TBS's "My Boys," one of TV's funnier and most endearing comedies, kicks off Season 4 tonight

In last season's "Private Eyes" episode, while Mike (Jamie Kaler) recounts the, er, wonders of his moustache -- the last holdover from the guys' moustache-growing contest -- Kenny (Michael Bunin) interrogates P.J. (Jordana Spiro) and Bobby (Kyle Howard) about their whereabouts last night, not suspecting, though, that they're concealing a romantic relationship; meanwhile Brendan (Reid Scott) pores over the blueprints for his new bar. Season 4 kicks off tonight with a pair of new episodes on TBS.

by Ken

TBS's My Boys is another show I came to late, and even with periodic repeats, there are still episodes, especially in Season 1, I still haven't seen, which I regret, because I've come to really treasure the show.

P.J. (Jordana Spiro) is a Chicago sportswriter, on the Cubs' beat, and for obvious reasons attracts plenty of men, but none who fit into the surprisingly rigid confines of her sports-beat professional and hanging-with-the-guys private lives. She gets plenty of support but remarkably little actual help from her best friend from college, Stephanie (Kellee Stewart), and not even much support from her big brother Andy (Jim Gaffigan), a corporate lawyer who spends as much of his free time as he can avoiding his wife and children, to pursue the closest thing he has to a hobby: drinking.

P.J. has had crushes on longtime pal Brendan and Bobby -- another sportswriter, who was a newcomer to the little group in Season 1 -- and managed to both botch, until somehow last season she and Bobby found themselves a secret couple. I have a feeling Spiro isn't what show creator Betsy Thomas had in mind for the role, and the show might have worked with a less captivating presence, but she really is breathtaking. At the same time, the specificity and depth with which the other characters have been created gives the writers all manner of possibilities to work with. You can think of it as a sort of regular folks' Sex and the City, with a mostly male group of friends and a Second City pulse.

What that still doesn't tell you is how funny the show is, and how touching, and in general how surprising as well as believable. I have no idea where Season 4 will take our friends, but I'm just glad that the wait to find out is finally ending.


AND DON'T FORGET TONIGHT'S
SEASON 4 PREMIERE OF MAD MEN

Three guys we've learned a lot about in three seasons, who really don't like one another: Can Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), Don (Jon Hamm), and Roger (John Slattery) make the new agency work?

With a heroic final-days push, i've knocked off the action-packed final episodes of Season 3, and now face a shorter delay than most Mad Men viewers to see what happens with now with the breakup of Don and Betty Draper and the implosion of Sterling Cooper. Although creator-producer Matt Weiner is telling a great story, he has always been serious about the times (the early '60s) the series passes through, and tonight's Season 4 has already drawn column-opening comment from Frank Rich. -- Ken

The glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don't really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news. "The world is so dark right now," she says. "One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman -- he's from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp." Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she fills in the dead air. "Is that what it takes to change things?" she asks. He ventures no answer.

This is just one arresting moment -- no others will be mentioned here -- in the first episode of the new "Mad Men" season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don't say and can't say. "Mad Men" is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman's reference to Goodman -- one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 -- that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can't imagine the full brunt of what's to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.

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