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TV Picks: ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,’ ‘Arthur & George,’ ‘Under the Dome’

Stephen Colbert participates in the "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" segment of the CBS Summer TCA Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Stephen Colbert participates in the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” segment of the CBS Summer TCA Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif.

(Richard Shotwell / Invision/AP)
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“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Although it’s very risky these days to tout anything as an “important television event,” mainly because everything is touted as an “important television event,” the debut of Stephen Colbert as the new host of “The Late Show” actually is an important television event.

Whether you loved it or loathed it, “The Colbert Report” was an astonishing work of sustained satire. Whether it, along with “The Daily Show” from which it was spawned and which also recently ended, changed the nature of newsgathering or politics in America is open for debate, but it certainly took the stuffiness out of the term “news junkie,” presenting political news and analysis through a prism of popular culture, which is exactly how many Americans see it.

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How much of this sensibility Colbert will bring to late night is exactly why this week’s debut is so exciting. Though his competitors — the two Jimmys and a James — work in the same YouTube-friendly medium, none shares his satiric sensibility. Or his past desire to affect change.

A host is an entertainer, but Colbert has been, up until this point, a satirist. It’s difficult to believe he will abandon the thing he does best, even for acceptance in broadcast late-night, which is one of the more conservative neighborhoods on TV.

So the real question is not “Can Colbert survive the mainstream but can the mainstream survive Colbert?”

CBS, 11:30 p.m. weeknights, beginning Sept. 8

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“Arthur & George” The collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a gift that keeps on giving. Especially to television, where “Elementary” (CBS) and “Sherlock” (BBC America) currently deliver two very different iterations of the world’s first, and most famous, consulting detective.

As it turns out, Doyle didn’t just set the gold standard for fictional sleuths; he also provided the first detective-writer-as-actual-detective story line.

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Long before characters like Ellery Queen, Jessica Fletcher or Richard Castle were mere notes on a page, Doyle used the powers of observation and deduction he had granted Sherlock Holmes to solve an actual crime and change the British judicial system.

Based on the Julian Barnes novel of the same name, “Arthur & George” is a lovely, lyrical and occasionally provocative fictionalization of Doyle’s exploits that should thrill myriad demographics: Sherlock Holmes devotees, of course, but also fans of costume drama, the Edwardians and series that rhapsodize the British countryside — especially the beloved “Doc Martin,” whose star, Martin Clunes, plays Sir Arthur with the sort of ramrod mustachioed stoicism that can only conceal a thoroughly romantic belief in the power of justice.

PBS, 8 p.m. Sundays, Sept. 6-20

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“Under the Dome” Fans of the show know what’s under the dome: chaos and dwindling ratings.

Now that CBS has pulled the plug on the Stephen King television-event-turned-series, we’ll finally find out what it is, who’s it is and, more important, are the answers the same as in the book.

CBS, 10 p.m. Sept. 10

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