The season four launch of FX Network’s Sons of Anarchy - about a gun-running outlaw motorcycle club -  delivered big ratings for the cable net.

Per FX, the SOA Season 4 premiere was the most-watched episode ever for the series with 4.94 million total viewers and 3.22 million adults 18-49

The premiere telecast and encore run combined for total audience of

7.25 million total viewers and 4.76 Million Adults 18-49

FX further reports that the season four premiere episode  is “likely to be the most-watched single episode ever for an FX original series” when Live+7 data becomes available from Nielsen.

Said John Landgraf, President and General Manager, FX Networks.  “Last night’s ratings are indicative of the passion the audience has for this wonderful show. [Creator] Kurt [Sutter] has crafted one of the most compelling series on television, with the raw, blow-your-hair-back energy of a wide open Harley and the subtle complexity of a great book.”

Some more data from the press release:
The first-run episode of Sons (Sept. 6, 10-11:30 PM) delivered 4.94 million Total Viewers and 3.22 million Adults 18-49, which were gains of +20% in Total Viewers and +15% among Adults 18-49 versus its third-season bow.

Last night’s premiere telecast and two encore runs (11:30 PM and 1 AM) combined to deliver 7.25 Million Total Viewers and 4.76 Million Adults 18-49, which marked respective increases of +28% in Total Viewers (5.66 million) and +24% in Adults 18-49 (3.84 million) over the season three premiere multi-telecast delivery (9/7/10).

The previous high in Total Viewers for a single episode of Sons was the season two finale which delivered 4.32 million Total Viewers (12/1/09), and the previous high in Adults 18-49 was 3.03 million for the season two premiere episode (9/8/09).

Sons also posted series-high deliveries last night in households (3.42 million), Women 18-49 (1.325 million), Adults 18-34 (1.8 million), Women 18-34 (746,000), Adults 25-54 (3.03 million), and Women 25-54 (1.34 million).

This morning we woke up to an ominous email from Comcast, threatening us with a partial account suspension.  Here’s the email, sans all the Comcast graphics etc.

Dear Comcast Customer,

Our billing system has detected errors in your payment information. This usually occurs when your payment method on file has expired or declines a payment charge.

Please be aware that your access to Comcast Services will be restricted, if these errors are not corrected.

Click here to get started.

Sincerely,

Comcast Billing

www.Comcast.com

The email was perplexing because our account is up to date.  For years, our bill has always been paid like clockwork on the same credit card, with a current expiration date years out.  Our payment record is pristine.

I eyed the email suspiciously.  Worried that it might be a cleverly disguised phishing expedition, I didn’t click through any of the provided links.

Also, the mere mention of “service restrictions” is somewhat anxiety producing, since internet and cable access isn’t an adjunct or a luxury any longer.  It’s an essential utility in our household.  (We’re triple play, meaning that Comcast is our cable, phone and internet service provider.)

I’m still smarting from my last tangle with Comcast billing.  A few years back (also around the same time in September) we had a big problem with Comcast billing who claimed that our payment was rejected by our credit card company - a notion they scoffed at.  (Our credit card company voluntarily contacted Comcast on our behalf.)

At any rate, that problem took weeks to resolve, so I was having black visions of weeks of unhappy wrangling with Comcast.

This morning, after slogging though Comcast vmail and waiting on hold for about four minutes (not bad), I was assured by the billing department that all was well.   Since the email was distributed from what appeared to be a legitimate Comcast email server/addy, I was still a bit uneasy.  The customer service agent routed me to a supervisor who picked up almost immediately.

The supervisor assured me the email was indeed a legitimate Comcast communication.  He said the email was sent out by mistake and he apologized profusely for the inconvenience.  He couldn’t tell me how many other customers may have mistakenly received the same email.

Comcast deserves props for honesty and the apology.   We’ve been Comcast customers for a loooong time.  Back (back, back, back) in the day, the company was often loath to admit mistakes or acknowledge a problem.   So, it’s always refreshing when a company says, “hey, we made a mistake,” and apologizes.

It’s no fun to wake up on a Monday morning to the prospect of account suspension/restriction, and to have the problem eat into 30 minutes of an already busy day.

But the satisfying experience with Comcast customer service softened the sting.

Reporting from Pasadena, CA/Jan.5 @ 4:40p PT –  On January 4, PBS kick started the first full day of Television Critics Association 2012 Winter Press Tour with an impressive parade of talent and entertainment, culminating in the evening appearance of the B-52’s.  For a good hour, the band rocked the house to promote their PBS special airing sometime this March.   A joyous room of tv critics jumped out of their seats to dance in the aisles.  Even PBS president Paula Kerger joined in the fun and got her boogie on when the B-52’s launched into their 80’s hit “Love Shack.”

A meme circulating among the press (and given credence in a recent NY Times article) is that PBS is mounting a challenge to premium cable supremacy.   There is definitely an embarrassment of riches with Masterpiece Theatre dramas like Downton Abbey, Sherlock II, Great Expectations, and the Inspector Morse prequel, Endeavour.

In addition, the popular American Songbook, hosted by pianist and singer Michael Feinstein, returns for three episodes. PBS organized a late afternoon cabaret event with Feinstein playing and singing Gershwin,  Bobby Short and more.  The decision to intersperse archival clips of the earliest music videos with Feinstein’s live performance was sheer genius.

Yet, PBS doesn’t want to be compared to cable in some respects, especially in the news space.

John Wilson, Senior Vice President & Chief TV Programming executive at PBS, opened the 2012 Election News session and he quickly set out to differentiate PBS from their competitors.  “It’s worth nothing that Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just cited PBS Newshour as having more coverage of elections and government in 2011 than any of the commercial networks’ evening newscasts,” he said.

The timing for the 2012 Election panel couldn’t have been better, with the PBS news team fresh off the Iowa caucuses.  Judy Woodruff (appearing via satellite) said she’d left Des Moines just four hours before the start of the session.  Also on hand:  Jeff Greenfield, Gwen Ifill, Ray Suarez and others.

As the PBS journalists fielded Iowa caucus questions, Jeff Greenfield -  an anchor (with Ray Suarez) of the WNET/NYC-produced weekly news program Need to Know -  was off to the races with highly quotable zingers like this one: “I hate the caucuses. I hate them. They’re fraudulent. They’re undemocratic. You can’t even vote at night if you’re on the day you work the night shift. They extort money everywhere from the Ames, Iowa, Straw Poll to the ethanol subsidy.”

Then, Greenfield took a swipe at cable news in general and MSNBC in particular:  “About a year ago, I was chatting with a U.S. Senator who told me that, at the end of the day, Countdown on MSNBC was the station of choice. I said, ‘Why after 12 hours a day in that hothouse of the U.S. Senate, why do you go home and watch ‘Countdown’?’ And the Senator said, ‘It’s like soaking in a nice warm bath,’ meaning that all the premises of that fight in the day were reinforced at night.”

Ray Suarez chimed in as well at one point, contrasting PBS with CNN:  “Let’s be realistic about a media diet where your diet includes watching those minute-by-minute frettings over four votes or 60 votes or 80 votes coming from a particular county or town that we saw in front of the moving map on CNN last night, and the real outcome of huge forces clashing against each other about something like Medicare….who do you think is going to give you a deeper, longer, more careful look at some of this stuff and how it’s going to change the lives of the people who read your columns and read your papers and log onto you online? ’”

Greenfield touted Need to Know’s in-depth story coverage.  On Need to Know,  for example, Greenfield said he’ll explore the power and influence of seniors in Florida, and visit Nashua, New Hampshire to take the temperature of consumers and retailers.  “We’re really drilling down microcosmically into that part of New Hampshire…” he said. “…. I went down to Florida a couple of weeks ago, and I’m doing as part of our Florida coverage not the horse race, but a very lengthy piece on the power of seniors, on how much of our federal money and how much is spent on this increasingly powerful and growing group and why it’s so hard to get entitlement reform.”

Suarez had this to say, passionately, which is why I’m simply printing most of it in full:

If you leave this room knowing nothing else about what we do, know that we sit in a room with no money and try to figure out how to do a lot with a little, and we do more with less than anybody working in journalism today.  And in order to make that happen, since we can’t just make money appear out of nowhere, we’ve created strategic partnerships with content creators in all different forms of media, magazines, television, people who have online presences….We ran “The Economist Film Project” for several months.  They brought us beautiful little gems of films shot in some of the most obscure places in the world that made you understand what it was like to be at that place and live in that place and look at the world through that place. The Economists came to us because they knew we could deliver to them an audience that they could not find for themselves. They don’t have a TV station. They don’t have a movie theater. We could help The Economists do that. We have partners like Mozilla and National Geographic and ProPublica.  They need what we have, and we need what they have.  And that’s the way a network with no money covers one of the most important elections in generations. Write THAT.

Done.

[date stamp is incorrect]

Last August, at Television Critics Association press tour, as we all filed in for FX Network’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia presentation, we found an odd bit of swag waiting at our seats.  A bucket of…something.  A BIG bucket of something.  Big, chunky, nauseating, sticky clusters of….maybe it was oily granola and marshmallow and chocolate.  (I didn’t want to look too closely.)  Around me, critics were peering into their buckets, some surreptitiously moving them aside, or under their seats.  There was some confusion, and a few hushed ewws!

As the cast took the stage, I thought, gee, Rob McElhenney is looking kinda…chunky.

Oh, chunks of….   Oh, I get it!!!

McElhenney, who plays Mac, gained 50 pounds for the seventh season of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia which debuts tonight (Thursday) at 10p.

The weight gain and the ensuing antics (shopping for “ugly as hell” Tommy Bahama shirts, insulin injections over chimichangas etc.) isn’t the half of it.  It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is as outrageous and depraved and funny as ever.  My husband and I were ROTF laughing as we screened the first four episodes.  As the series enters its 7th season,  McElhenney and crew have upped their game.

How they come up with some of this stuff - I just don’t know.   They revel in touching the third rail.

Here’s a small sampling:

Frank (Danny DeVito) wants to marry Roxie, a vodka-swilling crack whore.  She says Tiger Woods is one of her clients but he turns out to be an impostor.  When confronted, the impostor then claims he’s really Don Cheadle.  He’s into “foot sh*t.”

The posse heads to The Jersey Shore where Frank acquires, then loses, a ham.  Frank and Mac end up on a party boat, but Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Dee (Kaitlin Olson) aren’t so lucky.  They wander into the wrong, so very WRONG, side of town.  Frank finds his ham, eventually.

At TCA, when McElhenney was asked about his weight gain, he said he’d been watching a popular sitcom and noticed the casts were “getting better-looking as the years” wore on.  (According to some reports, he was referring to Friends.)

“I think mostly because they were more famous, and they had a lot more money, and they got new hair and new teeth and a new trainer,” he said to laughter in the audience. “And I always thought that what we were trying to do with SUNNY is a sort of deconstruction of the sitcom. So, instead of making the characters as likable as possible, we’ve always tried to make them as unlikable as possible…. I’m being realistic in terms of the way that the character would look based on the way he eats and drinks and doesn’t work out. This is close to what he would look like. So, it wasn’t just about the weight gain, it’s also the beard, and my hair was really greasy, and I tried to look as ugly as possible, basically.”

But see, that’s the thing.  The more they push the envelope, the more we love them.

Funny how that works…

HBO’s Game of Thrones begins with men on horseback emerging from a long, torch-lit tunnel into a wintry-white, ominous forest.  The introduction concludes with a beheading before segueing into one of the finest opening title sequences ever produced for television.

HBO is typically attentive to their opening sequences, and nothing topped The Sopranos and that ride through gritty New Jersey set to A3’s  “Woke Up This Morning” – until now.  HBO’s outdone HBO and raised the bar yet again.

Game of Thrones is a 10-part series adapted from the first book of the bestselling Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy by George R.R. Martin.  It’s an enthralling spectacle shot in Northern Ireland and Malta for $60 million (the official HBO figure) to close to $100 million (the unofficial figure, from “a person familiar with the budget”), according to the Wall Street Journal.

The series is certain to be wildly successful for the network.

In fact, in one respect it already is.  A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal also reported the series has “become HBO’s [top]-selling property abroad, according to people close to the network….fetched more than $2.5 million an episode from sales to international television channels, more than 50% higher than the international price tag for…The Sopranos.”

Game of Thrones is the best reason in years to call your cable provider and subscribe, or sign up for HBO’s streaming service called HBO Go  and watch on your iPad (starting in May) - although I can’t imagine ever watching this series on anything other than a big screen home theater system.  If you wait for Netflix, or the DVD’s, etc. etc. it’s going to be nearly impossible to avoid spoilers because Game of Thrones will be the stuff of Monday morning water cooler chatter.

A Lord of the Rings-like medievalist fantasy, Game of Thrones is set in a fictional, merciless world of jousting knights, swordplay, palace intrigue, dragons, and incest.  As the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros rot from within and powerful families vie for control of the Iron Throne, mysterious forces gather beyond the great wall of ice in the north.  To the east, only the “narrow sea” prevents nomadic barbarians from invading Westeros.

It’s likely that Game of Thrones will attract viewers beyond the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Avatar fantasy enthusiasts.  Even my husband, my bellwether male HBO viewer who prefers the hard realism of series like The Sopranos and Oz, said he couldn’t wait to see more, that he felt what he called a “frisson” of anticipation.

The settings are vastly different, but the Game of Thrones universe is just as savage and unforgiving as the Oz and Sopranos subcultures.  Viewers can count on plenty of swordplay with much skewering and throat slicing accompanied by lots and lots of spurting blood.  Game of Thrones is hard fantasy that (mostly) steers clear of some of the usual trappings  commonly associated with the genre -  wizards toting magical staffs and characters imbued with special powers.

Game of Thrones is world building at its finest.  It’s completely escapist, where you emerge from an hour of television and whatever woes and anxieties might have been tumbling around in your head  - about nuclear meltdowns or the economy or divisions in Washington D.C.  or whatever  - are forgotten.  It’s wonderfully therapeutic to just go untethered for an hour.

The opening sequence resonates like a bell, holding the tone for the audience long after the sequence is finished.  The music soars as the viewpoint swoops in and over a 3D map that sprouts castles, trees, and spinning gears. Think a dynamic Middle Earth map come to life using Sim City.  As the series progresses, viewers will start to recognize, and no doubt dissect, the motifs unfolding in the opening credits.

The challenge the writers faced was enormous: bring the audience quickly up to speed on an exceeding complex world.  The spectacular sets, costumes, and special effects serve to distract from the occasional exposition in the pilot – a necessary evil in this case.  There are seven royal family lines in Westeros, some of who are related by blood and/or marriage.  Then, there’s the Mongol-like horde, the Dothraki (which my husband called “a biker gang on horseback”), and more mysterious races to the frozen north, beyond the great ice wall.

The ensemble cast is big – 26 named in the press kit.  Here’s my incomplete list of noteworthy performances:  Irish actor Jack Gleeson is chilling as the coddled young Prince Joffrey Baratheon, heir to the throne.  Gleeson’s spoiled nastiness is only matched by Harry Lloyd as the deliciously evil,  infinitely ambitious and effete Prince Viserys Targaryen.  But Peter Dinklage gives the most nuanced performance of all as the imp Tyrion Lannister,  brother of the Queen.

Lady Lysa Arryn, played by Kate Dickie, appears in a later episode but there’s little that can be said without spoiling the shock of her initial introduction.  On Twitter, @westerosorg summed up Dickie’s performance as “fantastically creepy” and, whew! -  just yes.

As for Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo -  the Dothraki leader  -  he doesn’t get to say much but his lip-curl snarl is menacing and he broods nicely.  He’s also the ultimate eye candy, and I have to assume ::cough:: that wasn’t a body double in one scene.  Together with his reluctant queen, Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke), they’re a gorgeous couple.  Plus, watching Daenerys grow into her powers as the Khal’s equal is one of the great viewing pleasures of the series.

I do have a few nitpicks.  First, the gay characters are stereotypically effeminate.  And the Dothraki wedding was something out of a B-movie, dark continent nude dancing girls and all.   Almost the entire House Stark seems a tad naïve and too easily manipulated by the royal court.  (On the other hand, this is understandable - for years the family has lived far from court intrigue, protecting the north.)  It’s a huge story - the Game of Thrones paperback is over 800 pages long - and occasionally it feels that some characters could use more fleshing out.

HBO provided six episodes of the Game of Thrones for screening.  It’s the most engrossing six hours of television I’ve seen in years.  I made the mistake of popping the second episode into the DVD player around 9 at night, and was so mesmerized I just couldn’t stop watching, and stayed up until 2.am.  I was an exhausted wreck the next day….

It was TOTALLY worth it.

UPDATE: click here for Daily Beast’s @televisionary ’s handy, dandy Game of Thrones guide for dummies.

Game of Thrones premieres this Sunday, April 17, at 9p.  A 14 minute preview:

Game of Thrones Exclusive Preview