it’s back, if you care. The FOX Sunday night lineup no longer excites or interests me, though I’m glad King of the Hill will be back at midseason because at this point it’s the strongest of these shows.

A new special about Rodney Dangerfield which was produced by his daughter: Legends: Rodney Dangerfield (Comedy Central, 8pm).

Season premiere of The Wire (HBO, 9pm). Today’s featured pick (see above). If you have HBO, you’ve gotta watch this.

Season premiere of Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam (HBO, 10pm). No, you haven’t fallen into some sort of time warp, there haven’t been new episodes of this since the late ’90s.

Monday Daytime

Beyonce on The View (ABC, check your local listings).

Season premiere of The Tyra Banks Show (syndicated, check your local listings). Tyra divides her audience into groups by race (specifically: White, Black, Muslim, Latino, and Asian) and tries to determine “who has it worst.”

Jessica Simpson, Ron Livingston, Storm Large on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (syndicated, check your local listings).