It's the 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street, the gorgeous children's series that gives "educational" a good name. With two kids, I still watch it; I've even been won over by nouveau Elmo, who is way weirder than I ever gave him credit.

But here's a clip I remember from when I was a kid, not one from Sesame Street itself but from the equally wonderful The Electric Company. Man, this seemed sophisticated to me! Funky and almost scary, with its stripped-down Jules Pfeiffer–y cartoon lady. It was also the first time I'd heard any reference to "the blues," which makes it the toddler equivalent of stumbling into some dive in Greenwich Village in 1971.

John Leonard died a year ago, after nearly a quarter century as New York Magazine's television critic.

John's legacy is too wild to sum up in any simple way. As a critic, he was a brilliant clown, cheerleader, chastiser, and philosopher, sometimes acid with disdain, far more often passionate with praise. As a writer, he was a fantastically original stylist who was downright loopy on the page. His trademark move was big, sloppy, madcap, omnivorous lists — the "cascades" — inferring connections everywhere. He drew links between worlds that many thinkers kept separate (TV and literature, psychology and left-wing politics). And he was also one of the most interesting people in New York City.

Here's my essay denouncing Cougar Town (and placing the sitcom in the historical context of television cougardom) in the current print issue of New York.

Here's my earlier blog post defending (sort of, while ranting against) Cougar Town.

And here's a thoughtful essay by Willa Paskin on Double X, which doesn't exactly denounce my denunciation, but does argue that the show has greater potential than I'm giving it credit for.

Late-seventies television was, with a few exceptions, a wasteland for teen girls. In 1982, we got one intriguing season of Square Pegs, but the real breakthrough came in 1988, when Roseanne's Darlene Connor slouched onto the scene, swiftly followed by Blossom, Daria, Buffy Summers, Willow Rosenberg, Angela Chase, Rayanne Graff, Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks, the daughters on Once and Again, Rory Gilmore, and many more: Teen girls as multilayered protagonists, not crush objects or spunky ciphers.

In contrast to so many seventies and eighties girls, Joanie on the hit sitcom Happy Days had an appealingly bratty presence. But what really blew my mind was a far more minor Happy Days character: Susie Quatro, who appeared from 1977 to 1979 as Leather Tuscadero, the younger sister of Fonzie's girlfriend Pinkie. With her husky voice, Kristy McNichol–ish shag, and greaser clothes, Leather was a bit of a baby butch, freakishly rock-and-roll for TV, almost exotic. Plus, she had her own trademark hand gesture: two slaps to the thigh followed by shooty-fingers!

While surfing around to determine whether Flo "Kiss My Grits" Castleberry did in fact qualify as a cougar (long story, next week's essay), I came across this list on the blog TVMunchies: the Twelve Grossest TV Characters Who Get Laid Constantly.

Which should have offended me — so mean! So, uh, weightist! — except that it was funny and perversely accurate.

Sternbergh was right.

Early this fall, I'd watched the first few episodes of Bored to Death in a state of mild twitchiness, griping that I wanted to like it but didn't. In fact, I actively disliked the premiere — and then I managed to be annoyed even by the funny third episode, although in an abstract way I thought it was pretty good. So that was all very confusing.

I described my concerns to my colleague and aesthetic duelling partner Adam Sternbergh, who was unsympathetic. I like Jonathan Ames's novels just fine, I told him, but I didn't quite buy this emo Woody Allen–ized version of him in the body of Jason Schwartzman. The whole conception was so sad-sack, so self-pitying, too boyish-begging-for-pity. Maybe it's Judd Apatow poisoning, but I didn't think I could take a show about an immature man-boy mooning over his lost, more "adult" girlfriend, she of the complaint that he drinks too much.

But then the series started getting to me. First of all, it's been a while since I've seen a TV series that actually feels like contemporary New York, especially Brooklyn, with scenes at the co-op and in Prospect Park and people racing through Grand Army Plaza. It's thrilling! And pretty. Even the set decoration was oddly perfect, like a random Rubik's Cube in some dude's ashtray.

Also, it's so great to finally watch a show about magazines that actually acknowledges what's happening to magazines (I'm talking to you, Ugly Betty). And last night when I was catching up on some old episodes, I giggled throughout that whole Ted Danson plot in which his therapist advises him to try bisexuality in order to try to reach his magazine's lost female demographic, a plot which may have made no sense, but made me laugh like a crazy person, as did the scene where he hit it off with a male hustler, and especially the scene in which he rants about the perfection of Danny Kaye's affair with Laurence Olivier, which was pretty much the funniest thing I've watched all year. ("He could do so many accents. He could be a different woman for Olivier every night.")

The show had crossed what I think of as the Tootsie barrier: if it doesn't bother you that a recently nationally famous TV star is able to anonymously knock over mimes in Central Park, it's because you like the movie (or show, or book) too much to nitpick over the little things.

Now perhaps I'm probably not the best audience for a show with a whiny streak about masculinity issues. I'm still suspicious of the Apatow bent. (During yet another scene of a girlfriend kvetching at a sad sack, my husband glanced up at the screen and said, "Why are all the women such nags?") But although Sternbergh was wrong about Cougar Town, he was right about this. It's hard to describe the show's appeal, but it's funny. It's oddly addictive. Even a little sexy. I'm happy it was picked up for a second season. Season pass.

I'm working up a piece about Mad Men, because people! The backlash must stop. I'm not saying the show is flawless, but a panicky jump-the-shark reflex is a reliable phenomenon among audiences during the third season of almost every great series — and it's hit the AMC hit even harder. People are not unreasonably desperate for great television in this, the season of post-Sopranos, post–The Wire anxiety. We're mid–Jay Leno, trapped in the Lost hiatus, it's an economic and aesthetic 1962 of the televisual soul! Don't panic! (Although I admit that Betty is pretty off-putting.)

In the meantime, I advise you fans of Adult Cable Shows to watch the fourth season of Dexter, which has been outstanding, genuinely chilling, and powerful. I'm going to respectfully disagree with our Vulture recapper who complains that "once again, Dexter identifies with a murder victim. Stifle that yawn." This is, to me, sort of like complaining that Six Feet Under has too many funerals. From my perspective, Dexter might look like just a jokey killer's-eye-view procedural, but the show is at its best a dark, funny, stylized allegory about masculinity. Each season hacks a fresh path through Dexter's pathology, as he murders his way into self-knowledge, contrasting himself with the evil people he tracks down in order to work his way toward (delusional, grandiose, but strangely genuine!) emotional health.

Maybe I'm still a little shook up from our long national silver-balloon nightmare yesterday, but I got PTSD-ish flashbacks re-watching this excerpt from The Day After, the Very Scary and Important Television Event of 1983.

For those of you who weren't around to be excessively vulnerable to television in 1983, the seventies and eighties were an era of traumatically educational television events, many extended throughout multiple nights: Holocaust, Roots, Shogun. Here's a column I wrote on the subject a few years back, explaining my Amelia Bedilia-ish linguistic misunderstanding of the time: "As a teenager, I didn't even realize that 'mini' was a prefix: I simply jumped to the conclusion that a miniseries (rhymed with rotisseries) was a literary genre in itself — a sprawling, quasi-educational epic studded with torture and interracial romance."

The Day After ran for one night, but as far as I was concerned, it might as well have been on television every night of my junior year in high school, since concerned adults kept raising the show again and again, attempting to solicit earnest conversations about nuclear war. (It was a little like those cockeyed, horrifying encounter groups about suicide in Heathers: "Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make!")

Why I Hate Glee, by Sadie Stein at Jezebel.

I've got a far-higher tolerance for campy TV than Stein: I liked Popular more than anyone I knew, and I adore Ugly Betty. But I can't say I disagree with much of what she says — both about the female characters and the brittle use of high-school stereotypes. Calling the show "a smug, G-rated Election on uppers with 2-D characterizations" is a punch in the solar plexus of my tenuous fanhood, because it crystallizes a discomfort I've felt with the show over the past few weeks. And while Election is one of my favorite movies, the year it came out marked the rise of this type of caustic-satirical story. Many of them were flawed copycats, and few were capable of Election's nervy trick: to be terrifically tough on its characters while revealing a core of genuine insight, even kindness, into their worst acts.

Unlike Sadie Stein, I certainly don't hate the show — parts of it I've adored, especially the outrageously great premiere episode, which had everything good in it — but hey, I don't want it to be a guilty pleasure. I want it to be an actual pleasure. Fingers crossed for this week!

While we're reading good pieces from other places, check out the reliably hilarious Heather Havrilesky's rant on Cougartown, in which she bemoans not only how offensively bad the show is, but what great reviews it has gotten:

"If aliens learned about our culture by watching our newest television shows, they might assume that planet Earth was terrorized by predatory middle-aged women with hairless, bony bodies and the same blank expression on their overly Botoxed faces, a look of creepy awe at the joys of 20-something tenderloin ...

... the older aliens would already recognize that these "cougars" clearly serve as some sort of cautionary tale for female humans, a moralistic narrative that humans refer to, strangely enough, as a "guilty pleasure" — "guilty" in this case meaning "it makes you want to stick your head in the oven" and "pleasure" referring to the feeling humans get from having their fingernails ripped off one by one."

My friend Misha just IM'd me with a different comparison for HIMYM: It's the new Lost, according to the excellent James Poniewozik of Time. In his essay about why sitcoms are the most ambitious things on TV, Poniewozik writes:

CBS's How I Met Your Mother is like a sitcom version of Lost: It's built around a central mystery — how the protagonist meets his eventual wife -- and likes to play with nonlinear narratives, story lines that jump around in time. It's a light show, but it expects its viewers to pay much closer attention than did the sitcoms of a generation ago (as does Emmy-winning 30 Rock, which is shot through with inside jokes and tightly woven callbacks to past episodes).

I think this is one of the reasons I wasn't so wild about this episode: Because the script didn't do so much rich chronological stuff (other than that flashback to Lily and Marshall's previous courtships of other couples), it felt sitcommier.

But actually — and this is a totally separate issue — I do agree that HIMYM's time-jumping is part of what makes it such a terrifically contemporary show. Like Lost, like Mad Men (and like One Tree Hill! and Desperate Housewives!), the characters leap forward and back by whole years, radically expanding the thematic game board and the potential for suspense and character growth, not to mention running jokes.

On some series, like HIMYM, these tricks are skillfully done, on others, cheesily, but I have this larger theory that the prevalence of time jumps over the past few years is in fact a Hollywood-wide psychological symptom. It's a nearly Jungian symbolic manifestation of TV writers' anxious excitement at television's own time-machine transformation via the Internet, Tivo, and DVDs. Historically, television writers were creating something meant to be shown once, a linear performance for a static audience. But now that their creations are pauseable on DVRs, binge-watchable on DVDs, etc., television is time-shifted by definition. And writers have come unstuck, à la Billy Pilgrim.

This is my theory, which is mine.

Even for fans like me, How I Met Your Mother can feel like an update of Friends: You've got your Manhattan hangout, two geek males plus one womanizer, and the unsettling sensation that all that warm likability could curdle with a few bad episodes. I do like the show much better than Friends: stronger friendship chemistry, for one thing. Friends was fun, but HIMYM is witty, structurally sophisticated and genuinely New Yorkish. Plus, Barney.

That said, last night freaked me out when I realized man-child Marshall was Phoebe, with his silly songs and photo montages, climaxing in an actual song about a cat, à la "Smelly Cat." (Marshall's song was "Cat Funeral," but still.) I'm sure online fan groups have seen this through many times, but all of a sudden, Barney was Joey, Lily was Monica, Ted was Ross (complete with professorial shoulder patches), and Robin (okay, this is a major stretch) was intimacy-impaired Chandler. And that "All By Myself" montage (albeit genuinely funny) was a perfect parallel to the Chandler-Joey breakup-parody montage — which also culminated in them gazing through the rain.

I admit the maître d' sneering, "Is it only you two?" made me laugh out loud. The eighteenth-century–poetry thing really didn't work, though. There's such a thin line between "frat-boy" humor and frat-boy humor.

[BTW, I wrote this comment before I'd read Amos's lovely recap, but commenter Julieandthecity and I are clearly twins — and she makes an excellent point about how much the couple-dating plotline contradicts a very funny earlier episode ... ]

Tonight, Pam and Jim get married on The Office: Mazel tov!

If you're one of those folks planning to stand up in your living room during the ceremony and shout out your objections, please read this totally smart and on-target essay by the Star-Ledger's Alan Sepinwall about how well the series has handled requited love and the insidious effects of the Moonlighting Fallacy.

Here's Fox's latest promo, a frat-boy mash-up of strip-club scenes from your favorite Fox series, topped with the truly greasy slogan "Welcome to the Club." Can I get comped for an arsenic? Makes me miss that old Ms. Magazine column "No Comment."

(I love the blogger Warming Glow's interpretation of the whole thing: "Why? Because shut up and tits, that's why.")