Monday Medley

What we read while wondering if the winners of the Lingerie Bowl play the winners of the Puppy Bowl…

• Michael Weinreb explores the American bacchanalia that is the Super Bowl…

• Michael Kruse starts examining the constitutionality of Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd’s sting operations, but doesn’t dive deeply enough into the crux of the issue for our tastes.

• Over in the movie world, Stephen Tobolowsky explained how Groundhog Day changed his life, while Tara Reid apparently announced plans for a nonexistent sequel to The Big Lebowski. The Writers Guild Awards happened (on two coasts!) and Kristen Schaal hosted the east coast version.

• Speaking of comedy, Dana Carvey was back hosting SNL. Also, old people don’t understand why David Brent is funny.

• Our favorite part of FOX’s NFL broadcasts–referee majordomo Mike Pereira–did an online chat with the Wall Street Journal, hinting at possible changes to the league’s challenge system.

• Chris Jones goes after Jason Whitlock! And Phil Simms goes after Desmond Howard!

• The Onion strikes again, this time on puppies. Man, we love the Puppy Bowl.

• Tyler Cowen enters the fray on the Chinese mother discussion. He also has a controversial new book out.

• We stumbled upon two websites that attempt to explain the endings of two notoriously impenetrable TV classics.

• Michael Lewis went to Ireland to figure out why the country’s going bankrupt.

Aught Lang Syne: The Ten Funniest Episodes of Television

Our look last week at the decade in television focused mainly on dramas. But the creative advancements in the medium were not limited to that genre; it’s only more obvious there. The Aughts have been a great decade for comedies as well, seeing such brilliant shows as Arrested Development, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and many others. There are plenty of reasons why comedies have been so good during the Aughts, and we touched on some already, but the same principles that applied to dramas are at work here: The people making TV realized that there is an audience that actually likes shows that are unconventional, smart, and formally innovative. We’ve seen shows embrace the documentary structure (The Office, Modern Family, etc.), plentiful flashbacks (How I Met Your Mother), third-party narration (Arrested Development), and political satire (South Park). A slew of new comedies from 2009—Community, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family—bode well for the continued success of the sitcom.

Comparing comedies, though, is a little trickier than comparing dramas, since they don’t generally tell one consistent story. Even seasons often contain no “narrative arc,” and, if they do, it often has little to do with the actual comedy. As a result, comedies are much more susceptible to uneven seasons and bad stretches than dramas. Instead, we’re going to compare episodes. And unlike previous lists, we’re going to put a strict cap, of one, on the number of times a single show can appear on the list. Other than that, though, the parameters are pretty loose: Of any show, no matter how long it lasted or where it aired or on which network, these are the Aughts’ ten funniest episodes of TV:

Aught Lang Syne: The Best TV Characters

John S already called the Aughts the “Golden Age of Television.” Now, he’s joined by Tim to help further justify that statement by recalling some of the most original and memorable characters the medium has produced over the last 10 years. We had one criterion: The character had to debut this decade. Some notable characters who did not make the cut include Gil Grissom (CSI), Mr. Bennet/HRG (Heroes), and Walter White (Breaking Bad).

As for the ones who did, we’re not saying we ranked them, but we’re also not saying the order is random.

Adrian Monk: The character of the seemingly all-knowing master detective has been around for some time now, dating back to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, at least. Adrian Monk didn’t reinvent the wheel on Monk, but in giving the detective a compelling backstory and severe psychiatric disorders—the latter usually played for comedy, except in the context of the former—it added a depth to what could otherwise be a stale cast character.

Furthermore, it’s hard to think of an established actor who has engrossed himself in a television role as much as Tony Shalhoub did for the eight seasons of Monk.* As the eponymous detective stricken with a severe case of OCD, Shalhoub mastered the portrayal of the neurotic genius, even if the show too often settled for being a network procedural that just happened to air on cable.

*There is one other guy on this list that has a case.

–Tim