I’m quite excited to see what happens when Conan O’Brien takes over the Tonight Show Monday. He has always been my favorite late night talk show host, he is more absurd and out there than anybody else, very affable and hilarious.

But I really wanted to share this article because it helped me empathize with what he is going through. He has my full support, here’s rooting for you, Cons!

Obviously the writer’s strike has taken a toll on things this season. New shows have been hard to come by, and good shows at that… I can only name one. It is an American remake of a British sitcom The Worst Week of My Life. It is about a guy, to whom an inordinate number of bad things happen, and through association, his fianceé and her parents are dragged into the bad things as well.

It is an interesting exercise in television writing as they start out each episode with a barely-there status quo where everybody has had enough time to cool down from the last horrible incident (normally shown in a short clip) and quickly builds motivation upon mishap upon excuse to bend the story toward a relatively believable yet insane ending. It is fairly predictable in the short term (something important is introduced and almost assuredly going to go wrong) but you swiftly end up far from where you could have imagined it going in the beginning of the episode. You definitely would not want to hear about an ending out of context but it would probably make you wonder how they got to that destination.

The acting is uniformly top-notch, especially last week’s episode with Fred Willard on it. Comic genius that guy, he was also recently on Pushing Daisies (a great new show from last year if you even remember it). And for those out there that think women just aren’t as funny as men, I’ve got news for you: Erinn Hayes is an incredible comic actress. I’m willing to see anything she’s in thanks to this show. Additional proof of her awesomeness here: Children’s Hospital, the Rob Corddry web series.

Worst Week is on Mondays at 9:30 ET on CBS, and a great companion to How I Met Your Mother at 8:30, although I would skip all two and a half of the men between the two.

Similar to my Y rant, once something I love reaches its end, I am compelled to tell you all about it. Maybe it is part of the letting go process, attempting to give it to others, in hopes that it will live on with them. But then again, I would have been willing to tell you about it at any point in its 60 episode run, because it is the best thing I have watched in a long time. It is an amazing hyper-realistic examination of modern American city, represented here by Baltimore, Maryland.

It starts out as a twist on the old cop show formula, in that the crime is not solved by the end of the hour long episode. The case is allowed to breathe through 13 episode seasons. It gives time to the showcase minutia of detective work, really develops characters, and becomes a very satisfying experience. This means it requires you to watch TV a bit differently, however. You will need to pay attention to things. Threads are dropped and picked up multiple episodes later, and it will be all the better if you remember who that guy was and what he was doing.

As the series progresses, it does not bother telling the same stories of drug dealers and the po-lice after them. It shifts gears each season, introducing a new facet of the city, while never neglecting the people you already know and love. You get to see the plight of the blue collar dock workers, the back door dealings of the politicians, the heartbreak of the school system, and the crushing responsibility of the media to report it all.

And in the end (as it has been with each season finale, but especially now), it somehow manages to be satisfyingly closed and open. They managed to combine a circular “life will go on” with a “this story is complete”. We know exactly how the lives will work out for most characters, except for two, and I will happily continue to imagine their possible lives far into the future. Creators David Simon and Ed Burns have made something really special here, it is the most riveting and rewarding show I have ever seen. Congratulations to them and everybody involved! I will never be able to get you out of my head.