Tuesday: The Office
The series finale of the original version of The Office--better known as "The Christmas Special"--is quite possibly our favorite thing ever. We're talking films, television shows, books ... nothing compares to the heartbreaking perfection that Ricky Gervais put together for his final go around at Wernham-Hogg. For most of the two hours, every character is cloaked in failure and regret to an almost unbearable degree. Then, just when you think things can't get any sadder, Mr. Gervais pulls the happiest of happy endings out of his bag of tricks. By the time the last 10 minutes are over, you'll never be able to hear Yazoo's "Only You" again without a tear coming to your eye. [BBC-America, 9 a.m.]

Wednesday: It's a Wonderful Life
It just wouldn't be Christmas Eve without George Bailey. We're continually fascinated by Frank Capra's most famous film because the perception of it has changed so much over the last 20 years. When we were kids, and broadcasts of It's a Wonderful Life aired so frequently during the holiday season that they became a punch line, everyone talked about how corny and toothless the movie was; now, you can't walk two feet without tripping over some think piece about how bleak and miserable it really is. We never thought It's a Wonderful Life fit snugly into either category. To us, it's the ultimate "hope" movie. Hope that no matter how bad things get--that no matter how bad you screw things up--there is always a chance to get on your feet again. And there's nothing toothless or miserable about a message like that. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Casablanca
We don't think Humphrey Bogart was born in a manger, but that doesn't mean you can't celebrate his birthday on December 25, too. In honor of Mr. Bogart's special day (he would have been a spry 109 years old), TCM has been kind enough to schedule a marathon of his most popular films, starting with Casablanca. Afterward stayed tuned for The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen and High Sierra, in succession. We shouldn't complain--that's a lot of Bogie, after all--but we wish they had found room for The Petrified Forest and Key Largo. Maybe we'll get our wish next Christmas when he turns 110. [TCM, 8 p.m.]

Friday: Definitely, Maybe
Our esteemed colleague gave Definitely, Maybe an honorable mention on her top-10 list for 2008, and while we don't share the same enthusiasm for Adam Brooks' film, we do really like it. Sure, it's not perfect. Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher could have more chemistry together; Kevin Kline and Rachel Weisz could appear in a few more scenes (and by "few more scenes," we mean "all the scenes"); the '90s flashbacks could have better musical cues; but, in the end, none of that stuff matters. Fact is, the wonderful relationship between Mr. Reynolds' almost divorced dad and his precocious daughter (played by the precocious Abigail Breslin) is more than enough to make up for any of the shortcomings. [More Max, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday: Gremlins
Gremlins is a Christmas movie, if you like Christmas movies where little green monsters terrorize and gruesomely kill many inhabitants of a Capra-esque town. Despite being written by noted saccharinist Chris Columbus (Home Alone) and executive-produced by Steven Spielberg (himself no stranger to shmaltz), Gremlins is pretty harsh stuff for children. In fact, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it helped herald in the era of PG-13 ratings. If it weren't for that adorable Gizmo, we don't think we could have watched this when we were kids without having a panic attack. [AMC, 3 p.m.]

Wednesday: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
We affectionately call Cristian Mungiu's 2007 Romanian film the "Children of Men of abortion movies". His harrowing tale of two students trying to procure an illegal abortion in 1987 Romania is a brutal (brutal!) viewing experience, thanks in large part to Mr. Mungiu's love of long takes. Honestly, it feels like there are only 10 cuts in the entire film. In one particular stretch, the camera stays locked on star Anamaria Marinca for nearly eight minutes and the young actress, trapped in the frame like a prisoner, doesn't disappoint; she conveys more emotion with strained and worried glances than most Hollywood stars can with full soliloquies. [Sundance, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: L.A. Confidential
Looking back at the movies we liked in college is sometimes as embarrassing as seeing old photos of ourselves. (Did we really love American Beauty? And are we really wearing Adidas pants? Ugh!) Thankfully, L.A. Confidential doesn't fall into that trap. It's hard to believe Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland helped create one of the best movies from the last decade, but thanks to an extraordinary cast and James Ellroy's source novel, it would have been pretty hard for them to screw this up. L.A. Confidential might not be Chinatown, but it's damn close. [Starz, 4:15 a.m.]

Friday: Greatest Holiday Movies: TV & Film Countdown
If you're like us, you haven't been able to keep up with all the holiday movies airing on cable during the last couple of weeks. There just isn't enough time! Thankfully NBC has people like us covered. This countdown show might be more suited to VH1, but since many of our favorites are represented, who cares? It's a lot easier to watch the end of It's a Wonderful Life than to sit through the entire thing for the 60th time. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

In The Philadelphia Story, for instance, he's condescending, too wry, a tabloid reporter stuck covering a society wedding who gets loaded and tries to bone the bride-to-be. In Rear Window, it's bad enough that he's become, trapped in that wheelchair, this peeping tom, creepy, obsessed, but he also treats Grace Kelly most of the time like she's a flesh-eating virus he might catch. And in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey may be the bulwark that prevents Bedford Falls from devolving into Potterville, but the man is also self-righteous, self-pitying, driven easily to suicide, and a screamer. This is the bravery of Jimmy Stewart. He didn't hedge for your sympathies, he screwed with them. He undermined his sappy, sad face with nasty, sinister eyes; and used that timorous, aw-shucks voice to say the most terrible things.

Which brings us to Vertigo. It's on TCM, this Saturday evening, at 5:45. Don't count on doing much afterward, because it tends to leave a person pretty fucked up. But it's Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece and maybe the finest American movie ever made, our apologies to Godfather fans.

Here, Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie, a detective forced to retire because dizziness hits him at any height above chair level. Kim Novak plays the rich woman he's hired to tail, who is probably sick in the head but may be possessed by the ghost of a Spanish noblewoman, whom he falls in love with and loses. Ms. Novak plays too the shopgirl he meets later on, also loves, wants to possess.

So, he remakes the shopgirl in the image of the dead rich woman. He's like a Hollywood talent agent manipulating some kid fresh off the bus into the shape of a starlet. He re-creates the style of gray suit he remembers, dies her hair platinum blond and twists it back up into the tree-ring knot he longs to caress. "Judy, please, it can't matter to you!" is what he pleads, as he dolls her up and destroys her.

Maybe the detective parts of him are still whirring and humming inside, putting her puzzle together piece by piece, deducing with great difficulty why the rich woman and the shopgirl look so much alike, making the mystery make sense. But he's also so deeply disturbed, so awful and broken, that Freud and a whole team of Viennese psychiatrists wouldn't be able to figure him out. Hell, they couldn't even name what he's got. His vertigo, bad enough, becomes a disequilibrium that can never be righted. We think Scottie's weirder and scarier than Heath Ledger's Joker, but because he wears a Jimmy Stewart suit and Jimmy Stewart seeming-good intentions instead of facial scars and war paint, it's hard to see.

Anyway, for anyone who doesn't already know, we're loathe to spoil the ending, so all we'll say is that Scottie cures himself of his vertigo, but the cure is tragic.

And about Kim Novak, who you'll mourn twice, she had the crazy knack of acting both earthy and uncanny. We recommend following Vertigo up with one of two other Kim Novak movies: Kiss Me Stupid, a Billy Wilder sex-farce co-starring Dean Martin as a grosser, hornier, even drunker version of himself, or The Notorious Landlady, the comic thriller she made in London with Jack Lemmon and Fred Astaire. In each of these films, she again plays someone pretending to be someone else, but these masquerades end happily. Of course, there's no real antidote for Vertigo.

But aren’t we forgetting James Stewart? He certainly had a far greater emotional range than any of the competition. To name only the films that seem to me to contain his most innovative work, Stewart convincingly played a sly voyeur in Rear Window (1954), a seething necrophiliac in Vertigo (1958), a worldly circus clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), tenacious, driven cowboys in Bend of the River (1952), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955). He also successfully played a Mitteleuropean clerk in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a middle-class banker driven to the edge of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a swozzled fantasist in Harvey (1950), a grizzled old pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), a crafty small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a cynical reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and an idealistic Congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Even Grant partisans will have to admit that these are the credits of an actor without fear, willing to try nearly anything. Stewart’s credits make the man who was born Archie Leach look pathologically cautious by comparison. And what’s more, Stewart was laboring manfully beneath a burden unusual for a movie star: After he outgrew his boyishly attractive pre–World War II gawkiness, he wasn’t sexy at all.

No, Jimmy Stewart deserves better than he’s gotten. And after Marc Eliot’s dismal biography, he still does.

The problem with writing about Stewart is that he was a kind, pleasant man—he wasn’t just liked around Hollywood, he was loved. He married once, raised a family, served his country nobly in World War II, grew increasingly conservative and actually lived his values. By modern biographical standards, he’s a dull subject. Not that there aren’t intimations of terrible stress under the surface; he flew several bombing missions during World War II and finally had something of a nervous breakdown, an experience that may have informed his increasingly ragged and vulnerable George Bailey in Frank Capra’s last great film.

Marc Eliot has produced a bewilderingly bad book, beginning with the false intimacy of its title. His comically clause-happy writing teeters on the edge of incoherence: “Almost from the day they took over the place, there were parties practically every night, where the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood, which meant in the country, which meant in the world, came to play and in most instances, to stay, at least until the next day.”

His judgments are often ridiculous, as in this, about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): “The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God, while its mise-en-scène is a description of deception, Hollywood style, the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera sees it from where the director has placed it.”

When Mr. Eliot isn’t slaughtering the English language or flaunting his vulgarity (Gary Cooper, he writes, “talked softly and carried a big dick”), he’s mangling film history: Mack Sennett’s name was not “Max”; producer Joe Pasternak worked at Universal, not Paramount, when he made Destry Rides Again (1939); Joseph Schenck came over with Darryl Zanuck from Twentieth Century Pictures to run Fox, and was not the presiding eminence at Fox before the merger; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was neither “rarely seen” nor “a box-office dud”—it went into profits within a couple of years of its release, as did practically every John Wayne movie (ditto for James Stewart).

Finally, anyone who could sum up Lubitsch’s exquisite The Shop Around the Corner, one of the few nearly perfect movies in Hollywood history—a romantic comedy that dares to put its characters on the edge of emotional obliteration—as “unexceptional” deserves to have his keyboard impounded. If that doesn’t stop him, he should, like Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, have his fingers broken.

You might expect a style this barbarous in a book about sports—as Hunter Thompson observed, sportswriters as a breed generally don’t have enough sense to empty warm piss out of their boots. But no sportswriter who manifested such transcendent ignorance of his subject would get a book contract.

There is no—repeat, no—excuse for a book this badly written, this reportorially suspect. Does no one edit anymore? Does no one care?

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.

But aren’t we forgetting James Stewart? He certainly had a far greater emotional range than any of the competition. To name only the films that seem to me to contain his most innovative work, Stewart convincingly played a sly voyeur in Rear Window (1954), a seething necrophiliac in Vertigo (1958), a worldly circus clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), tenacious, driven cowboys in Bend of the River (1952), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955). He also successfully played a Mitteleuropean clerk in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a middle-class banker driven to the edge of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a swozzled fantasist in Harvey (1950), a grizzled old pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), a crafty small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a cynical reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and an idealistic Congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Even Grant partisans will have to admit that these are the credits of an actor without fear, willing to try nearly anything. Stewart’s credits make the man who was born Archie Leach look pathologically cautious by comparison. And what’s more, Stewart was laboring manfully beneath a burden unusual for a movie star: After he outgrew his boyishly attractive pre–World War II gawkiness, he wasn’t sexy at all.

No, Jimmy Stewart deserves better than he’s gotten. And after Marc Eliot’s dismal biography, he still does.

The problem with writing about Stewart is that he was a kind, pleasant man—he wasn’t just liked around Hollywood, he was loved. He married once, raised a family, served his country nobly in World War II, grew increasingly conservative and actually lived his values. By modern biographical standards, he’s a dull subject. Not that there aren’t intimations of terrible stress under the surface; he flew several bombing missions during World War II and finally had something of a nervous breakdown, an experience that may have informed his increasingly ragged and vulnerable George Bailey in Frank Capra’s last great film.

Marc Eliot has produced a bewilderingly bad book, beginning with the false intimacy of its title. His comically clause-happy writing teeters on the edge of incoherence: “Almost from the day they took over the place, there were parties practically every night, where the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood, which meant in the country, which meant in the world, came to play and in most instances, to stay, at least until the next day.”

His judgments are often ridiculous, as in this, about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): “The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God, while its mise-en-scène is a description of deception, Hollywood style, the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera sees it from where the director has placed it.”

When Mr. Eliot isn’t slaughtering the English language or flaunting his vulgarity (Gary Cooper, he writes, “talked softly and carried a big dick”), he’s mangling film history: Mack Sennett’s name was not “Max”; producer Joe Pasternak worked at Universal, not Paramount, when he made Destry Rides Again (1939); Joseph Schenck came over with Darryl Zanuck from Twentieth Century Pictures to run Fox, and was not the presiding eminence at Fox before the merger; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was neither “rarely seen” nor “a box-office dud”—it went into profits within a couple of years of its release, as did practically every John Wayne movie (ditto for James Stewart).

Finally, anyone who could sum up Lubitsch’s exquisite The Shop Around the Corner, one of the few nearly perfect movies in Hollywood history—a romantic comedy that dares to put its characters on the edge of emotional obliteration—as “unexceptional” deserves to have his keyboard impounded. If that doesn’t stop him, he should, like Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, have his fingers broken.

You might expect a style this barbarous in a book about sports—as Hunter Thompson observed, sportswriters as a breed generally don’t have enough sense to empty warm piss out of their boots. But no sportswriter who manifested such transcendent ignorance of his subject would get a book contract.

There is no—repeat, no—excuse for a book this badly written, this reportorially suspect. Does no one edit anymore? Does no one care?

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.

In 1959–when Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe were red-hot–one of the finest and most important American films was released, did well, won an award or two (like the New York Film Critics' selection of James Stewart as best actor) and then passed from the scene. But it should be required viewing for anyone who cares about such things as true quality in picture making, a few of America's best aspects, our complicated judicial system and life's generally ambiguous pathways. Co-starring Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara (only his second film), George C. Scott (his first big role), Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, and the national hero, Joseph N. Welch (the man who brought down Joe McCarthy) as the judge, the film is Otto Preminger's totally enthralling and superb adaptation of Robert Traver's best seller founded on a true story of rape, murder and the trial, Anatomy of a Murder [Wednesday, May 20, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 10 P.M.] .

That Robert Traver is a pseudonym for the actual defendant's lawyer in this case, that the entire movie was shot on the real locations in upper Michigan where it happened, and that Preminger was first trained as a lawyer–his father being Attorney General of Austria and one of its most famous attorneys–helps to give the work its pervasive feeling of truth. Stewart gives a performance of absolutely perfect pitch. Though he was among the top five stars of the 50's, Anatomy was the peak in popularity for his career and one of the last roles of significance he was to have. All the other performances, down to the bits, are right up there with Stewart, the movie being a kind of seamless blending and contrast of young and older star actors, a Preminger trademark at its zenith. His best and most personal film, it also features a unique, utterly fresh score, one of only two ever composed by the innovative and incomparable Duke Ellington (who appears briefly at a piano bar).

The picture also had a tremendous impact on the freedom of the screen: After getting taboo words like "virgin" and "pregnant" into his otherwise innocuous The Moon Is Blue (1953), and being the one to finally address drug addiction, with Sinatra in one of his most powerful dramatic portrayals, in The Man With the Golden Arm (1956), Preminger dealt Hollywood's Production Code the coup de grâce with Anatomy , as America's own Jimmy Stewart uses words like "penetration," "panties" and "spermatogenesis." Indeed, accepting the role was a measure of Stewart's artistic conscience: Though many of his heartland fans objected to what they saw, Stewart told me once there was no way he "could turn down a part as good as that." The theme of the movie, spoken by Stewart, that people are neither all good nor all bad, is worth remembering daily.

Other do-not-misses, but more on them anon: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne in John Ford's poetic and heartbreaking 1945 World War II combat drama, They Were Expendable [Monday, May 25, TCM, 82, 5:30 P.M.] . Two, count 'em, two rare James Cagney musts: In the light but touching vein, with Olivia de Havilland and a young Rita Hayworth in Raoul Walsh's nostalgic 1941 classic, The Strawberry Blonde [Saturday, May 23, TCM, 8 P.M.] ; and Cagney, darker, more reckless and 10 years younger, in Howard Hawks' fast-paced 1932 racetrack-rivalry-between-brothers drama, The Crowd Roars [Sunday, May 24, TCM,3P.M.] .

Wednesday, May 20

After summoning his spirit from the beyond, Cher does the next best thing, hosting a TV tribute to her late husband, with Sonny & Me: Cher Remembers . [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Again with the Seinfeld finale ? O.K., so it wasn't so hot. It was too long and disgustingly self-congratulatory. Writer Larry David didn't give the four main players enough to do. And when they started cracking wise during the carjacking scene, they seemed more like characters in some rococo black comedy than themselves. The best scene was the tacked-on ending, added at the last moment by Jerry Seinfeld (without Mr. David's input), of Jerry doing a stand-up routine in prison. "Anybody here from cell block D?" That was nice. The rest we could have done without. Still, Seinfeld leaves behind seven years (out of nine) of good solid comedy. [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Julia Roberts shows off all her Julia Roberts-ishness on tonight's edition of In the Wild . You will experience tender emotions as Miss Roberts gives a bottle to a three-month-old orangutan baby. You will shudder as a 400-pound brute takes Miss Roberts in a hug–and won't let her go! Old-time Hollywood producers, watching from run-down rest homes, will be shouting at the TV: "That girl is magic! I want her in my next picture!" [WNET, 13, 8 P.M.]

With not much on its prime time schedule (we keep trying to like Everybody Loves Raymond , but it's kinda hard to pay attention), CBS opens its vaults for CBS: The First 50 Years and airs some of the best sitcom stuff ever (clips from I Love Lucy , The Andy Griffith Show , The Mary Tyler Moore Show ), moments from its glorious 80's soaps and examples of its trademark authoritative news reporting. (So what the hell happened?) [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Six young celebrities field softball questions and show off their magnificent homes for Barbara Walters on Six to Watch . All of the guests either work for ABC (Jenna Elfman) or need some public relations help (Kobe Bryant is trying to make himself a palatable commercial pitchman after another season of showboating; David Spade has the personality of … David Spade; Jon Bon Jovi is trying to put his bad-hair past behind him and become an actor ; Minnie Driver has some kind of general celebrity attitude problem; and Rupert Everett would like to play straight roles). Well, they've come to the right interviewer. [WABC, 7, 10 P.M.]

Thursday, May 21

Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky made the indie documentaries Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost . Now, they're stepping into prime time with Where It's At: The "Rolling Stone" State of the Union . With Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner producing, they interviewed Beck, Bruce Springsteen, Jewel, Sean (Puffy) Combs and lots of unfamous people, too. "It's a dream job for a documentarian to get a decent budget and to travel around the world talking to people," said Mr. Sinofsky. "In an ideal world, I would have loved to do a road movie that has a story with structures and themes, but what an opportunity to do a show that will be seen by millions. We think it's a really good piece of TV, and we worry because TV execs low-ball the American public. They think of them as Joe Six-Pack, and it was very good for ABC to say, you know, 'We'll take a chance, it will be human beings talking about what's important to them.'" …

"My only disappointment about doing a network TV show like this was that, if we were on our own, I think we would have delved into the extremes," said Mr. Berlinger. "We would have liked to present a wider range of situation. We would have gone a little deeper into the murkier corners of the country … It's hard to get a two-hour prime time special on TV with your vision intact." [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]

Friday, May 22

Who said the kids have short attention spans? MTV's nightly sex advice show, Loveline , is the least visually appealing thing on TV. The hosts are sitting there taking phone calls, and half the time you can't hear what the callers are saying, and then they kind of ramble on and on with their advice, with one guy trying to be cheeky and blunt, and the other one trying to be professionally bland. It goes on and on, an hour every night, but the kids watch it, so go figure. [MTV, 20, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, May 23

Tonight on Baywatch (yes, it's still on the air), Mitch (that's David Hasselhoff) finally decides to marry. First in a two-parter. Somewhere, in a small town in Germany, the little girls are weeping. [UPN, 9, 7 P.M.]

Sunday, May 24

NYTV correspondent Nick Paumgarten reports: Stan Fischler, a.k.a. the Hockey Maven, is a Brooklyn-born hockey aficionado who has written over 60 books about the game. He has also served as a color commentator on National Hockey League broadcasts since 1975. During this past season, he turned up all over the place as a roving interviewer and critic during cable broadcasts of Rangers, Islanders and Devils games. But when the Rangers and Islanders failed to make the playoffs and the heavily favored Devils got dumped in the first round, Mr. Fischler suddenly found himself facing an idle spring.…

So NYTV turned to Mr. Fischler to find out what to watch for in Game 1 of the conference final between the Dallas Stars and the winner of the St. Louis-Detroit series: "You look for strange players," he said. "Dallas has one of the strangest players in hockey in [defenseman] Craig Ludwig. He's about a thousand years old. His pads are wider than goalie pads. How he's getting away with illegal pads like that I don't know. And he looks like he shouldn't be playing in a helmet, like he doesn't want to be playing in a helmet. He looks like he just got hauled out of a tavern, and they said, Hey, we got a pickup game. Come out and play.…

"And, of course, the other thing that's so fascinating about Dallas is the coach [Ken Hitchcock]. The guy was 400 pounds at one time! You know that, right? He weighed 400 pounds! This guy is one of the greatest testimonials to dieting in the history of the world. I guess it's six years now that he's been dieting. I'd say he's 200-plus these days, but he's at least acceptable now. He was a joke when he was working as an assistant coach for the Flyers. They said he'd never make it because he'd be mocked by too many players.…

"And, obviously, there's the superstar, Mike Modano. He's one of the elite six in the league. Plus, he's got personality. You talk to him, it's like you just opened up a seltzer bottle. There's something nice and bubbly about him, and he's an American. He has buck teeth, and so do I. That's why I like him. Neither of us have used braces.…

"Another thing about Hitchcock: He's got his mustache … I've gotta tell you a funny story about a mustache. I grew up in Brooklyn and the first Dodger team I ever saw was in '37, when I was 5. The Dodgers had an infielder named Frenchy Bordagaray. His nickname was Frenchy. His real name was Stanley, which meant I automatically liked him. Another reason I liked him was that, like myself, he was Hungarian. So Frenchy, he showed up at training camp–remember, this was the 1930's–he showed up wearing a mustache and a goatee!"

Anyway, watch Messrs. Hitchcock, Modano and Ludwig, but not Bordagaray, continue their quest for the Stanley Cup. [WNYW, 5, 2 P.M.]

Monday,May 25

It's 4:45 A.M. If you are watching Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. , something is desperately wrong with you. [TBS, 22, 4:45 A.M.]

Tuesday, May 26

Mary Matalin and James Carville hire Jamie as their P.R. woman on Mad About You . Leah Oppenheim, a 23-year-old grad student at Bank Street College of Education, has been thinking a lot about Ms. Hunt and Mad About You lately, and, in general, the portrayal of Jews on TV, and she'll be teaching a course called "Is There Jewish Life on Television?" at the 14th Street Y this summer.…

"I'm going to do it thematically," she told NYTV. "I might take Jewish women as a theme and discuss Fran Drescher and how she fits into the tradition of Jewish women on TV. I don't like her stereotype–she's a little bit outrageous–but I think you can place her with Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice. Also, as far as I can discern, Helen Hunt is Jewish. It's funny to look at Mad About You , and she's playing the quintessential WASP. I mean, Jewish women can look like that, they can look like WASPs.… Another theme would be the way Jewish humor has become so integrated into American culture, but if you look at a show like Mad About You , Paul Reiser has always refused to identify his character as Jewish when all the humor on the show is derived from this idea of Jew and WASP.…

"I want to discuss stereotypes and to raise awareness. I want to keep adults and children aware of the constant barrage of media that we take in … I was thinking about the children's shows, and I never thought about it until recently, but there's no Jewish character on Sesame Street , which is a gross omission for a show that's supposed to be a mirror of New York City. Rugrats is a good example–it has this sort of bizarre state where everyone's Jewish and Christian at the same time. There's a grandfather who appears to be a Jew and they celebrate Hanukkah and Passover, but this is the world that kids live in today." [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]