Have I said today how much I love HBO ?

Nice article in New York Observer about HBO lineup

..Things start off this Sunday with the two-hour series premiere of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Based on the best selling books by Alexander McCall Smith, Ladies’ stars R&B singer Jill Scott as a recently divorced Botswanan woman who opens her own detective agency. (The title, in this case, is very literal.) Ladies’ appears to be the type of series that we see so little of on HBO—a light-hearted procedural that won’t be caked in Shakespearean tragedy; that the pilot was co-written by Love, Actually’s Richard Curtis and the late Anthony Minghella should tell you all you need to know about Ladies’ tone. Additionally, cinephiles should take note: Mr. Minghella directed Sunday’s pilot before passing away last spring, and it represents the last chance anyone will have to see new work from the Oscar-winner...

Of course, this is all a prelude to the summer, when Entourage and True Blood return with new seasons. This year they’ll be joined on the HBO roster by Hung, a new series from Sideways director Alexander Payne. Hung stars Anne Heche, Jane Adams and Thomas Jane, playing a high-school gym teacher with a really big … well, think about the ending of Boogie Nights and you can probably figure out where this series is going. As they say, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.”

Read on

May I also note that they have had the guts recently to air (and in some cases produce) programs like :

They Killed Sister Dorothy
Death on a Factory Farm
The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306
Right America: Feeling Wronged - Some Voices from the Campaign Trail
Taxi to the Dark Side
and
Taking Chance

I'm not sure where we'd be without HBO and it's not always just fun and entertainment like our beloved True Blood -- but it's oh, so very important!