Thursday night, Fox debuts two bad sitcoms that together pose a good question: What makes men more miserable–love, or the lack of it?

Taking the shows in reverse order, Happy Hour (8:30 p.m. E.T.) unintentionally makes both singlehood and couplehood into their own special kind of hell. Larry (Lex Medlin), a cocky, martini-mixing

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"All summer long," Couric, says, "people have been asking me, how will you sign off at the end of your broadcast? I’ve racked my brain, and, so far, nothing has felt right." Couric then introduces a montage of famous anchor sign-offs–"Courage," "Good night and good luck," "Stay classy, San Diego"–and concludes that she’s opening up her

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Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes introducing a segment on The PBS NewsHour. I hear the original idea–to have it blaring from a boombox, held aloft by Walter Cronkite–was rejected.

"Expressing your opinion is very American," announces Couric, earnestly introducing tonight’s freeSpeech segment and sounding like she’s introducing a student-council-election-speeches assembly. Morgan Spurlock gives a decently funny piece on how the public discourse focuses on the extremes of ideology, ignoring the folks in the middle.

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"The folks at Chevron felt like they won the lottery!" Thus Couric introduces a segment on the reported new Gulf of Mexico oil find. I know Couric is a neighborly type, and that’s part of her appeal, but… "the folks"? I can’t wait to hear what’s up with "those cutups over at the Dept. of Homeland Security" or "those Halliburton dudes."

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First advertiser: Vytorin anti-cholesterol medication. But there’s also one of those Dr. Scholl’s "Are you gellin’?" commercials, which probably qualifies as edgy for the evening news.

Couric announces that she’lll have an exclusive interview with President Bush tomorrow, and manages not to gloat. She then spends a few seconds on the obligatory Steve Irwin item, but at least does not lead with the item, as NBC did yesterday. Who’s got gravitas now, punk?

The news has co-operated tonight by not overshadowing Couric with any important breaking events, allowing all us media analysts to focus on the truly substantive matter of what she’s wearing. (Eye-grabbing but not-too-girly bright-white jacket.) Instead, the broadcast opens with a packaged piece by Lara Logan on the Taliban, followed by

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"I’m very happy to be with you tonight." Couric sounds a bit needy here. Diane Sawyer would be making us feel like we were damn lucky she deigned to join us.

A whole minute into her broadcast, Couric’s show looks very much in the stand-up-and-stride-to-the-desk mold of modern evening news. But I’m interested to see the "freeSpeech"

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As we sit nervously awaiting The Day That Changed Everything, it’s worth wondering if the most interesting part of The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric will be the parts when Couric is not on-screen. The intriguing details that have leaked out, for instance, have to do with things like opinion segments–reportedly including Rush

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Tonight, Katie Couric embarks on the noble challenge of teaching Americans under 75 that there is a show that comes on the air before The Insider and Entertainment Tonight. Couric takes the helm of The CBS Evening News, and Tuned In–always proud to be your one-stop source for instant premature judgment and overcoverage of overhyped

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There is, face it, something a little narcissistic about pop-culture obituaries; when people memorialize a singer or TV host or actress from the past, as often as not they’re really eulogizing their own lost youth. But at least there’s something normal about that. Burying one of your kids’ pop-culture icons upsets the natural order of

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Television watching takes a lot out of a man, and even more so one so woefully unmanly as Tuned In. Which means it’s time for vacation. Between now and Labor Day, Tuned In will be ensconced at a remote tropical spa, dedicated to the purpose of rejuvenating TV critics. My eyes will be massaged and wrapped in a soothing poultice of mud,

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