A blog about television by TIME’s TV critic James Poniewozik.

NBC: There Was Never a Conan O'Brien

Tonight, there will likely not be a dry eye in the house, as America says goodbye to Jay Leno. Again. This time for three whole weeks.

After The Jay Leno Show ends tonight, Jay will head back to the Tonight show beginning March 1. And what can you do in the meantime, while Tonight is on hiatus for the Olympics? Well, you can always watch some online reruns of the Tonight show with Conan O'Brien.

Oh, wait—you can't. Because NBC has silently scrubbed all episodes of Conan's Tonight show from NBC.com and Hulu.

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CBS

Spoilers for last night's How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:

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Undercover Boss: Biggest Thing Since Dolly?

Somewhere in the CBS press release about Undercover Boss's boffo debut ratings was the claim that this was the biggest debut for any new TV series since the Dolly show in 1987. If you're like me, you're thinking, Wow! And also: What the hell was the Dolly show?

I was not watching a lot of TV at that juncture in my life, but Dolly (as distinguished from the 1970s Dolly! show) was ABC's attempt to revive the variety show, starring Dolly Parton. It ran until the following spring. Which is to say: don't assume Undercover Boss is an unstoppable hit just yet.

None of this, by the way, is to take away from Parton, who is awesome in any vehicle, however doomed. In the above clip from Dolly, she absolutely kills House of the Rising Sun, despite the cheesy setting and the synth-heavy '80s backing arrangement.

          

CBS

Along with last night's mammoth Super Bowl ratings came the news that 38.6 million people watched the debut of CBS's new reality show Undercover Boss, in which executives work incognito within their own companies. Did those people see an entertaining, emotional work that celebrated American workers? Or a manipulative, cheesy piece of big-network p.r. for executives looking to burnish their image while they keep squeezing every dime out of their workforce?

Yes! And yes!

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Super Bowl Beats Everything on TV, Ever

Last night's Super Bowl was the most watched program.

Period. Of the night, the week, the year, the Christian era, you name it—at 106.5 million viewers, it broke the record held for 27 years by the finale of M*A*S*H. (Which means that that many people, give or take a few million bathroom breaks, watched that crappy Dodge ad.)

As I'm not a sports fan, the amount of people who tune into one big game as opposed to another is always something of a mystery. The elements that last night's game had going for it—name-brand players, a close contest (at least until the end), dramatic behind-the-scenes stories—have all been present before, but maybe there was just a perfect storm of them. (And maybe the perfect storm that hit the East Coast kept a few more people watching at home rather than out.) Your thoughts?

          

Toyota has been making a show of contrition for the acceleration problem that led to a massive recall of several of its models, buying a humbled Super Bowl ad and apologizing publicly. But one group of its dealers is working hard to blow any positive credit the company may have earned, pulling its ads from ABC stations to punish the network for supposedly too-tough coverage of the automaker's runaway cars.

ABC News reports that the Southeast Toyota group ordered its ads pulled off ABC affiliates and moved to competitors, over the apparent objections of its ad agency, whose representative sent a chagrinned-sounding e-mail to local stations.

This is the last thing Toyota needs, and I can't imagine why any genius in the dealer group thought that this would help their cause. The dealers, of course are free to spend their ad money wherever they want and for whatever reason. And people who care about companies not being able to bully their way out of bad news are free to, um, shift their own spending.

          

Big Love Watch: DIY Edition

HBO

Super Bowl ad duty kept me up late last night without time for Big Love (which, by the way, just got a fifth-season pickup!), and some more pressing duties mean I won't be able to review "Sins of the Father" soon. So feel free to post your thoughts here, and if I catch up in time, I'll update this post with mine.

          

My quickie reviews of last night's Super Bowl ads (all of them, with a few exceptions, 68 in total) are up at time.com. I grade them not as an advertising professional but simply as a guy who watches TV and buys stuff, though I try to take the effectiveness of the message into consideration.

My favorites included: Google's surprisingly sweet love-story-via-Web search; Betty White (and Abe Vigoda) taking a hit for Snickers; Kia's road trip including Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba!; the Hangover-esque whale tale from Bridgestone; Hyundai's vision of Brett Favre's future; C. Montgomery Burns pitching for Coke; Cars.com's we-sell-confidence spot; and David Letterman and Jay Leno making (somewhat) nice with Oprah. (The Late Shift's Bill Carter has the story on how the ad got made.) That "controversial" Tim Tebow Focus on the Family ad, on the other hand, ended up being notable mostly for its anticlimactic dullness.

Least favorites? Oh, there were plenty. But the worst trend overall was a running streak of misogyny that made the cheesecake GoDaddy ads look like PSAs for female empowerment.

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TV Weekend: Join Together With the Band

This Sunday is That Sunday: as usual, I'll be watching the game for the ads, and time.com will post my complete (or as near as I can get it) postgame review of all the commercials sometime overnight Sunday.

There will also be a football game! And a halftime show, with The Who, whom CBS fans know either as "the guys who do all the CSI themes" or "those hippies my daughter saw at Woodstock." The band has said they plan to play a medley of hits, including Horatio Caine's favorite, at the game. What do you want to see them play—personally, I think something from Sell Out (above) would be fitting for advertising's highest holy day—or who would you rather played the game instead?

          

FoxNews.com has posted the entire unedited interview of Jon Stewart by Bill O'Reilly on its website, and if you're the least bit interested in media criticism, or Fox News criticism in particular, or discussions of politics and febrile American culture, or just tough but respectful debate, you really need to watch it. (By the way, if you have trouble getting the video to play all the way through at Fox News, which I did in my browser, you can also find it on YouTube starting here.)

Among other things, you'll see Stewart give a much longer, detailed, and damning walkthrough of how Fox's news and opinion programming work together to form one conservative "narrative," exceptions like Shepard Smith notwithstanding:

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