Hbo

Although it has not quite recaptured the magic of "The Sopranos," there is no denying that HBO is once again in full stride. With Emmy-winning movies, a panoply of well-done documentaries, successful comedies and dramatic hits both popular — "True Blood" — and critical — "Boardwalk Empire," "Treme" — the premium network bursts with so much justified confidence that it took on the perilous realm of fantasy with the well-received "Game of Thrones....

In “Silver Linings Playbook,” Robert De Niro won plaudits for playing a complicated father. Now he'll spend some time exploring his own. In a new documentary from director Perri Peltz (”The Education of Dee Dee Ricks”), De Niro will examine the life of his father, Robert, a painter and bohemian figure who died in 1993 at the age of 71. Currently titled "Robert De Niro Sr.," the film is being produced by De Niro producing partner Jane Rosenthal and involves the work of Peltz collaborator Geeta Gandbhir.

There are basically two kinds of fans of HBO's comedy "Eastbound & Down," which wraps up its third, and what will probably be its final, season Sunday. One kind gets the joke. The other is the joke. "They are some scary people," said Danny McBride, 35, the star and co-creator of the series. "They like the show, but for the wrong reasons - like they want to be Kenny Powers. " For those who may not have been properly introduced, Powers is perhaps the sharpest - and certainly raunchiest - satiric portrait of a redneck ever to be loosed on television.

It is heartening in a way that perhaps the biggest comic in America - in a sense of cultural import if not necessarily in income, though he is obviously doing well there too - is a doughy, bald man of 45. It's heartening both from the aspect of one's own advancing age and as notice that kids these days are not entirely consumed with things made in their own image. That experience counts for something is an explicitly stated theme of Louis C.K.'s new concert special, "Oh My God," which premieres Saturday on HBO: Real wisdom is a thing that only time can earn, he says.

'Sergio' Where: HBO When: 8 p.m. Thursday Rating: Not rated

HBO has canceled its low-rated critical darling "Enlightened. " The series, created by Mike White and Laura Dern, centered on Amy Jellicoe (Dern), a self-destructive woman who undergoes a spiritual awakening and takes on a path bent on reforming her company's bad methods. The role earned Dern a Golden Globe for the show's debut season. The half-hour series, which recently wrapped its second season, was praised by critics but that didn't translate to ratings success. Though its second season saw a slight boost in viewership, it was hardly a sturdy or everlasting one. It's January premiere drew 300,000 viewers, up from the 210,000 viewers it locked in when it made its debut in late 2011.

The first 10 minutes or so of HBO's new epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones" are spent celebrating the glories of cable, i.e. bloody violence (beheadings, hacked off body parts, eviscerated guts steaming in the snow) and HBO sex (female semi-frontal nudity, non-missionary position intercourse and unnecessarily graphic sound effects.) Unless you are a minor, you should not be deterred by any of this because "Game of Thrones," written and produced by David Benioff and D.B Weiss, quickly becomes a great and thundering series of political and psychological intrigue bristling with vivid characters, cross-hatched with tantalizing plotlines and seasoned with a splash of fantasy.

HBO's star-studded afternoon sessions at the Television Critics press tour launched with Claire Danes discussing her February biopic "Temple Grandin," and ended with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant bantering about the 13-part animated comedy series "The Ricky Gervais Show." In between, the network brought out luminaries, including Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon, Rosie O'Donnell, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg to talk about their spring projects. In the movie "You Don't Know Jack," Pacino slips into the skin of Jack Kevorkian, the most public face of the assisted suicide movement.

HBO lures Hoffman HBO continues to develop aggressively, with a new pilot starring Dustin Hoffman and a series pickup based on a line of bestselling fantasy novels. The pay cable outlet announced Tuesday that it had committed to a pilot plus nine episodes of "Game of Thrones," adapted from the "A Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy epic by screenwriter and novelist George R.R. Martin. The story concerns a violent civil war that racks a fictional land called Westeros. The cast includes Peter Dinklage and Sean Bean.

After watching an exodus of fighters that included Floyd Mayweather Jr., Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Amir Khan to rival network Showtime, HBO announced this week it will stop broadcasting fights involving boxers promoted by Los Angeles' Golden Boy Promotions. “In order to achieve our goal of the best fighters in the most compelling matchups, we've decided to focus our efforts and resources on those strategic relationships where we better share common goals and business philosophies,” HBO Sports President Ken Hershman said in a statement.

Customized TV Listings are available here: www.latimes.com/tvtimes Click here to download TV listings for the week of April 14 -20, 2013 in PDF format This week's TV Movies     SUNDAY "Parts unknown" can refer to exotic places you've never been - or mystery ingredients in a dish you've never tried. There'll likely be a bit of both when our favorite foodie returns in "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. " 6 p.m. CNN Remember the 1980s?

BALTIMORE - The good staffers of Vice President Selina Meyer's office had been trying to put out a fire all afternoon when their slightly discombobulated leader, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, turned up on the set of HBO's "Veep. " Before she stepped into character, however, Louis-Dreyfus had a question. "Did you talk to the actors about the script changes?" she said to the show's creator and all-around head coach, Armando Iannucci, as he sat behind a monitor watching takes. He nodded.

NEW YORK - If there's one thing Gabriel Byrne has learned in recent years, it's the importance of a comfortable chair. After a marathon 106 episodes as psychologist Paul Weston on the HBO drama "In Treatment," Byrne stars in "Vikings," History's first full-length scripted series, as Earl Haraldson, a Norse chieftain with a flowing salt-and-pepper mane (all his own, thank you very much) and a taste for cruelty. Despite the considerable differences between the shows - one set almost entirely in a shrink's office in brownstone Brooklyn, the other in 8th century Scandinavia - they both left Byrne, well, uncomfortable.

Customized TV Listings are available here: www.latimes.com/tvtimes Click here to download TV listings for the week of April 7 -13, 2013 in PDF format This week's TV Movies       SUNDAY Yee-haw and amen! Blake Shelton and Luke Bryan host "The 48th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards" and Steve Harvey is master of ceremonies for "Celebration of Gospel 2013. " 8 p.m. CBS; 8 p.m. BET The ad men of "Mad Men" are back for a sixth season, but the bad men of "Shameless," "House of Lies" and "Californication" sign off for now with those series' respective season finales.

If you are under 30, male and interested in sex, drugs or anything paired with the word "extreme," you are likely to be familiar with Vice - the magazine, proprietary websites, YouTube channel, ad agency, record label and now TV show. "Vice," which premieres Friday on HBO, is a half-hour, globe-trotting news program from the Brooklyn-based, multi-platform media company of the same name (35 offices in 18 countries). The company has been attacked - "chided" might be a better word - for the way its content is tailored for and sometimes by the companies that sponsor it. The HBO show became controversial, to overstate the case, when a trip to North Korea on the back of three Harlem Globetrotters and Dennis Rodman was seen as unfortunate or incompetent, given Rodman's flattering comments to Kim-Jong Un, just before the Young Leader went war crazy.

After the coffee. Before seeing if I can get Jay-Z as my agent. The Skinny: The video obtained by  ESPN  showing Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice abusing his players is tough to watch. But if you see it, look for an assistant handing Rice another basketball after he hurls the one in his hand at one of his players. Wonder what that job pays. Wednesday's stories include a look at Vice Media, Jimmy Fallon is getting a new deal and Jay-Z wants to play Jerry Maguire.

HBO has pulled the plug on its gambling drama "Luck" after controversy erupted over the deaths of three horses during production. "It is with heartbreak that executive producers David Milch and Michael Mann together with HBO have decided to cease all future production on the series 'Luck,' " the network said in a statement. The statement continues: "Safety is always of paramount concern. We maintained the highest safety standards throughout production, higher in fact than any protocols existing in horseracing anywhere with many fewer incidents than occur in racing or than befall horses normally in barns at night or pastures.

SAN FRANCISCO - As HBO adapts its television empire to the digital age, it's rolling out the red carpet to Silicon Valley. The pay TV network put on showy "Game of Thrones" season premiere parties this week in Silicon Valley and Seattle, ground zero for the revolution underway in television viewing habits. Digerati turned out by the hundreds to immerse themselves in the fantasy realm of Westeros, some wearing Twitter logo T-shirts, others Google Glass, the Internet giant's yet-to-be-released futuristic eyewear.

Big and beefy with a scraggly beard, Shane Smith looks more like an aging roadie than a thrill-seeking foreign correspondent or a budding media mogul. But Smith is both those things. Vice Media Group, the company Smith co-founded and is chief executive of, has gone from a single magazine aimed at tattooed teeny-boppers to a media empire with more than 30 offices around the globe, a large digital presence, a record label, an advertising agency and a book publisher. The closely held Vice is projected to hit nearly $200 million in revenue this year and has a valuation approaching $1 billion, according to people close to the company.

Anyone who dismisses television viewing as a passive activity clearly hasn't watched "Game of Thrones. " HBO's crown jewel requires the sort of OCD focus and possibly the same picture-plastered, color-coded white board that Carrie Mathison used to track down Abu Nazir in Showtime's "Homeland. " As with the George R.R. Martin series from whence it sprung, "Game of Thrones" has redefined "sprawling epic. " And as Season 3 opens, the sprawl factor is perilously high, with the multitudinous characters - seven families, people, from seven kingdoms - scattered all over Westeros, their story lines progressing in an ever-climbing wall of overlapping layers, a citadel of narrative.