* The '90s are back! While certain TV critics may have been underwhelmed with 90210, the teen-soap remake was The CW's highest-rated debut ever (fine, that's going back two years, but still). 4.9 million people watched, a small number by network-TV standards but roughly a gajillion by CW standards—important news since, The Hollywood Reporter says, The CW's corporate parents may have pulled the plug on the network if the highly-hyped show bombed.

* In other screw-the-critics news, 7.7 million people disagreed with me about TNT's cliched lawyer drama Raising the Bar, at least enough to watch the first episode Monday and make it TNT's biggest debut ever.

* Raising the Bar was helped by the fact that, because of Hurricane Gustav, there was no Republican National Convention on the networks Monday. [Update: Well, technically there was, but the news was mostly about Gustav.] But the second (but for TV purposes, first) night of the RNC was down slightly from night 2 in 2004, according to Nielsen. It drew 21.5 million viewers (on ABC, CBS, NBC and cable news), compared with just over 22 million in 2004, and compared with about 26 million of night 2 for the Democrats this year. Of course, the Dems' Tuesday featured the Hillary Clinton Traveling Media-Drama Roadshow.

The big question: will tonight's Sarah Palin speech out-draw Joe Biden? Celebrity Barack Obama himself? Or (more awkwardly) John McCain?

Ray Mickshaw/ FX

Sorry I haven't had a chance to put together the vaguely-promised Shield Watch: besides having other things to deal with, it takes me a while to get my bearings on a new season—especially when it's been over a year since the last one. I am intrigued by the gang war paralleling the cold war between Vic and Shane, but most of all I'm always amazed by how, even though FX still can't go certain places that HBO can in terms of language and graphic content, the show nonetheless manages to be more raw than anything on pay cable. It's partly the unflinching grimness and sickness of some of the cases, partly the fact that the characters, even though certain obscenities are off the menu, manage to do more (and go to skeevier places) with the language they do have available. It can't be more explicit, but it can be more disturbing.

Tonight, FX debuts Sons of Anarchy, a similarly raw drama about a murderous biker / gun-running gang in Northern California. You could think of it as The Shield: Criminal Intent, in that while the milieu is similar (California, grisly crimes, turf/race wars among gangs), you're seeing from the bad guys' (well, the non-cop bad guys') perspective.

Unfortunately, while there's enough promise to give the show a chance to develop, in the two episodes I've seen the central characters aren't nearly as compelling as those in The Shield. The premise of Sons is a kind of biker Hamlet. Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) is the scion of the Sons of Anarchy gang, once run by his late father but now overseen by his mom (Katey Segal) and his stepfather (Ron Perlman). Jax is beginning to disagree—as, we learn, his father once did—with the gang's increasing brutality and greed, as over the decades it's become less about alternative lifestyle and more about alternative revenue sources (namely, selling guns to inner-city gangs). The overarching story is the battle for Jax's soul.

I've like Hunnam in the past (in Undeclared and the British Queer as Folk), but so far we don't see enough into that soul to care about the battle; his Jax is laid-back to the point of indifference. The idea has enough horsepower that I'll keep with it for a while, though. Maybe The Shield be succeeded by the wheeled.

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart got "all up in [Brian Williams'] grill"—though Stewart disputed whether "the whitest man in America" could possess a grill—about the on-air feuding that broke out last week at NBC's sister news channel, MSNBC. (Nutshell: Tim Russert is gone, everybody wants to be the new daddy, and it's catfight time.)

To the extent that Brian Williams is ever flappable, he got a bit flapped.

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Yesterday it was a prediction. Today it's a reality:

1. You start with a legitimate grievance. (The "What about the kids?" question would not, in fact, have been asked of a man.)

2. You argue that, by extension, any other criticism—about experience, about issues, etc.—must also be sexist. (The sum total of evidence for chauvinism in this op-ed: [1] Sarah Palin is a woman and [2] the word "chauvinism" is in the headline.)

3. You declare the other campaign guilty by association. (To be fair, Fiorina does provide one piece of actual evidence: Joe Biden called Palin "good-looking." Because it's not like he would ever comment on his male running mate's lean, youthful appearance.)

4. Repeat as necessary.

Due, I assume, to unforeseen technical problems, millions of Americans inadvertently saw President George W. Bush endorse John McCain last night at the Republican National Convention. The President's brief remarks had been slated in the 9:30 hour, which would have ended them before the major broadcast networks picked up coverage at 10 p.m. E.T. Instead, Bush's speech ran just past 10 p.m., giving a wider audience at least a glimpse of an address that seemed part generous praise for a former rival, part house-arrest video.

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Michael Desmond/The CW

To be fair, I can't properly review last night's 90210, because I missed the beginning, owing to a TiVo mishap. But unless the beginning included the phrase, "James Poniewozik, you are our $10,000,000 grand prize winner!," I can't imagine it helping all that much.

The fact that The CW held back screeners of the show from critics might make you think it was some sort of wild gamble—a daring rethink or an interesting disaster—but instead it was a fairly generic update of the original, just nostalgic enough to seem dated, just risque enough to remind you that Gossip Girl does that much better.

The final product was a combo of teen-show ideas from a generation ago (kids learning lessons from their well-grounded parents, a hoary storyline about a sports-team prank) jazzed up with the occasional fellatio reference. You can pull that novo-retro mix off if the show has a voice of its own, but instead we had the excruciating experience of hearing The Wire's Tristan Wilds reading lines like, "This place definitely doesn't suck!" (It was no, "Welcome to the O.C., bitch.")

Mind you, I don't begrudge him and Jessica Walter—playing a niced-up shadow of boozy Lucille Bluth—their efforts to try and pay the bills. But maybe we could take up a collection and match their salaries? I've got... let's see... $7.13 here. Who's with me?