Third time's the charm. (Photo by Chris Hornbecker)

The third season of everyone’s favorite IFC comedy-sketch show is fast upon us, with Portlandia slated to begin on January 4. In advance of the inevitable onslaught of new hipsterisms, hereto-unknown eccentricities and brand new organic fetishes, The Observer cornered co-creator Fred Armisen about what new “dreams of the Nineties” he would bring to life.

First among them is an appearance by No Doubt, the very ska-tastic Cali band that brought us Gwen Stefani before she turned all L.A.M.B. He would not divulge how Mrs. Gavin Rossdale and her cohorts would be featured in the show, but one might assume they will not be going Navajo. The Brooklyn-based band The Dirty Projectors will also be featured in the coming season.

Another newcomer to the show will be Chloe Sevingny. Ms. Sevigny recently guest starred on the third season of Louie--closing her act by unabashedly masturbating in a coffee shop, sitting next to a flustered Louis CK.

Ms. Sevigny will play a roommate to Carrie and Fred, Mr. Armisen said, as they are looking for something to “define their relationship a little bit more.” The dynamics of a third wheel crush perhaps?

“I’ll just say this, she causes a rift in the relationship, she kind of causes some problems in our friendship,” he said. But he stops to check himself, “I wouldn’t even describe it as problems, she kind of challenges their friendship.”

Fans can also look forward to a Christmas special, “Winter in Portland,” to air on IFC on December 14.

As a precursor to all the excitement, a travel-book based on the show was released on November 13th. Co-authored by Mr. Armisen and Ms. Brownstein, Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors, is intended as something of a keepsake for the fans.

“It was almost like going deeper into the stuff that already exists. Little things we couldn’t really do on the show,” Mr. Armisen said about his experience writing the book.

By way of an example, he refers to Candace and Toni, the women who own a feminist bookstore (‘Women & Women’)--which has had visitors like Aubrey Plaza, Heather Graham and Steve Buschemi in the past--on the show. Expect to find a ‘fem-zine’ insert, made by Candace and Toni, in the book. “When you look through that, you get a sense of who they are, it’s like their little book, it’s got their voices,” he said.

Putting the book and the third season together caused Mr. Armisen to reflect on what exactly he and Ms. Brownstein have tapped into with the show.

“The show is actually about people, it’s about trends, it’s about cities in general, and I am not just talking about living in the United States. I travel, and these communities exist in places like Sweden and England,” Mr. Armisen told The Observer. "It’s almost like Portland is sort of like, the book cover, it’s the wooden frame around it.”

Before letting Mr. Armisen get on with his busy schedule, The Observer just had to ask the SNL veteran if there was one personality he was itching to impersonate on the late night show. “I haven’t done Bill Maher yet. I just haven’t figured out a way to do a sketch about him,” he said, adding that he was a fan of Mr. Maher’s.

Nsharma@observer.com

Nick Cannon (Getty Images)

NBC, finally emerging from its Jeff Zucker hangover (don't worry, Mr. Zucker's doing fine) with a booming fall season, has signed a first-look deal with comedian/TV host/radio personality/actor/Observer profile subject Nick Cannon. 

Mr. Cannon will develop programming for the network, a role he performed at cable network TeenNick. In our 2011 profile of Mr. Cannon, Mr. Mariah Carey noted, "I call it an entrepretainer. It’s a businessman and an entertainer at the same time. That’s kind of what you have to be.” His involvement with NBC has thus far included hosting America's Got Talent during the summer and briefly acting on oft-retooled sitcom Up All Night.

Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU (NBC)

The showrunner for Dick Wolf’s last standing Law & Order program, Special Victims Unit, was struggling to understand how people watch “marathon” sessions of the show he manages. “The children episodes are disturbing, even to us,” said Mr. Leight.

He singled out one such episode, entitled “Friending Emily,” in which detectives go to an FBI office to view images of abused children. Mr. Leight sounded shocked, tired and a little bit horrified over a detail that he and his writers chose to put in the episode. He sounded a lot, in fact, like SVU’s former protagonist, Elliot Stabler.

“There is a kid in diapers whose photo we show,” said Mr. Leight. “We found it on an Internet pornography site. It had 37,000 hits in the last four days.” (Which, it turns out, is the exact line that a government official says during the episode.)

“I mean, a bunch of us on the writing staff have children,” he said. “Nobody really wants to write this stuff. It’s dispiriting.”

The show may upset its own writers, but Law & Order: SVU has outlasted every other show that Dick Wolf created. It’s been two years since NBC nixed the original Law & Order, after 20 seasons. Even after the cancellations of two highly promoted spin-offs, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Los Angeles (not to mention an ill-fated fourth spin-off called Law & Order: Trial by Jury), SVU is still going strong.

It’s one thing to say that violence sells. It’s another to say that gruesome sexual attacks on the most vulnerable members of society, children, can power the remaining show in an unusually successful franchise. Even last season, when its ratings were at their lowest, SVU was still the sixth most watched show on NBC, ahead of 30 Rock, The Office and everything else in the Thursday night lineup. At its peak, SVU was able to topple the original Law & Order when they were on the air together.

What’s clear: people love watching Special Victims Unit, especially young women and mothers. In fact, since the show launched 13 years ago, females age 18 to 34 have been its most consistent viewers. “Two-thirds of our audience are women,” Mr. Leight said. “I honestly don’t understand why, completely. I don’t get it when parents say they watch the show with their kids, either.”

Lisa Friel, a lawyer who spent nearly 30 years in charge of sex crime prosecutions in the New York City District Attorney’s office, understands the impulse. Ms. Friel, who actually oversaw SVU-style prosecutions at work, used to watch the show with her high-school-age daughter, now 18 and a college freshman.

Some of the subject matter they may have encountered: an episode titled “Consent,” in which a young girl is drugged with GHB; the aforementioned “Friending Emily,” in which an older frat brother conspires with a newer pledge to kidnap and rape a high schooler and then broadcast the videos of her molestation on the Internet; and “Brotherhood,” in which a pledge-master is murdered after raping several women as well as the fraternity’s own pledges.

“It wasn’t like I was watching it with her when she was 7,” Ms. Friel told The Observer. “But when the time was right, when she was old enough and when I thought it was appropriate to start dealing with these issues, it was another way to open the dialogue.”

The writers’ lunchroom is plastered with New York Post and Daily News front covers, enough to extinguish one’s creative juices ... or appetite. Every Law & Order installment has a noted “ripped from the headlines” element, and at times the show has even presaged the news. During Mr. Leight’s tenure, for instance, SVU had an episode (“Personal Fouls”) about a basketball coach using his charity as a conduit for kids he could molest. The show aired “two weeks before the Jerry Sandusky story came out,” Mr. Leight noted, with a hint of pride.

As Gothamist asked its readers at the time, “Not to pull a total conspiracy theory here, but this particular story scales pretty high on the ‘just a coincidence’ scale, don’t you think?”

Mr. Leight explained that the story line wasn’t based any on inside information, but that it wasn’t a complete coincidence, either. SVU has a team of rape counselors, crime survivors, detectives and other law enforcement experts who advise the writers on plot points. “Male-on-male sex crimes was just something that people were telling us was happening,” he said. “The show had never really tackled that issue in a substantial way.”

Confessions" Episode 1003 (NBC Photo: Will Hart)

But the show hasn’t always been an easy sell. When Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered in 1999, starring Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay as detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson, it was criticized for sensationalism. There was just no TV precedent for a series that tackled not just the rape or molestation of adults, but also, with disturbing frequency, of children as well. It wasn’t unusual to have a scene in which a small boy or girl was found wandering around the city, dazed, with blood running down his or her legs.

The most brutal episodes violated yet another TV taboo: some of the kids were murdered as well. Longtime viewers of the show may have seen a 15-year-old found in the bushes, a dead baby discovered in a cooler and a 14-year-old war refugee with a slit throat.

Lisa F. Jackson is one of the show’s critics. “SVU portrays a universe of sexual violence that doesn’t really exist,” said Ms. Jackson, director of the HBO documentary Sex Crimes Unit. To make the film, Ms. Jackson spent two years inside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with the prosecutors of sex crimes.

“SVU shows a universe that people prefer over the reality of rape and sexual violence,” she said. “In real life, most victims don’t show physical signs of assault, and it’s a lot harder to identify victims because they don’t come forward.”

Especially during the final Christopher Meloni years, SVU seemed intent on pumping up ratings with increasingly outlandish crimes and plot twists. Stabler’s own children were kidnapped, a hackneyed plot recycled from 24.

“I think people are remembering stuff from season 10, season 11,” said Mr. Leight carefully, when asked about the more exploitative aspects of the show’s story lines. “I think toward the end of the Meloni era, it got a little ... fetishistic. It was like anything else: you had these great writers on the show for 10 years working with the talented [original showrunner] Neal Baer, and they keep pushing the limits, pushing the limits. When we came in two years ago, our whole idea was to bring the show back to the basics.”

SVU has sailed past its 300th episode, is well into its 14th season, and has survived the loss of one of its two stars. It might be worth considering that there is something in it besides cheap thrills. It’s hard to think of SVU as entertaining. Riveting, perhaps.

Mr. Leight would have us believe that SVU exists as a public service, and that the writers get no pleasure in creating these dark stories, especially if they involve children. Like SVU’s relation to real-life sex crimes, his contention probably has some element of the truth, but isn’t the whole story.

During our interview, Mr. Leight asked us what we thought of the recent accusations that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, had once been sexually involved with an underage teen.

We said we thought it wouldn’t be too long before an episode about a child-molesting puppeteer would make it onto SVU.

Mr. Leight coughed and was quiet for a moment. “Yeah ... probably not for a while.”

That night, Mr. Leight would write on @warrenleightTV Twitter account, “Memo to: FBI/CIA/NATO/SesameStreet From:SVU Writers’ Room—Please slow it down, we’re having a hard time getting this all down.”

Dan Stevens (Getty Images)

Via Vulture, a somewhat spoiler-y report that will trouble anyone rooting for the Matthew-Mary romance on British soap opera (come on, it is a soap opera) Downton Abbey--actor Dan Stevens may leave the show after the beginning of the as-yet-unshot fourth season. Mr. Stevens, the show's romantic lead, appears in the third season (airing stateside early in 2013), but has publicly made noise about wanting to depart the show; he has also recently pursued extracurricular interests, serving as a judge for this year's Booker Prize--a surprisingly demanding duty--and appearing on Broadway in The Heiress.

The New York Times quotes a statement from the Sesame Workshop, which produces the PBS series:

"...none of us, especially Kevin, want anything to divert our attention from our focus on serving as a leading educational organization. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Kevin’s personal life has become a distraction that none of us want, and he has concluded that he can no longer be effective in his job and has resigned from Sesame Street."

Mr. Clash was accused of a past relationship with a minor last week by a now 24-year-old man, who later recanted; TMZ reported that the accuser later attempted to go back on his recantation, offering to pay back his cash settlement in order to allege an inappropriate relationship with Mr. Clash once more.

"This is a sad day for Sesame Street," wrote the Sesame Workshop in its statement.

Welcome the new Girls. (Getty Images)

So technically, the new Channel 4 green-lit show Drifters is a spin-off of The Inbetweeners, a popular British sitcom about lackadaisical male 20-somethings that was eventually turned into a movie, and is about to get its own bastardized American version, à la The Office.

But Drifters--which stars three of the actresses who appeared in The Inbetweeners film--sounds a lot like a certain American pop culture zeitgeist retooled for British fans. Including the fact that one of the star's of the show--Jessica Knappett--is also its writer.

From Channel 4's description of Drifters:

'Drifters' features three twentysomething women having their first experience of the real world, making terrible decisions, but having a brilliant time doing it.'

Which, come on, is essentially the slogan for Girls:

And as Daily Mail adds:

The show, which Kanppett has been writing, will tell the tale of a group of friends who are trying to work out what to do with their lives while doing boring menial jobs in Leeds.

We just wonder if any of Girls’ more memorable first-season moments will make it into Drifters. Does Leeds even have a health clinic in which these girls can throw their first abortion party?

Get ready to go Catfish'in! (MTV)

We're not sure how many of you out there actually saw Catfish, the pseudo/documentary directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost of Paranormal Activity 3 and 4 fame. It was a very hyped film in 2010, especially after it received a Sundance buzz-bump that led to Brett Ratner's company Rogue Pictures acquiring the distribution rights and creating a marketing campaign in the style of The Blair Witch Project, which played up the film's ambiguous placement on the reality spectrum.

Ostensibly, the film began as a chronicle of "Rel's little brother Yaniv ('Nev'), and his relationship with Megan, a girl he met online." It soon devolves into one of those "too unbelievable to be true" (except they say it is) narratives about the perils of trusting the identity of anyone you meet on the internet.

For two years now, MTV has been sitting on the rights of a Catfish TV show starring Nev, which is only now seeing the light of day, premiering tonight. And for an adaptation of a film that hinged so much on the gray area that exists between people's online personas and who they were in "real" life, the TV version seems dedicated to erasing all that ambiguity and revealing--surveillance-style--the identities of these digital Romeos and Juliets. For example, Catfish is currently being used by NYC social startup DateMySchool.com, which vouches for the validity of its members.

From the press release announcing the tenuous link between MTV's Catfish and DateMySchool:

With its advanced privacy settings, and exclusivity to students and alumni, DateMySchool is safer than
any other online social platform worldwide.
DateMySchool is:
• Anonymous: Members may restrict schools, departments, age ranges and individuals from accessing
their profiles, and they cannot be searched on Google.
• Safe: Members are authenticated by their school e-mail addresses and other databases, like Uni-
LDAP and alumni directories, and are given extensive privacy control
• Exclusive: Only verified students and alumni may join.
DateMySchool is the first reversed social network:
• Users see people who they don't know but can trust.
• Users are seen by people who they want to contact and who want to be contacted by them.
• Users discover people online and then meet them offline.
DateMySchool has zero embarrassment:
• Members remain anonymous by restricting their profile-access to people they may see around
campus.
• As a reversed social network, users can be discreet about their reasons for registering.
• Whether for dating, relational or study purposes, DateMySchool is an online platform to discover new
people in a safe way.

But wait, so is the entire thesis of Catfish the show is to be hyper-vigilant and demand transparency of its subjects, when the film itself claimed that it shouldn't have to prove its authenticity/legitimacy? No, that's cool. It won't make for very interesting programming if it just turns into To Catfish a Predator, but we understand how the complexities of the original film might have been a little too much for the network to put on the schedule alongside Awkward.

AnnaSophia Robb as "Carrie."

The Carrie Diaries, the struggling-upward-teen-in-New-York Sex and the City prequel, is taking the Monday 8 p.m. time slot of the wealthy-teens-in-New-York soap Gossip Girl, once that show goes off-air at the end of the year.

Diaries and its time slot predecessor share executive producers in the form of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, but hopefully the new show will burn off its buzz a bit less quickly than did the ratings mayfly that was Gossip Girl. We'll find out beginning Monday, January 14.