HBO

DVD Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Like therapy itself, HBO’s “In Treatment” requires a commitment. The award-winning program aired from Monday to Friday on HBO for nearly nine weeks and took up forty-three episodes. If you’re starting from the beginning of “In Treatment,” you will need to clear approximately 1,290 minutes of your schedule. Don’t go in half-heartedly.

Television Rating: 4.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Danny McBride had an amazing 2008, stealing scenes in “Tropic Thunder” and finding comic gold with director David Gordon Green in the great “Pineapple Express”. McBride, Green, director Jody Hill, and producer Will Ferrell have teamed up for the six-episode HBO comedy series “Eastbound & Down,” one of the most laugh-out-loud, promising comedy premieres in a long time.

Television Rating: 4.5/5.0

CHICAGO – How does Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) do it on HBO’s “Big Love”? He has three beautiful wives, a sea of children, parents at war with each other, politics with a polygamist prophet and big business to control. And that’s just the beginning.

CHICAGO – David Simon and Ed Burns, two of the television geniuses behind “The Wire”, turned their eyes and ears from the gang-ridden streets of Baltimore to the bullet-strewn bodies of Iraq in the incredible seven-part HBO mini-series “Generation Kill”, now available in a box set from HBO Home Video.

CHICAGO – “Deadwood” and “The Wire”, two of the best television programs of the last decade, have been given lavish, must-own treatment by HBO with spectacular season sets available just in time for the holidays.

CHICAGO – Men in three-piece suits. Smoking and drinking throughout the day in your corner office. Womanizing and objectifying every woman in the secretarial pool.

CHICAGO – Amy Ryan’s star just keeps rising. The breakout actress from HBO’s “The Wire,” who was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award for her role in “Gone Baby Gone,” will be featured in at least five episodes on this coming season of NBC hit TV show “The Office”.

DeKALB, Ill. – Richard Jenkins is a familiar if not overly recognizable character actor. With his distinctly grave voice, he’s best known for his turn as the dead father in the seminal HBO series “Six Feet Under”.

CHICAGO – “Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time,” comedian George Carlin once said. The iconic and award-winning figure died of heart failure on Sunday at the age of 71.