Matt Leblanc

EPISODES. 10:30 p.m. Sunday, Showtime. BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The Olympics aren't the only show coming out of London this summer. There's also Showtime's very funny "Episodes," a satirical look at the TV business that's set in sunny Los Angeles but largely filmed in not-so-sunny downtown England. In the winter. "It's really hard. I mean, I don't know if you've been in London lately, but doesn't look anything like L.A.," said Matt LeBlanc at a CBS/Showtime party this week.

Hail, Friends . Well met. Half the cast of that modern classic sitcom are back in prime time. Fire up the espresso machine, Gunther! Courteney Cox (Monica) has carved out a keeper for herself with the whack-a-mole comedy Cougar Town (or as I call it: The Daze of Wine and Neuroses ). Matthew Perry (Chandler) returns this week with the promising Mr. Sunshine . And Matt LeBlanc (Joey) stars in Showtime's Episodes . If you haven't seen it, Episodes , one of the sharpest satires of the television business ever made, is worth seeking out. The married creators of a sophisticated award-winning British witcom are lured to Hollywood to fashion a note-for-note remake of their show.

Conan The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (11:35 p.m., NBC10) — Matt LeBlanc; Sig Hansen and Keith Colburn; Robin Thicke. Jimmy Kimmel Live (12:05 a.m., 6ABC) — Comic Louis C.K.; actress Zoe Kazan.

FOR 10 SEASONS on "Friends" and two more on "Joey," Matt LeBlanc played a character whose last name people have been misspelling for years. It's Joey Tribuiani, not Tribbiani, says Broomall's Marta Kauffman. She should know, having co-created "Friends" with Bala Cynwyd's David Crane - the pair met at Brandeis - and having given the character the surname of someone she knew. "I have a sister - she was married to Raymond Tribuiani," Kauffman said in an interview this summer.

In All the Queen's Men, a putative World War II comedy, Friends doofus Matt LeBlanc stars as an ace American Army spy who leads a crackerjack team of English cross-dressers behind enemy lines. Their objective: the Nazi code boxes known as the Enigma. What's really an enigma, however, is how this flatfooted farce ever got the go-ahead in the first place. Call it Some Like It Not So Hot: LeBlanc and his "poof platoon" - Eddie Izzard as a transvestite cabaret crooner, David Birkin as as an effeminate codebreaker, and James Cosmo as an aging macho non-com - don brassieres, girdles and all the rest to infiltrate a Nazi plant where the cipher machines are made.

On the TV program "Friends," Matt LeBlanc plays an unemployed actor who auditions for parts that usually come with dialogue bad enough to make you wince. It appears he's finally landed one. "There's one cold fish I'd like to thaw," says LeBlanc, drooling over a shapely young woman in "Lost in Space," a special-effects adventure that casts the "Friends" star as a macho space pilot leading a family of inventors and scientists on a mission to save humanity. The movie is based on the old TV show about space explorers - the Robinson family - marooned in an unknown galaxy.

"Alert! Spatial anomaly in progress!" warns the robot, or something robotic, in one of Lost In Space's whooshy cataclysmic moments. Hey, what about acting anomaly in progress? William Hurt, Mr. Method himself, squeezed into a "Cryosuit" (think Batsuit, with contoured armor-like breasts), grumbling about deep space recon and hyper-gates to other dimensions. How about indie heartthrob Heather Graham - blithe bimbo of Boogie Nights - forced to act opposite a computer-generated space monkey and that dumb guy from Friends?

Where does Ed, which is about a baseball-playing chimp and his human sidekick, fit in the pantheon of simian cinema? Way, way down there - on a level with toe lint. In a genre that runs the gamut from classics (King Kong) to English art pics (Morgan!) to Clint Eastwood road movies (Every Which Way But Loose) to otherworldly sci-fi (Planet of the Apes), the woeful Ed represents an embarrassment to humankind and monkeykind the world over. And the title character - a mascot for the lowly minor-league Santa Rosa Rockets - isn't even a real chimp.

It's over. The gambling. The commercials. The endless hype. Last night, millions of fans of the NBC sitcom "Friends" tuned in after the Super Bowl to gorge themselves on an hourlong episode that had nearly as many guest stars as it did regular cast members and enough high (and low) points to keep the internet buzzing for weeks. We know it'll take us some time to forget. Chandler (Matthew Perry) in Julia Roberts' underpants. (It must be love. She was barefoot.) Singer Chris Isaak telling Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow)

I nquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting this week from the television critics' press tour in Beverly Hills. These items originally appeared in his blog, "Eye of the Storm," at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/storm . Ellen ankles "Idol"; TV critics not agog Ryan Seacrest may have been all worked up on his morning radio show about Ellen DeGeneres' surprising, amazing, earth-shattering announcement that she was leaving American Idol, but TV critics at their summer meeting in Beverly Hills were unmoved.

EPISODES. 10:30 p.m. Sunday, Showtime. BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The Olympics aren't the only show coming out of London this summer. There's also Showtime's very funny "Episodes," a satirical look at the TV business that's set in sunny Los Angeles but largely filmed in not-so-sunny downtown England. In the winter. "It's really hard. I mean, I don't know if you've been in London lately, but doesn't look anything like L.A.," said Matt LeBlanc at a CBS/Showtime party this week.

Conan The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (11:35 p.m., NBC10) — Matt LeBlanc; Sig Hansen and Keith Colburn; Robin Thicke. Jimmy Kimmel Live (12:05 a.m., 6ABC) — Comic Louis C.K.; actress Zoe Kazan.

I LOVE LISTS, but I'm not crazy about 10 Best lists, since I like to think there's more to TV criticism than dividing sheep from goats. Plus, I always forget something marvelous. And there is, believe it or not, a lot to marvel at on television, so much that even exceptional shows may get lost in the crowd. So while you don't need me to tell you that AMC's "Breaking Bad" had an extraordinary season in 2011, or that ABC's "Modern Family" is still really, really funny, you might be able to use a guide to some of the good stuff - some of it on Top 10 lists, some maybe not - that a lot of viewers missed but that hasn't disappeared: 1 "Men of a Certain Age. " Ray Romano's splendid and bittersweet return to television, produced by Romano and former "Everybody Loves Raymond" writer Mike Royce, starred Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula as middle-aged friends and won a Peabody Award but not enough viewers to keep TNT from canceling it. Season 1 is available in DVD and both seasons are for sale on iTunes.

* FIVE. 9 tonight, Lifetime. THERE WAS a time, during the years that "Friends" was on NBC, when the phrase "Broomall's Marta Kauffman" probably appeared in print in Philadelphia as often as "Upper Darby's Tina Fey" does now - as if their hometowns had become part of their names. "That's hilarious," said Kauffman, laughing, when I told her that this summer during an interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., about a very different project that the "Friends" co-creator had worked on with one of her former stars.

FOR 10 SEASONS on "Friends" and two more on "Joey," Matt LeBlanc played a character whose last name people have been misspelling for years. It's Joey Tribuiani, not Tribbiani, says Broomall's Marta Kauffman. She should know, having co-created "Friends" with Bala Cynwyd's David Crane - the pair met at Brandeis - and having given the character the surname of someone she knew. "I have a sister - she was married to Raymond Tribuiani," Kauffman said in an interview this summer.

Hail, Friends . Well met. Half the cast of that modern classic sitcom are back in prime time. Fire up the espresso machine, Gunther! Courteney Cox (Monica) has carved out a keeper for herself with the whack-a-mole comedy Cougar Town (or as I call it: The Daze of Wine and Neuroses ). Matthew Perry (Chandler) returns this week with the promising Mr. Sunshine . And Matt LeBlanc (Joey) stars in Showtime's Episodes . If you haven't seen it, Episodes , one of the sharpest satires of the television business ever made, is worth seeking out. The married creators of a sophisticated award-winning British witcom are lured to Hollywood to fashion a note-for-note remake of their show.

I nquirer television critic Jonathan Storm is reporting this week from the television critics' press tour in Beverly Hills. These items originally appeared in his blog, "Eye of the Storm," at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/storm . Ellen ankles "Idol"; TV critics not agog Ryan Seacrest may have been all worked up on his morning radio show about Ellen DeGeneres' surprising, amazing, earth-shattering announcement that she was leaving American Idol, but TV critics at their summer meeting in Beverly Hills were unmoved.

Country legend George Jones has been hospitalized for pneumonia, his record label said yesterday. The Possum, who entered Nashville's Baptist Hospital on Thursday, is expected to make a full recovery. Jones, 74, who says he's been sober for years, earned the nickname No Show Jones because of his much-publicized struggles with alcohol and drugs, which caused him to stand up audiences or arrive hours late to his concerts. Jones, who's on tour for his '05 album, Hits I Missed . . . And One I Didn't, will reschedule weekend performances for Albany, Ga.; Panama City, Fla.; and Chattanooga, Tenn.

There was much sentiment, some tears, and many smiles at the party thrown Wednesday night by ABC at its Times Square Studios in New York to honor Barbara Walters on her retirement from 20/20 after 25 years. The evening included a brief lovefest for beleaguered CBS anchorman Dan Rather, with Walters telling him, "Know that you have the support of all of us here for your superb career. " The New York Post says Rather's eyes welled with tears. There were a number of bigwigs there, including CBS network chairman and Viacom copresident Leslie Moonves and CBS News president Andrew Heyward, and other dignitaries such as Geraldo Rivera, Donald Trump, Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ted Koppel and Martha Stewart.

LADIES, ARE YOU ready to swoon? Just take a look at the new 007. Scottish actor Dougray Scott has reportedly been picked as the next portrayer of seductive spy James Bond. Scott, 38, will appear in the 23rd Bond film, set for release next year. According to the London Mirror, executives wanted someone like the aging (but still very doable) Sir Sean Connery, who originated the part of the sexy, brooding Bond. Connery, of course, is also Scottish. So is the delectable Scott, perhaps best known as Prince Charming in the Drew Barrymore Cinderella flick, "Ever After," up to the challenge?