Sons of Anarchy (10 p.m. Wednesday, FX) -- Calling this new drama about life inside a motorcycle gang 
The Sopranos on Harleys unfairly and incorrectly implies it's a cheap rip-off, but it does give you some of the show's flavor: The same weird contrast between domesticity and outlawry, the same troubled family dynamics, the same contortions as you clutch your stomach from laughter one moment, your eyes to keep out the unspeakable violence the next. As usual with FX shows, there's a spectacularly talented cast -- including Charlie Hunnam as a gang leader who's developing doubts and Katey Sagal as his old-school mom -- to bring the intricately plotted stories to life.
Raising the Bar (10 p.m. Monday, TNT) -- Maybe the next Hill Street Blues, or maybe the next Cop Rock -- you never know which way Steven Bochco's shows are going to go -- this is a courtroom drama that doesn't have much to do with courtrooms. Starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar (NYPD Blue), Gloria Reuben (ER) and Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm in the Middle), it follows the lives of two sets of lawyers from opposite sides of the fence -- the public defender’s office and the district attorney’s office. But the show's central thesis is that the overcrowded criminal justice system is really a giant bazaar where everything is about plea bargaining, and the last thing anybody on either side wants to do is go to trial.
90210 (8 p.m. Tuesday, The CW) -- Like a reanimated zombie, this Gen Y teen soap has clawed its way from the Nielsen burial ground; the faces are new, but the sex and drugs and epic teen angst are the same. The first question is, just how remote a spot on the Kansas prairie do new-kids-in-town Shenae Grimes (Degrassi: The Next Generation) and Tristan Wilds (The Wire) come from that they'd be shocked to learn that Beverly Hills teenagers are rich and mean and promiscuous and not entirely unacquainted with pharmaceutics? And the second is, how bad does this show have to be for The CW not to provide advance screenings to critics? Like, worse than One Tree Hill? Worse than Life Is Wild? Worse than The Game? OK, I've got to stop -- I'm scaring myself.
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'The Shield' is about to depart, but it's left its mark on TV history
Shawn Ryan wasn't sure which surprised him more: that somebody wanted to make his insane cop-show 
script -- full of four-letter words, racist rants, unspeakable violence and profoundly anti-social behavior -- into a TV show or that the interest was coming from an obscure little cable channel devoted almost exclusively to reruns of desiccated old 1970s programs.
"I had done the script mainly as a writing sample, to use when I applied for jobs," he recalls. "And when I heard FX was looking at it, my first thought was, ‘That's not even really a network. That's where I watch M*A*S*H reruns.' ''
Not for long. The Shield, Ryan's over-the-top story about renegade cops so violent and crooked that they could barely be distinguished from the criminals they pursued, would redefine the police genre, turn FX into one of the most influential networks in television and even remake the face of basic-cable television. Read my full story on how the departure of The Shield, which launches its final season Tuesday, marks the end of an era at FX.
Hey, Fox and Comcast Sports: Shut up and let us watch the game
I didn't think it was possible, but a sports network has come up with something even more irritating, distracting and irrelevant than the Hollywood celebrities who crowd into ESPN's Monday Night Football 
booth to plug their latest ABC shows. During the first half of the Washington State/Oklahoma State telecast that aired on about 20 Fox Sports and Comcast Sports channels Saturday afternoon, play-by-play men Ryan Davis and Tony Boselli suddenly went quiet. Instead, we heard a sideline interview (using the term very loosely) with billionaire corporate pirate T. Boone Pickens.
The nominal pretext for this is that Pickens donated $165 million to Oklahoma State's athletic department. But then the sideline reporter got to the real point. "Some people are calling you the savior to the American energy crisis with the energy Pickens Plan," he said. "Explain everything about that Pickens Plan."
The Pickens Plan is a scheme to spend $1 trillion on wind farms, funnel that energy into the electric grid, and use the natural gas saved to power vehicles. Who pays the $1 trillion? Well, you do, through taxes or outrageously priced electricity. How does the energy get from the wind farms to the power plants? The government will seize it through eminent domain. Who makes yet another fortune from all this? T. Boone Pickens, who owns a bunch of companies involved in wind-farming and natural-gas vehicles.
Unfortunately, not a single word of the information in that last paragraph made it onto the air. Though Pickens ranted on for well over one minute about what a genius he is ("I decided I was the one who knew the truth") and plugged his website several times, the "interview" was really just an exercise in windy self-promotion. Though, to be fair, it left at least two people in profound awe -- play-by-play men Davis and Boselli. Boselli breathlessly proclaimed that Pickens should be a member of the next American president's cabinet, while Davis squealed: "He's speaking the language out here!" He didn't precisely identify here, but I presume it to be the Grand Republic of Obfuscation and Plutocratic Windbaggery.
If Pickens has trouble making ends meet on his picayune $3 billion net worth and wants to lobby Americans to give him a few hundred billions more to tide him over, that's certainly his right. But let him buy an ad instead of interrupting a football game to hawk his three-card monte game. That way, we can quickly TiVo past it along with the rest of the baloney.
Sarah Palin for veep? What about Geena Davis?
If the news that John McCain had picked the young, relatively inexperience and something-of-a-maverick Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his Republican running mate had you scratching your head and thinking, Haven't I already seen this on TV?, you're probably not alone. That's exactly the plot of 2005 ABC's Commander In Chief -- or the first half hour of it, anyway. Then McCain -- errr, Teddy Bridges -- dies of a stroke and his vice president (played by Geena Davis) takes over the White House, threatens to go to war against Nigeria over female circumcision, Congress revolts and her appendix explodes while she's jetting around in Air Force One.
Rod Lurie, the producer who created Commander In Chief, thinks the Republicans actually stole his show. "It's unbelievable isn't it?" he told the Hollywood Reporter Friday. "I think that Geena and I need to be paid royalties by the Republicans." Commander in Chief portrayed Davis' character as heroic and the detractors who said she was young, inexperienced and possessed of too many X chromosomes as misogynist swine. But come on, Lurie says now, that was just a TV show. You wouldn't want to actually have a chick in the White House: "The idea of this woman actually facing down [Vladimir] Putin and negotiating with [Dmitry] Medvedev is idiotic."
MSNBC's body count is still rising
If you think all that on-air hair-pulling at MSNBC this week was just been a theatrical ratings gimmick, think again. Over at Politico.com, Michael Calderone reports that the place is on nuclear alert. “The situation at our channel is about to blow up,” Calderone quotes one high-ranking MSNBC journalist.
Perhaps to distract attention from their own troubles, MSNBC anchors spewed venom at other targets Wednesday, particularly Howard Wolfson, the former communications director of Hillary Clinton's campaign who now does some commentaries for Fox News. Keith Olbermann, who apparently has never met anybody he can't compare to a war criminal, referred to Wolfson as "Tokyo Rose" -- the nickname of Iva Toguri, a Japanese-American convicted of treason for her propaganda broadcasts on Radio Tokyo during World War II. For Olbermann, that was probably a remarkable act of self-restraint -- Toguri was only jailed for her treason. I'm sure Olbermann was really thinking of Lord Haw-Haw, Berlin's Brit propagandist, who was hanged for his.
ABC producer arrested at Democratic convention
The Beijing Olympics were the most-watched event in television history, and it seems Denver's police must have been some of the most avid viewers -- they've clearly picked up some law-enforcement tips from the Chinese. The cops arrested ABC producer Asa Eslocker Wednesday for the crime of taking pictures of big-ticket Democratic Party donors.
Eslocker's camera crew was on a sidewalk outside Denver's Brown Palace Hotel, shooting video for a series of reports on the role of corporate lobbyists and wealthy donors at the convention to air on ABC World News. The hotel told Eslocker to beat it; when he didn't, the cops handcuffed and hauled him off to the slam where he was charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order -- taking pictures of rich plutocrats evidently being against the law in Denver. Hey, you think Katie Couric had him busted?
ABC orders five shows for midseason
Like generals stocking up their supply depots with body bags before a big battle, the networks are already buying shows to replace the inevitable casualties of a fall season that hasn't even begun yet. ABC has just ordered five new series for midseason, all with a heavy comic flavor.
Two of them are hour-long cop shows that nonetheless depend more on laughs than gunplay. Castle, a sort of Stephen-King-joins-CSI, stars Nathan Fillion (Firefly) as a horror novelist who helps out an NYPD homicide squad. The Unusuals is also set in New York, in an oddball police precinct that includes Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia) and Adam Goldberg (Friends).
Two of the comedies are relatively straightforward sitcoms: Better Off Ted, with Desperate Housewives' Jay Harrington trying to climb the corporate ladder, and Single With Parents, with Alyssa Milano trying to cope with a dysfunctional family.
The third is a real oddity: Cupid, a remake of a brief and nearly unseen ABC romantic comedy from 1999 that starred Entourage's Jeremy Piven as an apparent nut case who thought he was Cupid. The creator of the original show, Rob Thomas, went on to do Veronica Mars, which everybody in Hollywood loved even though it had no actual viewers. His enhanced stature helped persuade ABC to give Cupid another shot, this time with Will & Grace's Bobby Cannavale in the title role. Who knows, if it works, maybe ABC will do a remake of Veronica Mars with Ellen Page.
It's a 500-channel universe, and the SEC is on 498 of them
The Southeastern Conference, which just signed a 15-year deal with CBS on the broadcast rights to its 
football and basketball games, on Monday made ESPN its cable partner. Between the two whopping deals, the SEC will make about $205 million a year, triple what it was earning from television under its last contract.
The ESPN package includes not only games on ESPN, ESPN 2 and college-sports channel ESPNU, but Spanish-language football on ESPN Deportes, replays of old games on ESPN Classic and, on-line simulcasts on ESPN360.com. You can watch on a cell phone via ESPN Mobile TV and you can watch overseas on ESPN International. You might even be able to watch on broadcast television some will be syndicated to local broadcast stations through ESPN Regional Television, which will syndicate some games to stations near SEC schools. ESPN may also sell off some games to other sports networks, including Comcast and Fox Sports.
The deal goes beyond football and men's basketball, too. ESPN channels will carry at least 32 women's basketball games, as well as A minimum of three regular-season baseball or softball games will be offered on ESPN or ESPN2 as well as some baseball, softball, gymnastics, soccer, volleyball, track and probably tiddlywinks if that becomes an NCAA-sanctioned sport.
Coupled with the CBS deal, the alliance with ESPN scuttles any hope of an all-SEC cable channel like the Big 10 Network. Considering the difficulty the Big 10 Network has had in signing up cable systems, that doesn't sound like a big loss.
'American Idol' adds a judge: Kara DioGuardi
Ever alert against the day when Paula Abdul passes and drowns in her own Coke cup, American Idol producers have added a fourth judge for the season that begins in January. She's songwriter Kara DioGuardi, who if you want to look on the bright side has written hits for Celine Dion (Taking Chances), the Pussy Cat Dolls (Ain't No Other Man and Beep) and Hilary Duff (Come Clean). On the hand, her resume also includes songs written for Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. So hanging around with Simon Cowell will be good practice for her future eternity in the middle rungs of Hell.
UPDATE: My pal Howard Cohen, who writes the Herald's American Idol blog and has my eternal sympathy, thinks four judges are one too many. Howard, Howard -- it's four too many.
