Thank you for all the terrific response to yesterday's edition. Please send any comments on today's TN&V to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me at www.twitter.com/daveha.

The only way I can keep the amount of television I watch under control is to rarely, if ever, watch a show when it first hits the airwaves. I learn about most everything when re-runs migrate to cable about the fourth season in.

Jenna Elfman, who plays the Mary Pols character, in "Accidentally on Purpose."

As it happens I didn't even know Accidentally on Purpose was airing, so I couldn't have avoided watching its Monday debut on CBS. But had I known about the show whose plot revolves around a film critic who "discovered she was pregnant from a one-night-stand with a much younger man with serious slacker tendencies," for sure I would have taken at least a look-see.

The program is inspired by a memoir of the same name written by Mary Pols, who is a time.com film critic. The only reason I know about Accidentally on Purpose is that a friend forwarded a blog entry written about the show by James Poniewozik, who is a television critic for TIME magazine.

What piqued my curiosity was his question why (in the first episode) the Pols character (played by Jenna Elfman) doesn't consider an abortion. Pols had, in real life. He then links us to an essay that Pols wrote addressing that very question.

It's a very interesting and very revealing assessment, at least as much about how her past dramatically influenced her real-life decision as it is about the wisdom of dropping the "A" word in the first episode. She understands that viewers might have the same response as someone who had read her book and posted an on-line revew did: she almost stopped when Pols wrote that she had considered an abortion. And, of course, the producers of Accidentally on Purpose always have the option of bringing that up later.

But there is a far more interesting aspect to her essay. At some unspecified time, but after the 7th week, Pols did go to see a "pregnancy counselor." At the time a 39-year-old working film critic who was not making a lot ["I figured I'd be destitute after two months"], Pols tells us that "I was terrified. I worried about derailing all I'd worked so hard for." Sounds like a preface to a decision to abort.

Then this very, very important passage.

"But as I told my counselor, I'd been down the college-girl abortion route, and it had broken my heart. Not in a I-shouldn't-have-done-that way, but in a I-wish-I-hadn't-had-to-do-that way, which never eased, not even when the guy who had gotten me pregnant in my early 20s turned out to be a remarkably gifted liar and cheat. I didn't want to go back to the sad regrets of abortion. I wanted to go forward, into the scary unknown, where there was at least one certainty: I would be a mother. I left the counselor's office, went home, looked over my pro and con list, and threw it in the recycling bin. I included my debate over this in my book because I believe in truth and messy realities, especially in memoir. I believe that what I lived through in college informed my decision at 39."

This is very moving and gives us a lot of insight. But there is also a little blurb from Publisher's Weekly that appears on Amazon.com --and not mentioned in Pols' essay--that tells us something that might have been hugely important in her decision not to abort.

"[T]he author, the youngest of a large Catholic family from Maine, resolved to make a go at single motherhood. A successful film critic, if not exactly rich, she nonetheless figured out (with the help of her devoted circle of friends and family) a plan to live and raise the baby, including residing for a spell in a friend's trailer while pregnant. … Candid and unaffected, Pols provides an important lesson about not being willing to compromise herself, and that being brave can bring the richest rewards."

Friends, family, courage.

Amen.

Have a great weekend.