Countdown with Keith Olbermann

These are production issues that will fix themselves in time. Olbermann was back. He jumped right back into the thick of things. And he was very, very good.

Olbermann is still Olbermann: left-leaning, punctuated by ironic humor, veering into bombast, and underpinned by sincerity. You'll just need to look a little harder in the far reaches of cable to find him.

This Countdown isn't terribly televisual and might gain in force and intimacy if it were transferred straight to radio, though it would suffer from the loss of light-hearted video clips that serve to cleanse the palate of bile.

Certainly Olbermann is refreshing, and singular, in the clarity of his mission, which is to defend the liberal point of view with the same sort of take-no-prisoners rhetoric that conservative pundits like Bill O'Reilly have wielded so effectively. But the blatant uber-medianess of his persona seems, at times, in direct conflict with that belief that "the weakest citizen is more important than the strongest corporation."

Countdown has transported itself from MSNBC to Current without major incident or much innovation.

I suspect Olbermann could build it out exponentially. But for that to happen, Gore or someone is going to have to rein Olbermann in on reckless and self-indulgent attack segments like the last one with Moulitsas.