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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.

Most writers can only daydream about meeting - in the flesh - the characters they've imagined. But for Ernest Hemingway, one afternoon in Key West, Fla., it came close to actually happening. One day when the writer was in his mid-30s, hanging out at a local fisherman's bar, he spotted a woman uncannily similar to the strong-willed, sexually liberated heartbreaker from his first novel. "It's as if, borne on the sea foam, she emerged - out of his own mind," says director Phil Kaufman.

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....

Next week, the combined efforts of an entertainment giant, a health insurance titan, a group of academic heavyweights, a technology philanthropist and two federal agencies bring forth “The Weight of the Nation,” a four-hour, four-part HBO documentary that gives the nation's obesity crisis a face. The program, produced in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's “Weight of the Nation” conference in Washington, D.C., balances on a knife's edge between determined hope and realistic discouragement.

QUICK TAKES A horse was injured and euthanized Tuesday during production of the racetrack drama "Luck," the third death in connection with the series, and HBO agreed to suspend filming with horses while the accident is investigated. The American Humane Assn., which oversees Hollywood productions, had issued an immediate demand "that all production involving horses shut down. " The animal was being led to a Santa Anita Park racetrack stable by a groom when it reared and fell back Tuesday morning, suffering a head injury, according to HBO. The horse was euthanized at the track in Arcadia, where "Luck" is filming its second season.

Such is the seductive nature of the lottery that after watching "Lucky," an HBO documentary chronicling the many, and often sobering, effects winning a big jackpot can have on a person, it is difficult to resist the temptation to rush out and buy a ticket. Never mind that statistically, one is almost as likely to win the lottery without buying a ticket or that most of the winners that director Jeffrey Blitz ("Spellbound," "The Office") chose to follow experienced at best mixed reactions to sudden wealth or that he includes, mercifully, the story of a woman who has spent a hundred bucks a day on tickets for 30 years with no big win. The idea that one's life can be made perfect with a large infusion of cash is a difficult one to dispel.

At the crux of the lingering debate over Dr. Jack Kevorkian is an unresolved question of character: What kind of guy would devote his life to helping other people die? Was he a compassionate visionary, fighting to end the suffering of the ill, or was there something darkly twisted about a man who defied the law and risked years in prison as he pushed the death toll well beyond 100? That sort of inscrutable extremism proved irresistible to Al Pacino and Barry Levinson. "We had talked about doing this kind of story, this kind of person … a true zealot, and what the makeup of that is," said Pacino, who, wearing thick-framed glasses and with his hair cropped short and white, plays Kevorkian in the new HBO film "You Don't Know Jack," airing Saturday.

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.

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

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.

The cancellation and hefty write-down of HBO's"Luck" and the closure of a TV channel in India put a damper on an otherwise solid first quarter forTime Warner Inc. The New York media giant reported a profit of $583 million for the quarter ended March 31, compared with $653 million for the same period in 2011, an 11% drop. Revenue was up 4% to $7 billion. "We're off to a great start to the year, and we're benefiting from strong momentum for our content across our businesses," Time Warner Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes said Wednesday.

There will be a rematch. At the end of Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s controversial, borderline-sucker-punch victory over Victor Ortiz in September, HBO boxing analyst Larry Merchant's post-fight interview with Mayweather took a personal turn. Mayweather accused Merchant of never giving him a break, and said angrily that HBO should fire the now 81-year-old, to which Merchant replied, "If I was 50 years younger, I'd kick your [rear]. " When Mayweather returns to the ring Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas against world super-welterweight champion Miguel Cotto, Merchant will help call the action, and has been assigned to post-fight interview duty even though the sport's top power broker has said he doesn't want to talk to the man. Are you surprised you got this assignment given HBO's reputation for catering to the wishes of Mayweather and his team?

In the upcoming HBO movie "Hemingway & Gellhorn," actors Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman bring to life the passionate and stormy relationship between Ernest Hemingway and World War II correspondent Martha Gellhorn — the inspiration for the writer's classic novel "For Whom the Bell Tolls. " But the real star of the cable network's film, which premieres May 28, is San Francisco and the Bay Area. Although the movie takes place in nine countries, it was shot over 40 days last spring entirely on location within about 20 miles of the Northern California city.

SUNDAY From the animated antics of "The Simpsons" to the ratings powerhouse that is "American Idol," a once-upstart network and some of its stars, past and present, will celebrate a quarter-century of TV goodness in "Fox's 25th Anniversary Special. " (Fox, 8 p.m.) She debunked the so-called "Seinfeld" curse with her hit series "The New Adventures of Old Christine," so we've no doubt that Julia Louis-Dreyfus will have us laughing with her — as well as at her — in her new D.C.-set sitcom "Veep.

Armando Iannucci's droll, fleet "Veep," which premieres Sunday on HBO and stars Julia Louis-Dreyfusas Selina Meyer, vice president of the United States, has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, who once came close to occupying that post and bears a minor resemblance to the star. It is, rather, an Americanization of Iannucci's fitfully ongoing 2005 BBC series "The Thick of It" and its spun-off 2009 film "In the Loop," whose protagonists are minor ministers in the U.K. government, and which make comedy from the place where power and powerlessness, ambition and limitation overlap.

Those looking for behind-the-scenes drama on how Pau Gasol handled ongoing trade speculation won't find it on HBO's "Real Sports. " Those hoping for more explanations on his unraveling in the 2011 NBA playoffs won't find answers on the critically acclaimed series, either. Instead, Gasol's segment featured Tuesday night focuses on his multifaceted interests. It mentions how Magic Johnson's announcement in 1991 that he had HIV inspired Gasol to go to medical school: "I wish I could do something in the future to cure this disease.

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.

The welter of expectations and "highly anticipateds" surrounding the premiere of David Simon's "Treme" all but demands a measure of critical blowback. Certainly there will be obligatory mewling about the new 10-episode HBO series being good but not as good as "The Wire," which launched Simon into the elite cadre of television artistes. There may be some random chest-beating over white folks' unfortunate tendency to get mushy in the head about black musicians and the South in general, and probably more than a few blog-ready over-analyses of the politics/wisdom/hubris/sentimentality of taking on post-Katrina New Orleans.

Toward the end of the first episode of HBO's "Girls," Hannah (Lena Dunham), in the hopes of persuading her parents to continue supporting her, hands them the half-dozen pages of the "book" she has been writing for the last two years. To finish this proposed nine-chapter opus, all she wants is $1,100 a month, for two more years. It's a wonderful moment, capturing the inevitable divide between generations. With all the gloriously narcissistic conviction of an academically coddled, white, upper-middle-class publishing "intern," Hannah truly believes she is writing a memoir - she just has to live it first.