The brilliance of the first half of the second season of the AMC series "The Walking Dead," which wrapped up Sunday night, should speak for itself. But not everyone was a fan, including AOL TV's Maureen Ryan, whose vivisection of the series left me wondering whether we were watching the same show. And yet it's well written and persuasive enough to beg a very different take here.

The season's seventh episode--its last until "Dead" picks up again for another six episodes beginning in February--may be the most incredible hour of TV I watched all year. And that includes the stunning season finale of "Breaking Bad."

Which isn't to say it represents some quantum leap from the six episodes that preceded it this mid-finale. If the show's creative quality was supposed to degrade in the transition of showrunning duties from Frank Darabont to Glen Mazzara, that's news to me. If the first season left itself open to criticism as nothing but a gorefest thrill ride, the second season so far stands as an utter refutation to that sentiment.

What's all the more remarkable about the show's maturation is the narrative risk it took to get there. By making the daring move to derail the "Dead" characters from the ceaseless violence that awaited them on the open road in favor of sequestering them on the relatively peaceful idyll of Hershel Greene's farm, this series truly came into its own. 

While zombie entrails may not have been as copious as during the first season--though hardly in short supply either--the series took its characters deeper without dissipating its crackling energy. If anything, that energy took on a more coiled intensity that finally erupted in memorable fashion that I won't describe--no spoilers here, folks. 

The second season is offering a very simple but powerful question: Is there any sense in being humane amid inhuman conditions?

Though the "Dead" group has always been rife with assorted tensions that seem set to explode any minute, the first half of the second season makes clear that question has driven a rift between them all. There are those like protagonist Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his family who are trying to hold onto conventional moral values even as the world in which those values were formed falls apart. And then there is Shane--played by an Emmy-worthy Jon Bernthal--who advocates cutting off anything that leaves them vulnerable to attack, no matter what the cost. 

And then there is Hershel (Scott Wilson), whose seemingly crazy decision to harbor zombies in a barn has a seductive logic. Is there just cause for killing a "walker" without self-defense? What's incredible is that somehow I find myself in agreement with both Hershel and Shane even though they are inhabiting extreme ends of a moral spectrum. If I were Hershel and found a way to secure my zombified love ones until a potential cure could be found, would I do it? Absolutely. If I were Shane and seen up close just how horrific the havoc the zombies wreak, would I have a zero-tolerance policy toward letting any of them "live"? Damn right, I would.

To be able to put the viewer simultaneously in the mindset of moral polar opposites--I'm hard-pressed to remember a TV show that's managed to pull off such a nifty trick.

"Dead" leaves the audience at such a juicy juncture that this two-month layover is going to be painful: How on earth is this group going to function as a cohesive group when they are separated by a moral chasm? 

At its best, "Dead" has recovered the gritty greatness ABC's "Lost" possessed early in its run but ultimately squandered in a narrative complexity that tied itself into pretzels. Dismiss it as mere sci-fi if you will, but "Dead" makes you think about the real-life grey zone of wartime, when the rules that govern society aren't as easily applied.

In my mind, "Walking" stands shoulder to shoulder with "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." Congrats, AMC: The three best currently running series on TV just might all reside on one network.

One week into the post-Regis Philbin era and there's still no clarity on who might assume the seat opposite Kelly Ripa on the show temporarily known as "Live! With Kelly." Jerry Seinfeld did a decent job in his first week but permanent hosting duties don't seem to interest him. Andy Cohen seems out of the running as well given his new deal at Bravo expands his late-night show to five nights a week while keeping his hand in various executive duties. The next co-host beginning Monday, Neil Patrick Harris, wouldn't seem to be a realistic long-term choice either given his own commitment to "How I Met Your Mother." Could the next fleet of guests hosts announced Wednesday provide some clues? Jerry O'Connell steps in on Friday, and he could certainly use a new gig. Then come a trio who have perfectly good day jobs, including Derek Hough (Dec. 4), Jonah Hill (Dec. 5) and Josh Groban (Dec. 7-9). Maybe the best bet remains Ripa hubby Mark Consuelos, though you'd think they could have a deal in place by now given his close ties to the show. Remember, Disney CEO Bob Iger has said it could take six months or more to find a replacement, so start practicing your patience skills....

NBC's midseason schedule release generated all kinds of sound and fury, signifiying ... what?

Rarely has the cosmic dissonance between the taste of the people I hang with online and the taste of mainstream America been so electrically boogalooed as it was Monday, when my Twitter and Google Reader feeds exploded with "What are they thinking?" posts directed at NBC for its plan to place on hiatus in January a show that about 295 million Americans choose not to watch each week, "Community."

It underscored the narrow crevice NBC finds itself in — Aron Ralston had an easier time escaping his predicament. The Peacock has such a small fanbase, and yet the only way to have a larger one may start with turning its back on those core viewers — including me.

Keep in mind that the midseason fate of "Community" was mostly written in week one of the 2011-12 TV season, when "Whitney" and "Up All Night" opened strong (by current NBC standards) but "Free Agents" did not. That meant, if NBC retained the same six comedy slots at midseason (two on Wednesday, four on Thursday), that at least one show would have to be sidelined to make room for the return of "30 Rock," as well as the intended premieres of "Are You There, Chelsea?" and, at the time, "Bent."  "Whitney" and "Up All NIght" pushed "Community" close to the chopping block, where it would be jockeying for safety with the one show arguably more beloved by fans of NBC Thursdays, "Parks and Recreation."

"Community" hasn't been canceled, and in fact, there's no expectation that its remaining third-season episodes won't air sometime in 2011-12. But having not broken 4 million overall viewers since March and having actually shed audience from its first season in 2009-10, when it averaged more than 5 million, "Community" has been living on time borrowed from NBC's ongoing ratings struggles. It's truly an underdog show (which, for what it's worth, absolutely fits its creative sensibility).

So it's all well and good to seethe that creatively inferior shows will displace superior ones, but it doesn't erase the central question: What is NBC supposed to do?

Bob Greenblatt and Co. can tinker, tailor, soldier and spy their schedule all night long, but this is a network that won't solve its fundamental crisis unless one of three things happen:

Solution No. 1: A new "ER" or "Friends" appears — a series that melds critical and popular success so strongly from the very first episode that it begins revitalizing the network both as a destination and as a promotional vehicle.
Problem: "ER" and "Friends" premiered in 1994, and while NBC wasn't No. 1 in primetime, it was strong. If shows of that caliber came around again, it would certainly be a positive step, but it's not clear that either of them would break out anything like what happened 17 years ago.

Solution No. 2: NBC embraces its existing creative strengths but reinvents and expands its marketing in a no-holds-barred manner, failing to rest until it throttles 10 million Americans into appreciating what the network is offering.
Problem: While it appeals to my frustration over how few people watch some of the best shows on TV, this solution butts against reality, as well as certain civil liberties legistlation.

Solution No. 3: Build from without: The network revamps its schedule to put on the broadest appeal programming, regardless of creative merits, to increase its audience base — then reverts back to the best and the brightest shows but with better options to launch them.
Problem: Requires more staffing at TV viewer metaphorical suicide hotlines, as evidenced by even the threat that "Community" will be a casualty of this strategy.

Again, what is NBC supposed to do?

What you realize is that Solution No. 3 is actually a Trojan Horse version of Solution No. 1. The strategy is premised upon an idea that the right show (right, in this case, being a show of broad appeal) will bring viewers to your network regardless of what else they watch, and you could cite both "Sunday Night Football" and springtime reality hit "The Voice" as evidence. Other than both being a form of competition, those two programming pieces could hardly have less to do with each other. But if "Community" had the ratings of "The Voice," we'd be planning to watch the irrepressible Danny Pudi and Donald Glover reenact "Star Wars" scenes for their grandkids.

Does that mean that a clever scripted show can't duplicate the success of something more on-the-nose like football or advanced karaoke? Or does it mean that outside of the NFL, you never really know what will click with viewers — so you might as well keep trying for the best and the brightest?

"Community" might be closer to graduation than my friends and I would like, and "Parks and Recreation" might never get the audience it so mightily deserves. But NBC shouldn't give up preserving or pursuing those types of shows just because they are struggling today. For one thing, at the end of the week, they take up very little real estate on a primetime schedule. For another, no one — not even NBC — knows how, when or why the next show will click with a broader fanbase.

ABC's "Modern Family," which I endorse wholeheartedly as a clever scripted show, is thriving while "Parks and Rec" struggles. To some extent this is because of their respective networks, but to a larger extent because of something nuanced to the point of being almost indefinable. "Modern Family," after all, premiered on a struggling network with very little support system around it.

NBC needs to continue to believe that, despite all the discouraging evidence to the contrary, that it can deliver the next "Modern Family," the next "Seinfeld," the next "ER," and without going entirely to cheap laughs or stunts to do so. TV is a messy business, and even the best and the brightest must admit, as we all do, that no one can systematically predict what will work.

Here's a preview of Rick Perry delivering the list of "Top Ten Rick Perry Excuses" on "Late Show with David Letterman" tonight, one night after his not-so-hot performance in the latest GOP debate.

With this tweet in response to the firing tonight of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, Ashton Kutcher –- who has more than 8 million followers on Twitter -- risked having his own Brett Ratner moment:

@aplusk: How do you fire Jo Pa?  #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste

The tweet certainly ran against the grain of those who felt that Paterno's lack of follow-through on the allegations of child rape against longtime assistant and associate Jerry Sandusky over roughly a decade merited a decisive response. But while everyone's entitled to their opinion, numerous people on Twitter pointed out the weirdness of the stance, considering that Kutcher and wife Demi Moore have a foundation dedicated to fighting child sex slavery. 

TV insider @maskedscheduler also issued the following reply that highlighted the oddity of the tweet coming from Kutcher, the newly crowned "Two and a Half Men" star in place of Charlie Sheen:

Hey @aplusk why don't you ask your boss why you fire reprehensible people. He'll school you. You jerk.

Ongoing coverage of the firing of Paterno was carried by ESPN but was outshined at first by CNN, which had better camera coverage for many of the key moments (including a brewing student protest that devolved into violence) and could complete it completely as a news story, rather than be forced to also wrestle with the football implications. But CNN eventually then went to its Piers Morgan show, leaving the coverage to ESPN.

Update: The Kutcher tweet was deleted approximately 30 minutes after it had been posted, and was followed by a new set of tweets in which he said he was "ignorant" as to why Paterno had been fired. So some water was quickly poured on that fire.

From my Twitter feed alone came these suggestions for the Oscar host to replace the now-exiting Eddie Murphy:

--The Muppets
--Neil Patrick Harris
--Stephen Colbert
--Billy Crystal
--Ricky Gervais
--Jamie Foxx
--Arsenio Hall
--Ron Swanson (aka Nick Offerman)
--Alec Baldwin
--Old Hoss Radbourn
--Troy and Abed from "Community" (Danny Pudi and Donald Glover)
--Melissa McCarthy
--Kim Kardashian
--Albert Brooks
--Amy Poehler and Tina Fey
--Tom Hanks
--Craig Ferguson
--Roman Polanski and Mel Gibson

Based on the interest, I have suggested a 12-week reality show in which the finalists compete for the gig.

Well, it's not every day you see a callback to the Tim Kazurinsky era of "Saturday Night Live," but "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" obliged Monday — no doubt to the bewilderment, as Stewart implicitly acknowledged, of any members of his audience under the age of 30.

CollegeHumor.com gets off some decent one-liners in this "Roast of HBO" that in fact leaves few networks unskewered.

In the broadcast networks' defense, I would say they have some of the best TV comedy on today, so I don't know that they should have been depicted as so out of touch. But this is not the place to quibble.

The People's Choice Awards are definitely their own animal — kind of the same way that the kitty from "Hello, Kitty" is its own animal.

The nominations for the PCAs (broadcast by CBS on Jan. 11) came today, and the intersection between these and the noms for them oh-so-elitist Emmy Awards is pretty, pretty slim. They also leave us with the eternal question: How do you nominate David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel for awards but not "Bones" for top network TV drama?

Below, the full list of TV picks (and please excuse the lack of quotation marks around the titles):

1) Your use for AMC's new "Hell on Wheels" (premiering Sunday and reviewed by Brian Lowry here) will likely boil down to whether you were a fan of HBO's "Deadwood" and, if so, whether you can put that fandom in an Al Gore-style lockbox. Otherwise, this fresh "Hell" doesn't offer enough that's new or better than "Deadwood" to require your viewership. But if you can ignore "Deadwood" — and the over-the-top nonsense of Colm Meaney's railroad baron character — you should find yourself continuing to watch.

2) How bad does it get with Thomas "Doc" Durant, played by Meaney? There's a scene in the pilot where he finds that one of his lieutenants, so to speak, has made a mistake. A significant mistake, but one that can be repaired with little long-term consequence. Durant's response is pure insane theatrics, emphasis on the insane. So yeah, it's dramatic — but is it good storytelling? Not for me.

3) "Hell" is also part of a trend of really unspeakably violent, gory television that HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" is at the forefront of. You've heard this song all too many times before, but the fact that basic cable values allow AMC to show those kinds of scenes, but not nudity, is more than a little deranged.

4) Speaking of "Boardwalk" ... Do you prefer the show's bootlegging storylines or its relationship storylines? Sunday's upcoming episode puts them in pretty strong contrast, and I found myself realizing how little I cared about who controlled the illegal liquor trade compared to what was happening in everyone's personal lives. Which I guess makes "Boardwalk," for me, a soap. (You'll need to continue to have a high Paz de la Huerta-Michael Shannon tolerance, though — the most bizarre, yet strangely engrossing, couple on TV today.)

5) CBS' "The Big Bang Theory" had another episode Thursday in which its female characters and a female point of view took over — and all to the good. It was Mayim Bialik's best episode on the series today — she showed a terrific and entirely real range of emotions. That show's evolution continues to amaze and please me.

6) It was another solid night creatively for NBC's three single-cam comedies, with "Parks and Recreation" again leading the way. Not even 4 million people watched "Parks" on Thursday — "Big Bang" is super, but does it really deserve an overall viewership that's nearly four times as much as "Parks?" There needs to be an "Occupy" movement to whip this TV nation into shape.

7) Insiders and outsiders who care debated whether the nearly 20% ratings drop for Tuesday's "New Girl" came as a result of the show being sidelined during most of the baseball playoffs. My feeling is that the mini-hiatus probably made the decline steeper than it otherwise would have been, but it also partly reflects those who sampled the Zooey Deschanel starrer and found they didn't need more. People who can learn to live without "New Girl" were going to do so anyway. Long after the 2011 World Series is a receding memory, "New GIrl" will sink or swim on its appeal.

8) It's fascinating to watch "New Girl" in part just to see what works and what doesn't. It's such a fine line how sometimes, Deschanel's Jess hits just the right off-kilter note, and other times she just thuds. The show is new enough that during the thuds, you can start to worry whether it will get back in tune again. But as more time passes, perhaps the roller coaster will smooth out in a good way.

9) Similar to the art of walking that line between quirky and jerky is the art of creating the goofball supporting character that populates so many shows — the Kramer, if you will. ABC rookie comedy "Man Up," for all its flaws, has some grounded-but-fun personalties, but Dan Fogler's Kenny seems too often to exist just for "insert zany scene here."

10) Sunday's episode of "Homeland," which has former "Rubicon" exec producer Henry Brommell as a consulting producer, included a mention of "Truxton Circle."  Was this an homage to "Rubicon" villain Truxton Spangler?

It's only fitting that a series structured around being judged face a little criticism of its own.  

"The X Factor" gave the budding world of second-screen companion experiences the most prominent showcase its ever had in the U.S. on Wednesday, the first episode of the season to encourage audience voting. So there's a lot for the TV and new-media industry to learn from this prominent experiment known as the Xtra Factor app (powered by TVplus).

On-air support: "Factor" offered a textbook example of how best to promote an appwith multiple commercials and in-show integration that featured endorsements from Simon Cowell. Viewers clearly came away with the sense that the app was an important piece of the viewing experience going forward.

iPad disadvantage: The app was offered by both iTunes Store and Android Market but the latter seemed to have a much more robust experience given the tie-in to the series' sponsor, Verizon Wireless. Without the backstage secondary camera feeds and "touch" voting straight off the platform, the iTunes experience was quite substandard (and this viewer was watching with an iPad in his lap). It's understandable if a sponsor has to play favorites, but the disparity is just too great.

Content mix: Xtra Factor app sticks to a relatively simple mix of content choices that are easily accessed through a scrolling set of titles including factoids, lyrics, videos, polls, "judge's quote," photo gallery, tweet excerpts, fashion analysis. There's some slightly more interactive options like the opportunity to buy music on iTunes that "Factor" contestants are covering; mapping the contestants' hometowns with Google maps; Facebook's "like" options and of course, the contestants' twitter feeds. All together, it adds up to something serviceable but not quite special; surely there's got to be something on the second screen that is a true value-add. One exception: Verizon Fifth Judge, which is a nifty interactive graphic that allows the user to judge contestants on a 1-5 scale in the categories of song choice, style and performance. The result kicks out to Facebook, but it would have been even nicer to see an aggregate score from home judges.

More social: Sure, Twitter and Facebook are well-represented on Xtra Factor app but it lacked true integration of the robust on-air conversation taking place. There needs to be a filtered reflection of what's being talked about. My guess is the "Fan Feed" portion of the app, which is labeled as "coming soon...," will deliver on that note, but why this wasn't ready to go is a mystery.

Synchronized, schmynchronized: From a design perspective, Xtra Factor felt a little flat. A synchronized app should be far less static to convey a sense of following along with the program in real time but there wasn't so much as a single element of the interface that displayed a little dynamism.

Again, remember this is a demonstration of the iTunes experience, not Android.

ABC series "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" is getting a little extra help in its continuing quest to make the word a better place one tricked-out residence at a time. Syyn Labs, a collective of unorthodox engineers known for crafting pretty ingenious inventions, is joining the Endemol USA-produced series as of this Friday's episode.

You might remember Syyn Labs from a memorable episode last season in which the crew devised a device for a paralyzed former baseball player to continue pitching to his sons by just blowing into a tube that triggered a mechanized windup.

Brent Bushnell (Computer Sciences/Programmer), Eric Gradman (Roboticist, Circus Performer and Professional Whistler) and Daniel Busby (PhD/Physicist/Engineer) will be the primary representatives from Syyn Labs to be featured on the show.

Via the excellent Alex Weprin over at TVNewser: looks like one of the newly bankrupt MF Global's biggest creditors was business network CNBC. The net ranks seventh on the list of creditors with $845,000 in uncollected debt, right between law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and IT consultancy Headstrong services, which is owed nearly $4 million.

The brokerage firm run by one-term New Jersey Governor John Corzine (also a former head of financial crisis whipping boy Goldman Sachs) owes the net over unpaid ad sales, according to Business insider's Joe Weisenthal.

Here's one of the now-free ads:

For the first three weekdays after Regis Philbin's Nov. 18 farewell to "Live! with Regis and Kelly," Jerry Seinfeld will occupy the co-host chair alongside Kelly Ripa.

“Jerry is a great friend of ours, and a friend of Kelly’s, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s an entertainment icon,” said executive producer Michael Gelman. “It’s a great way to kick off the new beginning of our show.”

The newly (or temporarily) titled "Live! with Kelly" will rotate guest co-hosts until it settles on a permanent replacement for Philbin.