It's not just you. Wanda Sykes actually is everywhere.

 

She plays Barb on CBS' "The New Adventures of Old Christine." She pops up on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" whenever Larry David needs the perfect actress to play Wanda Sykes. She's the voice of a cow on Nickelodeon's "Back at the Barnyard." She's high on every talk show host's lists of favorite guests. And she just earned some of the best reviews of her career for the HBO comedy special "Wanda Sykes: I'ma Be Me," in which she discussed everything from Barack Obama to parenting to belly fat.

 

Naturally, what Wanda Sykes really needs is yet another television gig. 

 

Starting on Saturday, Nov. 7, the versatile comedian (and Emmy-winning writer) will become the latest performer tasked with kick-starting FOX's late night programming. The creatively titled "The Wanda Sykes Show" will air in the 11 p.m. hour on Saturday nights, a slot where her major mandate will be "Generate more buzz than Spike Feresten." Somehow we think the "Wanda at Large" star won't have any trouble with that one.

 

Certainly Sykes has a flashier set than Feresten's low-frills digs, with a handsome stage on the CBS Television City lot festooned with a giant "W" (Sykes jokes that she got it at a Mo'Nique yard sale and flipped it) that doubles as a bar.

 

At a recent event introducing her show (and its set) to a few members of the Los Angeles-based press, HitFix snagged five minutes with Sykes to discuss why, exactly, she though she needed more work and why late night was the place for her.

 

[Full text of the interview after the break... Oh and if Wanda features the game "Jewish, Canadian or Dead" on an upcoming episode, we want full credit...]

 

It turns out that giving 30 filmmakers carte blanche to tell the sporting stories of their choosing means a lot of sadness and a lot of attempted catharsis. 

 

We've already had the tragic story of a boxer who fought for too long ("Muhammad and Larry"), the tragic story of a football league murdered by Donald Trump ("Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?") and the tragic story of a city that lost a hockey icon ("Kings Ransom"). Even "The Band That Wouldn't Die," a phoenix-from-the-ashes tale, begins with the tragic story of a city abandoned and betrayed by its NFL franchise.

 

And if you thought those "30 for 30" installments were tragic, wait till you get a load of the series' next two hours, "Without Bias" and "The Legend of Jimmy the Greek."

 

Looking ahead, "30 for 30" has more tragedies to come, but there also seem to be a couple purely inspirational tales on tap (mostly in 2010), but only Bill Simmons and company know for sure why we've led off with six consecutive weeks of "30 for 30" pathos.

 

I've already waxed sufficiently rhapsodic about the overall awesomeness of the "30 for 30" endeavor, but I've still got small-ish reviews of "Without Bias" and "The Legend of Jimmy the Greek" after the break...

ABC's reboot of "V" has probably the best pilot of any new network drama this fall.

 

I've seen the "V" pilot four times now and I've enjoyed it each time. It has tremendous pacing, likable actors and some solid special effects, at least for the small screen. It's an hour of pure entertainment going onto a night (Tuesdays) that's short on fun, if you aren't a fan of CBS' unstoppable "NCIS" block.

 

I wanted to get that out of the way.

 

I wanted to make sure that y'all know that I like the "V" pilot, before I start a review which may spend a lot of time dwelling on why I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about the show's prospects going forward. They're two different and conflicted reactions and it's necessary that both of them get acknowledged.

 

[Full review of "V" after the break...]

It's not popular to say, because it was one of the post-Aaron Sorkin years, but the sixth season of "The West Wing" is one of my favorites. Perhaps no season of "The West Wing" was more process-oriented, as the writers took us through the rise of young, untested Democrat Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits) and maverick, outspoken Republican Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) as they went through the primaries to secure their parties' respective nominations for President. Just because the writing rarely sparkled as it did in the Sorkin years didn't mean that Season Six of "The West Wing" wasn't the savviest the show ever got about democracy in America.

 

A less pragmatic, less fictional, but no less fantastical version of a similar story plays out in Amy Rice and Alicia Sams' "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," which premieres on HBO on Monday (Nov. 2) night. Knowing a good thing when they spied it, Rice and Sams began filming Barack Obama in November of 2006, when he was just another junior Senator monitoring midterm election results and barely being whispered about as a candidate for the presidency, at least not in 2008.

 

"By the People" begins in ernest the following year, as Obama went to Iowa as a decided underdog to seemingly pre-ordained Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The rest isn't just history, it's recent history. And it isn't just recent history, it's well-recorded and well-reported history, as the run-up to Obama's election last November has to be the most covered presidential campaign in American annals. 

 

So what does "By the People" have to add to the discussion? What do we accomplish by looking back at the events of 2007 and 2008 through a prism of 2009?

 

[Full review after the break...]

Because of fantasy sports, I was a Red Sox fan rooting for Alex Rodriguez all season.

 

Because of fantasy sports, even though I couldn't care less about the Redskins, I died a little inside every time DeSean Jackson made it into the end zone this past Monday night.

 

Because of fantasy sports, I know that any chump can follow top-level minor league prospects, but only the true obsessives are scouring the high school or college ranks for catchers with line-drive power or corner infielders who might somehow have second base eligibility. 

 

Because of fantasy sports, or at least my seasonal (April to January, mostly) dedication to them, I approached FX's new comedy "The League" with a tremendous amount of good will. 

 

And, unexpectedly enough, "The League" doesn't fall flat due to its depiction of fantasy sports. When the show bothers to concentrate on the freaky, addictive, maniacal work of roto fanatics, it does so with a well-calibrated mixture of deserved mockery, condescending pity and bemused respect. However, by the second episode, fantasy football becomes only a background element of "The League" and it becomes clear that what the show isn't nearly as comfortable with, alas, is comedy. 

 

[Full review of "The League" after the break...]

An odd confession: As big a supporter of "Friday Night Lights" as I've always been, this may have been the first time I was really eager to have the show return for a new season.

 

Allow me to explain.

 

The first season of "Friday Night Lights" was 22 episodes of near-prefection and although I didn't necessarily think the writers chose the correct result for Dillon Panthers' trip to State, the season ended with such a feeling of closure that I didn't need anything more. With ratings what they were, I didn't expect a second season and I was satisfied.

 

The second season of "Friday Night Lights" was a mess, riddled with poorly integrated characters, newly injected narrative cliches and a key storyarc so bad it caused one of my favorite shows to literally make me sad. Although "FNL" rebounded a bit toward the end, I was concerned enough by what happened in the second season that part of me wanted the show to be put out of its semi-misery before Landry had the opportunity to kill again.

 

The third season of "Friday Night Lights" began erratically, with stunning episodes like "Hello, Goodbye" running up against ridiculous storylines like Tyra's relationship with the rodeo pretty-boy. But the third season closed with a half-dozen episodes as good as anything in the show's past and the writers generated a finale, "Tomorrow Blues," that offered something resembling closure, but simultaneously seemed to push the story in a direction I wanted to follow. 

 

"Friday Night Lights" returns for its fourth season on Wednesday (Oct. 28), but that's only if you happen to have DirecTV. The partnership was odd enough last season when NBC viewers had to wait for January, three months after the show's DirecTV window, but this year is even tougher, since NBC isn't expected to air "Friday Night Lights" until next summer. But hey, at least it got fans a fourth and fifth season of Texa

 

And that feels like a long wait for a the sports drama that immediately returns to its position as one of the small screen's finest hours.

 

[Review of the season's first two "Friday Night Lights" episodes, with only minor spoilers, after the break...]

The fable is told...

 

Back in the old country, there was a village and in that village lived many TV fans. Above that village, in a poorly ventilated shack in the mountains, lived a TV critic. He liked to recommend programs to the villagers. Sometimes they listened. Sometimes they didn't. 

 

And one day that TV critic saw a show he thought the villagers would love, so he ran down the mountain and went into the town square and yelled, "If you do not watch this show, the seas will boil and the trees will topple." And the villagers, always looking for good new shows, and occasionally suggestible in the face of extreme hyperbole, decided to watch. At least a few of them did. But they didn't like the new show and those who didn't watch noted that the trees went untoppled and the seas were as cold as they'd been before. 

 

Several months later, they noticed the TV critic practically rolling down the hill in a cloud of dust, rushing back into the square. And again the townspeople gathered, but warier this time.

 

"Remember that show I told you to watch last month?" the critic bellowed. "Sorry about that. It wasn't really as good as I thought it was. But it's gotten better. Much better. And if you don't watch it now, disease will afflict your cattle and your chickens will stop laying eggs!"

 

Well, the townspeople still enjoyed good TV and they still occasionally trusted the judgment of the critic, even if he usually saved his kindest words for premium channels they didn't get. So some of them tuned in for the episode and found it better, but still not proportionate to the critic's excitement. And while there was, indeed, a small and dedicated portion of the town population who had become fans of the series, most didn't bother with the next episode. In addition, despite poor viewership, they were unsurprised to see that their cattle remained robust and beefy and omelets flowed as freely as they had before.

 

Then three months later, they heard a cacophony of hooves, as the critic galloped down from his shack on his horse. After the initial confusion regarding where the critic had gotten a horse on his salary and how he was feeding the horse, given how rarely he came down to town to get provisions, they turned away and returned to their business at hand.

 

"Townspeople!" the critic screamed in the middle of an empty square. "I told you to watch that show and it was good, right? Right? It has a complex mythology and attractive lead actors, right? Well, as good as I told you it was before, it may be even better now! Watch! Watch! If you do not watch, your crops will fail and you'll never again be offered this kind of quality serialized programming on network TV. Watch!"

 

But the townspeople didn't fear for their crops and it was obvious that their appetite for serialized programming was more suited for cable or the Internet. Some of them watched the show, but they watched because they watched already and not because of the critic, but most of them stayed true to the old ways and just watched CBS procedurals instead, for CBS procedurals were reliable and close-ended, if not necessarily dynamic and challenging. 

 

And the critic sadly rode back up the mountain on his horse. 

 

On the way up, he was eaten by a wolf.

 

The end.

 

That, dear friends, was the parable of The Critic Who Cried "Dollhouse." And yes, it's a paraphrased version of the original story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who I believe wrote of a critic unable to convince his followers to watch "Manimal."

 

And yet here I am again... I'm not urging you to watch "Dollhouse" on Friday (Oct. 23) night. I'm just saying that Friday's episode, titled "Belonging," is a really good episode. If you watch? I'm pretty confident you'll be happy, but I can't vouch for what will happen to your livestock or your fields of wheat if you don't.

 

[More after the break...]

Unless you're The CW and you love little girls (in a demographic way, not a pervy way) or you're NBC and you can't make anybody watch anything anyway, the job of a broadcast television network is making sure that across 20-ish hours of primetime, you've given a little something to everybody and reached any many different types of viewers as possible.

 

With cable networks, though, the mantra is often narrowcasting. Find your audience. Know your audience. Give your audience what they want. Know your brand and hone it. 

 

These days, few cable networks have as much control over their brand identity as USA. The folks in drama development at USA are so confident in what they do and what their audience desires that they were even able to make  consummate journeyman Mark Feurerstein into a TV star of sorts.

 

So when I tell you that "White Collar" is a USA Network series through and through, that's both a compliment and a general assurance. I don't think I could look at a new TNT show and say "If you love TNT shows, you'll love this one" or even with a new HBO show say "If you're jazzed about HBO shows, this fits right in" but with "White Collar," I feel comfortable saying that if you like most of USA's original programming, there's no reason this won't be another winner.

 

Mismatched team fights crime using equal measures encyclopedic knowledge and quick-witted snark? Moderate-to-low emotional stakes with enough breezy style and charm to gloss over gaps in logic or plausibility? Talk about maintaining flow with "Burn Notice" and "Psych" and "Monk" and even "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" and "Royal Pains" (if you substitute "disease" for "crime")!

 

Full review of "White Collar" after the break...

On a show that's all about bad girls, Jessica Lucas' Riley Richmond has spent six episodes being the good girl.

 

Of course, being a good girl on The CW's "Melrose Place" doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as it does in a different zip code. Yes, Riley is a humble elementary school teacher, engaged to aspiring filmmaker Jonah (Michael Rady). But that doesn't mean she's above getting drunk and making out with neighbor Auggie (Colin Egglesfield). 

 

And while Riley isn't willing to go quite as far as doctor-turned-hooker Lauren (Stephanie Jacobsen) to fix her financial woes, this Tuesday's (Oct. 20) "Melrose Place" finds her leaving her students behind to pick up a gaudy paycheck as a fashion model. And, in the episode, her photographer is none other than Daphne Zuniga's Jo Reynolds, the latest original "Melrose Place" veteran to appear on the reboot. 

 

HitFix caught up with with the "Cloverfield" star and "90210" reboot guest to discuss modeling, playing the good girl and working with the old "Melrose Place" standbys. 

 

We also discussed another upcoming "Melrose Place" murder, Riley's flirtations with Auggie and whether Heather Locklear is going to be able to work ratings magic again.

There are certain words you never want to hear if you're in the "Battlestar Galactica" universe. 

 

Among those words are, "We don't know where the robot is."

 

Fortunately, the assembled group of bloggers and journalists were visiting the set of "Battlestar Galactica" prequel "Caprica" last week, reducing the chances that any one of us could be a Cylon in disguise. No, the robot in question wasn't a stealthy, flesh-coated cyborg with growing sentience and insidious motives so much as a giant, 6'7" metallic behemoth incapable of moving on its own, much less plotting humanity's destruction. For now, at least.

 

Set more than 50 years before the events of "Battlestar Galactica," "Caprica" premiered in April with a two-hour telefilm and will return to Syfy in January 2010 as a series that follows two grief-stricken families, the Adamas and the Graystones, on an arc that viewers already know will lead to the near-anihilation of civilization. "Battlestar Galactica" fans know how the story looks when it ends, but "Caprica" is about the very beginning of the end.

 

On this sunny October morning, though, the aforementioned online scribes were wandering through a Vancouver set bearing no resemblance to the cramped, grimy interiors that usually typified "Battlestar." The "Caprica" sets are triumphs of simple, character-driven production design, sometimes warm, intimate and lived-in, other times sterile and expansive and modern (by our standards). 

 

While the pilot was shot largely on locations in the Vancouver area, everything has been recreated by production designer Richard Hudolin and his team. That allowed those of us on the set visit to walk out of Joseph Adama's (Esai Morales) traditional Tauron home, go around a tight corner and find ourselves in the lake-side manse owned by Daniel and Amanda Graystone (Eric Stoltz and Paula Malcomson).

 

TV magic, y'all. TV magic.

 

More on the sets for "Caprica," plus the panel with the show's stars, after the break...