Wow. Congratulations, Kurt Sutter! You managed to condense all of Season Three’s disappointment into one underwhelming, anti-climactic massive failure of an episode. Nice job! I don’t have a dog you can kick, but I do have a kid you can take a swing at, if you’d like. You may as well after last night’s blowtastic season finale. That was some weak-*ss, cop-out holy-mother-of-God suck. You took an entire fast-paced, action-packed, intense and violent season and you blew it. It was the complete opposite of Season Three, where a slow season was almost redeemed by a brilliant (and a little-too easy) finale. This season, you shanked it: You pulled out and rolled over before you got to the good part.

Extended thoughts and spoilers, after the jump.

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Sons of Anarchy (FX) — Part 1 of a two-part season finale. I watched tonight’s and next week’s episodes last night, my last-ever Warming Glow screener. It’s good, but there’s nothing mind-blowingly awesome. I was surprised by how neatly certain plot lines got tied up, but other than that all of the notes sound pretty familiar: Gemma schemes, Tara goes crazy, secrets are revealed, and the neutralization of one threat to the club only results in a new threat. Oh, and Lincoln Potter turns out to be a lot cooler than I thought.

The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (CBS) — D’oh! I already uploaded the “Sons” banner picture, thus ruining a perfectly good excuse to post pictures of supermodels in ridiculously ornate lingerie. Ah well, inset photo it is. Also featuring performances from Kanye West, Maroon 5, and Cee-Lo Green. (hi-res of Miranda Kerr here)

New Girl (Fox) — Jess (Zooey Deschanel) starts a handbell chorus for teenagers, thereby guaranteeing they will never be popular. I’m not sure if Justin Long is still around in tonight’s episode, but I certainly hated him exactly as much as I expected to in the Thanksgiving episode.

Man vs. Wild (Discovery) — Bear Grylls takes you behind the scenes of the series. I’m guessing the revelations DON’T include him showing the nice hotels he stays at. Zing!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (CBS) / Scrooged (AMC) — Between these tonight and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” last night, we are now only A Christmas Story away from all the truly great Christmas programming. I was legitimately terrified of the Abominable Snowman when I saw “Rudolph” as a kid.

LATE-NIGHT GUESTS: Kathy Bates and Jay Mohr on Leno; Shaquille O’Neal on Kimmel; Margaret Cho on Ferguson; Betty White on “The Daily Show”; Nathan Fillion and Morrissey on Conan; and Jesse Eisenberg and Piper Perabo on Fallon (I desperately want musical guest Neko Case to sing “Can’t Fight the Moonlight”).

Sons of Anarchy (FX) — The release that came with the screener of tonight’s 90-minute episode (411, “Call of Duty”) says, “This is a spoiler-heavy episode, so please be mindful of spoilers.” I would never spoil a TV show before it airs, especially not one with as much firepower as this one. Let’s just say that it’s an EXPLOSIVE episode that will BLOW UP previous plot lines. I wouldn’t say it’s a favorite episode of MINE, but it’s certainly up there for this season.

Tosh.0 (Comedy Central) — Season finale, although there’s really no way to tell seasons apart except from whatever themed garment Daniel Tosh happens to be wearing. Also new tonight: Workaholics. The guys take a “man trip.”

New Girl (Fox) — Ugh, Justin Long begins his stint on the show. In an ideal world, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman would be forced to slap-fight to the death in an arena filled with drunk Turks holding rocks and glass bottles. Winner gets fed to Bengal tigers.

NCIS (CBS) — From Yahoo: “The NCIS team is on the hunt for a missing Marine this week: The search takes Gibbs and Ziva all the way to Afghanistan, where the Marine was last seen protecting innocent schoolchildren from a terrorist attack. Now Gibbs and Ziva have to make their way through a perilous war zone to bring their target home alive.” So basically, EXACTLY how military operations are ALWAYS carried out in Afghanistan. “We looked everywhere for our missing man. I guess it’s time to call some CIS investigators in from the States.” This is the #1 show on television, btw.

LATE NIGHT GUESTS: Bill Maher, Nikki Reed, and gigantic vagina Drake on Letterman; Howie Mandel and Snooki on Leno; Patricia Heaton on Kimmel; Ewan MacGregor on Ferguson; Ben Kingsley and Ashley Green on Fallon; Elijah Wood on Colbert; and check out Conan’s fantastic lineup: Jeff Goldblum, Adam Scott, and Childish Gambino. That’s like the exact opposite of Leno’s show.

‘HELL ON WHEELS’ DEBUTS STRONG. Sunday night’s series premiere drew 4.4 million viewers for AMC, the network’s second-best debut after “The Walking Dead.” I thought the pilot was okay, but I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that series star Anson Mount played Britney Spears’s love interest in Crossroads.

‘SONS OF ANARCHY’ GETS A BONUS EPISODE. Showrunner Kurt Sutter has worried publicly that Season 4 had too much story to fit into 13 episodes, so FX has given the green light for a 14th episode. The season finale will now air December 6th.

‘EBERT PRESENTS’ HAS RUN OUT OF MONEY. The intellectual successor to “Siskel & Ebert” will go off the air unless it gets more funding. Sucks to be on public television.

AUDIENCES AGREE: ‘CHUCK’ SUCKS. The hokey NBC crapfest is the lowest-rated show on primetime for any of the big four networks, drawing a .9 rating on Friday nights. The most recent episode was beaten by a repeat of “NCIS” on USA.

Quick! To the Genocycle!

I’ve got two TV news stories and only one allotted post for them, so you’re getting them both: (1) “Sons of Anarchy” has been renewed for a fifth season, and (2) “The Walking Dead” season premiere broke its own ratings records.

“It is no small challenge to bring the themes of a great, ancient play like Hamlet into a wholly original television setting and to tell this complex story in a way that is both riveting and accessible to a broad audience,” network President John Landgraf said… This season has been averaging 5.8 million viewers, with the premiere episode the most-watched program in the network’s history. [TV Guide]

7.3 million zombie lovers tuned in, shattering all previous records for the show and dramatically improving on last year’s series premiere tune-in of 5.3 million. The story was even better for AMC in the key demo of adults 18 to 49, where the show averaged 4.8 million viewers under 50 and scored a 3.8 rating — bigger than just about everything else on network TV Sunday, save for NFL football. [Vulture]

It’s so weird that these shows are doing so well on cable, considering that they’re not cop shows on TNT. But if I’ve learned anything from following the TV industry, it’s that nothing stays fresh for long before it’s copied poorly. So get ready for shows about zombie motorcycle gangs, shows about motorcycle gangs fighting zombies, and of course the new Discovery docuseries “Zombie Vs. Motorcycles.” Can’t wait!

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