Television

By the end of The 40 Year Old Virgin, the title character had lost his virginity — and actor Steve Carell had become a star.

The actor, who was a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show for several years, has gone on to films including Little Miss Sunshine and Evan Almighty, and next summer he'll star as hapless secret agent Maxwell Smart in a Hollywood adaptation of the vintage TV series Get Smart. And of course he's got a central role on NBC's The Office.

This year the Human Rights First Award for Excellence in Television will be given to a show that "depicts torture and interrogation in a nuanced, realistic fashion." According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.

TV producer Adam Fierro (The Shield), intelligence expert Col. Stuart Herrington and human rights advocate David Danzig discuss TV violence.

Shows nominated for the award include Lost, Criminal Minds, The Closer and The Shield.

Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!) and his successful television show.

The former correspondent and contributor to The Daily Show created his own Emmy-nominated late-night show to parody Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor.

In I Am America, Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal.

September 11, AIDS, the Holocaust — comic and actress Sarah Silverman has repeatedly proved that practically nothing need be off limits in a joke. Take the title of her Off-Broadway show, which later became a film: Jesus Is Magic. Or the music video, available on her Comedy Central show's blog, of "The Doodie Song."

Silverman has appeared in films including School of Rock and There's Something About Mary and she was a member of the Saturday Night Live ensemble in the early '90s.

Co-executive producers Barry Sonnenfeld and Bryan Fuller of the new comedy/drama “Pushing Daises” on ABC. The show combines romance, fantasy and mystery and is about a guy who can bring the dead back to life with a mere touch. Fuller created the series and also created the TV series “Dead Like Me” and was a writer and executive producer on “Heroes.” Sonnenfeld directed the “Men in Black” films and the “Addams Family” films. He also was executive producer of the TV show “The Tick.” (THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED BY DAVID BIANCULLI).

Fresh Air's TV critic reviews the fall season. New shows include the sitcom Aliens in America, premiering Oct. 1 on the CW Network, and ABC's comedy drama Pushing Daisies, making its debut Wednesday, Oct. 3.

Actor Ray Wise (Good Night, and Good Luck) portrays the devil in Reaper, a new series from Clerks writer-director Kevin Smith.

The show centers on a 21-year-old slacker, Sam, who discovers that his parents sold his soul to the devil when he was born. Sam must now serve as the devil's bounty hunter, helping return evildoers to hell.

Reaper premieres on the CW network on Sept. 25.

Actor Anthony Anderson stars as traumatized cop Martin Boulet in the new Fox TV series K-Ville.

The drama is set in post-Katrina New Orleans; it's gotten critical acclaim and high ratings.

The series, from NYPD Blue writer Jonathan Lisco, is filmed on location in the Big Easy. It airs Mondays at 9 p.m.

Fresh Air's TV critic previews The War, the new documentary series about World War II from filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War). It premieres Sept. 23 on PBS.

Fresh Air's TV critic previews a new series, a new special and a season premiere — all on HBO this weekend. They are, respectively:

Tell Me You Love Me, about a therapist and the couples she counsels
Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, in which Sopranos star James Gandolfini (the special's executive producer) interviews 10 injured war vets
Curb Your Enthusiasm, which begins its sixth season.

Executive producer and actor Jeff Garlin and actress Susie Essman discuss the upcoming season of the HBO comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Garlin plays Larry David's affable best friend and agent. Essman plays Garlin's wife and as such is known for her vitriol, no-nonsense attitude and foul mouth.

Novelist Bill Flanagan wrote the comedy A&R about the smooth operators and the scatty artists who make the music business so entertaining. Now he's lampooning the cable-TV industry in his novel New Bedlam. The source for his send-ups? His day job as an MTV networks exec.

With the rise of the TV-series box set, more shows are earning fans who devour episodes one after another. Fresh Air TV critic David Bianculli reviews two newly released sets: the debut seasons of Heroes and Friday Night Lights. The former is a seven-disc set packed with deleted scenes and the unaired original pilot; the Friday Night Lights set includes deleted episodes and a making-of featurette.

David Steinberg was big on the stand-up circuit back in the 1960s and '70s; he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson over a hundred times. Now he's host of TV Land's Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, on which he interviews other comedians. Steinberg went on to a career in TV production, directing episodes of Seinfeld, Mad About You and Friends. His new memoir is called The Book of David.

Our TV critic reviews High School Musical 2, the sequel to the wildly popular teen musical. It stars Zac Efron and premieres on the Disney Channel tonight.

Michael Harvey created the A&E cable show Cold Case Files, a documentary series that follows forensic experts and detectives as they investigate long-unsolved murder cases. Harvey has also written a novel, The Chicago Way.

Fresh Air's TV critic reviews the new Showtime dramedy Californication. The show stars X-Files veteran David Duchovny as a charming, jaded rogue of a writer trapped in a Hollywood identity crisis. The studios have turned his dark novel into a romantic comedy, but that's hardly the worst of it. He's still hung up on his ex — so much so that he's sleeping with every woman who'll let him.

Matt Weiner, a TV writer and producer who landed an Emmy and a Writers Guild Award for his work on HBO's The Sopranos, has created a new show. It's an AMC drama series called Mad Men, set in the fiercely competitive world of Madison Avenue ad execs in 1960s New York.

ABC is preparing to launch a four-week anthology series called Masters of Science Fiction; it's scheduled to air on Saturdays at 10 p.m. Fresh Air's TV critic says it's a modern-day Outer Limits.

Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer created the HBO series Big Love, now in its second season. It's about a man (Bill Paxton) and his three wives (Chloe Sevigny, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Ginnifer Goodwin). They've broken from the Mormon church and still practice polygamy — a tradition disavowed by mainline Mormons. Olsen and Scheffer are credited as writers and producers on the series. This year, they won a Writer's Guild Award for their work.