And the Peabody Goes To … “Mad Men,” “Colbert Report,” “30 Rock” and “Dexter”

After plowing through incisive reports on this page regarding “Farmer Wants a Wife,” ABC’s summer reality sludge, “Prison Break’s” latest shark jump and Paris Hilton on “My Name is Earl,” you might get the impression that this blog is obsessed with the rancid debris Television leaves alongside the road in his carefree travels.

To disabuse you of this notion, we’re going to do an entire entry dedicated to Television Excellence. Today, the Peabody Awards – an award that by law must be described as “prestigious” – were announced, and we’re presenting the entire list, as noted in the first line of the press release below:

COMPLETE LIST OF 2007 PEABODY AWARD WINNERS

See? Anyway, here are the winners, with comments from the Peabody folks on some of them, comments from me on some of them and no comments whatsoever on others.

“30 Rock” Peabody says: “Tina Fey’s creation is not only a great workplace comedy in the tradition of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ complete with fresh, indelible secondary characters, but also a sly, gleeful satire of corporate media, especially the network that airs it.”

What Peabody means: So watch it, already.

“Mad Men” Peabody says: “The way they were on Madison Avenue, in the Manhattan towers and the bedroom communities of New York, circa 1960, is recalled in rich detail and a haze of cigarette smoke in this exemplary period dramatic series.”

Wow. Someone got fancy there with all that writing and words. But if they hadn’t honored this show, this blog would have been very, very disappointed.

“The Colbert Report” Peabody says: “Let none dare call it ‘truthiness.’ Colbert, in his weeknight Comedy Central parody of all that is bombastic and self-serving in cable-news bloviasion, has come into his own as one of electronic media’s sharpest satirists.”

They’re just now noticing this?

“Dexter” Peabody says: “With a premise that questions our fondness for avenging heroes – a serial killer who channels his dark urges into police forensics and the killing of other psychopaths – this Showtime series is a masterful psychological thriller and a complex and ambiguous meditation on morality.”

I’ll be this one is giving our friends at the Parents Television Council fits. I thought the second season was better than the first, which is saying something, and wonder how they’ll be able to top themselves.

“Planet Earth” Peabody says: “Awesome, spectacular, humbling, exhilarating – pick your effusive adjective – the 11-part [Discovery] series documented the natural wonders of our world, some familiar, others never before seen, in stunning high-definition clarity.”

No question, but National Geographic’s “Galapagos” boasted cinematography that was just as breathtaking, but apparently got lost in the shuffle.

“Project Runway” Peabody says: “A series that redeems the reality-contest genre, this face-off competition among upstart fashion designers demands, displays and ultimately rewards creativity that can’t be bluffed.”

I know people who hate reality TV who like this show. I might, too, if I cared about the fashion world.

“Bob Woodruff Reporting: Wounds of War – The Long Road Home of Our Nation’s Veterans” Peabody says: “Severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Woodruff made wounded veterans and their struggle with recovery and red tape his special focus and served them well with his sensitive, dogged reporting.”

This documentary would’ve been good even if it hadn’t had the additional resonance of Woodruff’s own injury propelling it.

“Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” Peabody says: “The centerpiece of this thoughtful, topical edition of ‘NOVA’ was the recreation, verbatim, of key testimony and argument from a six-week trial in Pennsylvania that served as a crash course in modern evolutionary theory, the evidence for evolution and the nature of science.”

Boy, I got crap from the mouth-breathers out there who don’t believe in evolution when I reviewed this. Guys, take up your grievances with the esteemed Peabody council.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” Peabody says: “The brutal death of an Afghani cab driver while in U.S. military custody gave director Alex Gibney the central thread of his searing exploration of detainee interrogation techniques and who, ultimately, bears responsibility.”

When is winning a Peabody anti-climactic? When you’ve already won an Oscar, as this documentary has.

“NATURE: Silence of the Bees” Peabody says: “The first in-depth investigation of an alarming, world-wide die-off of honeybees, this documentary underscored the critical role of these pollinators to our food supply and surveyed the forensics that have yet to solve the mystery.”

“FRONTLINE: Cheney’s Law” Peabody says: “In a strongly researched and reported hour that sometimes played like a political thriller, ‘FRONTLINE’ traced the Bush Administration’s expansion of Presidential wartime powers to a determined, secretive campaign by the Vice President, that stretches back three decades.”

“CNN Presents: God’s Warriors” Peabody says: “In six hours over three nights, CNN explored how rising fundamentalist disenchantment with the modern, secular world has affected Judaism, Islam and Christianity in sometimes similar but also different ways.”

The rest of the winners, after the jump: