television

Willow Palin needs your help. Thousands of viewers expressed outrage recently when David Letterman cracked jokes about Eliot Spitzer and Alex Rodriguez taking runs at the Alaska governor's daughter.

It's tempting to give NBC credit for putting a family-friendly series like "Merlin" on the air, but the network wasn't acting out of any generosity toward families. NBC announced this British import a year ago when it went on a buying spree of low-cost co-productions. And the saying is true: You get what you pay for.

There are plenty of reasons to suspect NBC's "The Philanthropist" will be awful: It's airing in the summer dumping ground; it was part of NBC's terrible 2007-08 development season; and executive producer Tom Fontana ("Homicide: Life on the Street") wrote the pilot teleplay, got fired and then got rehired.

"True Blood" -- the steamy vampire drama with lots of gore and bad Southern accents -- is rising for a second season (9 p.m. EDT Sunday, HBO).
Picking up from where the first season ended, the story opens with the discovery of a dead body in the back of a car. The victim's heart has been torn out, leading the police to believe a vampire is to blame.

Often it's obvious why a network green-lights a show. In the best scenario, networks are drawn to smart, entertaining scripts. Or maybe it's a provocative concept.

Telling a TV scribe that his or her show is realistic is often one of the highest compliments a viewer can offer. Realism has been a primary goal ever since "Hill Street Blues" pioneered serialized storytelling in the early 1980s.

For one day, at least, Lynne Koplitz knew the rush of Internet fame.
"A couple of months ago, weirdly, I was the third-most-searched name on Google for one day," she says with a laugh. "It was so crazy. I was like, 'What is THIS?' "

For some teen-agers, squabbling with parents, shrieking angrily and slamming doors is a by-product of adolescence. For Katelyn Pippy, it's a day at the office.
Pippy, 16, begins her second season starring as a series regular on Lifetime's "Army Wives" as Emmalin Holden, disgruntled daughter of an Army general (Brian McNamara).

A light, breezy show about a New York doctor who finds himself a fish out of water in the tony Hamptons, USA's "Royal Pains" is an amusing, enjoyable addition to basic cable.

Canadian actor Craig Olejnik sports choppy black hair and gazes with piercing blue eyes -- the only standout attribute in NBC's "The Listener," an otherwise generic procedural drama.
Producers understand that the eyes have it. The show's opening credits include several close-ups of Olejnik's baby blues.