FOX has just given Raising Hope a second-season pickup. No surprise, given its Glee-boosted ratings have been more than solid. But you’d never guess how popular this show is, given how little buzz it gets.

This has always surprised me, since I think it’s adorable. The story of a working class family who find themselves raising the infant daughter of a serial killer, Raising Hope veers between darkness and shots of a giggling baby without ever becoming too saccharine or too depressing. And the cast is awesome: Martha Plimpton as the baby’s vain grandmother, Deadwood’s Garret Dillahunt as her husband, and a recurring role for the very funny Kate Micucci of Garfunkel & Oates (they’re sort of like the girl version of Flight of the Conchords) as the baby’s nanny.

Will the show be able to continue to produce episodes as funny as “Blue Dots,” in which the entire family, one by one, are convicted of sex crimes? Showrunner Greg Garcia has repeatedly claimed to be out of ideas already, but I hope he’s joking, because I’m hoping the show runs long enough to morph into a pre-K version of Dexter.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that when I learned that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others had been shot on Saturday, amidst my shock and worry was the thought, “What’s Jon Stewart going to say on Monday?”

One of my favorite things about the host of The Daily Show (Comedy Central, Dish Network Channel 107) has always been the moments he gets real. Ever since his tearful post-9/11 monologue, I’ve really liked the moments when he stops making dick jokes and gets real. He’s eloquent, he’s moving, and he knows just how much sincerity his audience can take before he swings back into dick-joke mode.

Jon Stewart on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting

Honestly, I’m not as impressed this time as I expected to be. Stewart seemed like he was rambling a bit toward the end. But he makes a good case for cooling off the tone of our political discourse without unfairly blaming Sarah “Reload” Palin and her ilk for a tragedy perpetrated by a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, wasn’t goaded on by anything but the voices in his head.

Colbert makes the same point a bit more elegantly, with the usual Daily Show/Colbert Report montage of politicians and pundits behaving badly – in this case, people on both sides of the aisle trying to cast blame on the other.

Stephen Colbert on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting

It’ll be interesting to see if Saturday Night Live does anything with the news this weekend. They can hardly ignore the biggest story of the week, but it’s hard to remember the last time something left the country so shaken – will audiences be ready to hear actual jokes about it?

Like all good TV geeks, we worship at the altar of Buffy The Vampire Slayer auteur Joss Whedon. But these days, Whedon-wise, it’s hard out there for a geek. Buffy was awesome, but what has Joss done for us lately?

Sure, Firefly and Dollhouse were cool, but we all knew they wouldn’t last. Rumors of a followup to internet musical Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog and various superhero film projects aren’t enough to sustain us. We want him back where he belongs: television. We’ve got some thoughts on how Joss can get back on TV and manage to stick around.

• Ditch the Dushku. Eliza Dushku was great as Faith on Buffy, but casting her as a multiple-personality chameleon on Dollhouse was a huge mistake. Dushku can do strong and sexy. She can’t do much else.
• Keep it simple. In the time it took to for a fan to explain Dollhouse’s convoluted premise to a new viewer, it had already been canceled. Whereas Buffy could be summed up in three glorious words: “Cheerleader kills demons.” Joss needs to find a similarly elegant way to package the geeky violence he does so well.
• Cast better dudes. Whedon has a knack for finding quirky, intriguing ingenues – he launched the careers of Summer Glau, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Alyson Hannigan. But his male stars tend to be just kind of there. Dollhouse’s Tahmoh Penikett was a particularly low point. We kept hoping one of the dolls would kill him.
• But! Keep a female focus. The reason we all keep Buffy in our hearts is that she was that rarest of rarities: A tough, complicated female protagonist on a genre show. Hint to Joss: You’re allowed to do more than one of those.

Some virtuous souls out there may be resolving to watch less television in 2011. We have no such ambitions. But after mainlining two seasons of The State while those DVDs of The Wire gather dust, we have to admit that the quality of our viewage could improve. So here are the fancy-pants, critic-approved shows we hereby resolve to watch this year.

• Mad Men. We love this show, but the pressure of keeping up with the most zeitgeisty show out there sometimes gets to be too much and we fall behind. Don’t cry, Don Draper! We’ll catch up.
• The Wire. Yes, it’s a modern masterpiece. It’s also kind of sad. Hard to work up the energy for after a long day of work. This is why we have an encyclopedic knowledge of 30 Rock while those Wire DVDs continue to gather dust.
• Six Feet Under. Maybe we can get away with scratching this one off the list. It’s been off the air long enough that we can probably just claim to have been big fans without getting called on it.
• Friday Night Lights. We didn’t like going to the actual Friday night football games growing up – why get invested in the travails of a fictional team? And yet, somehow doing so has become a requirement for serious TV geek cred. So we’ll bite the bullet and do something we’d permanently escaped: Pretending to care about football.

The BBC’s Sherlock was one of the surprise hits of the 2010 season (a hit for the PBS crowd, anyway). Though its first season only ran for three episodes, the modernized Sherlock Holmes won a lot of loyal fans with its fidelity to the source material, and its weirdly named but perfectly cast Benedict Cumberbatch as the Great Detective.

We won’t give anything about the plot away, except to note that the third episode ends on a major cliffhanger – and though we’ve been promised that a second season is on the way, no air date has been set. In fact, they haven’t even shot it yet, thanks to Martin “Dr. Watson” Freeman and his busy schedule of Hobbiting (also Sherlock’s showrunners are the Doctor Who guys). We just hope they get to it soon, even if the second season has to be set in New Zealand and centered around the mystery of why Dr. Watson now has hobbit feet.

So Dish Network has been very friendly to our favorite iPad owners by releasing a free Remote Access App from the Apple App Market but what about us Google lovers? Android anyone? Selling over a quarter million phones daily has to mean something to someone.

Well good news for you, Android. Dish Network has released the aptly named “Dish Remote Access Android” allowing many Android users to watch both live and recorded TV on their compatible smartphones and tablets. In conjunction with a Sling-loaded device, such as the Sling Adapter or ViP 922 Slingloaded receiver, you can keep in touch with the TV shows on your DVR. If you don’t happen to have a Sling device, you can still watch live TV, just not your DVR TV shows.

No matter what, this is a win for Dish Network customers who own an Android device. Check out the “Dish Remote Access Android” in the Google Market.

To quote one particularly apt reTweet from Time magazine I ran across last week:  “The royal wedding, broadcast in 3D? // Oh, f*** you, world. Just f*** you.”

With this ring, we are totally hexed.  Via

I was four years old during the last ginormous royal wedding, and vaguely remember seeing Prince Charles and Princess Diana waving from the balcony on my parents’ television.  Other than that, we were going to Americana Amusement Park, and these flat- haired people on the TV were holding up the show. And yet, I continue to be one of these people who continually announce total mental and emotional detachment from the British royal family, and yet lean forward when one of their names shows up in the supermarket checkout line.

I suppose I could blame all this on a vestigial respect for the British literature which drenched eight schooling years of my life, but no.  I’m interested.  Like, I clicked on an article about the engagement between Prince William and whats- her- name, Waity Katry.  Then I called my mother and we discussed how William looked like his mother when he was little, but now looks more like his father, and can you believe he gave her that ring?  That one?  The big honkin’ sapphire one his father gave his mother?  Given how incredibly well all that turned out?  Could have have at least taken the stone and had it made into a new ring, maybe?  Ya think?

This is potentially because the bulk of my information on British history hails from Regency romance novels, and all information modern British culture is garnered from Top Gear. So I probably won’t be rushing out to snatch out some of those Best Buy $150 3D glasses.

But, well, you know.  Royal weddings only come around, what, every other marriage or so.