Best Bets: "The Firm" on TV, "Contagion" on DVD and books by Jimmy Carter and James Patterson

(CBS) This week, television gets good again.

After two weeks of reruns and holiday specials, viewers finally will be served up new episodes of their favorite series, new seasons of old favorites and even some entirely new shows.

Tonight, California winemaker Ben Flajnik, an also-ran in last season's "The Bachelorette," will get another shot at finding love in the season premiere of "The Bachelor" on ABC. On Tuesday, weight watchers put their New Year's resolutions to the test in the premiere of "The Biggest Loser: No Excuses" on NBC.

Thursday will see the premiere of an all-star season of "Project Runway" on Lifetime and a fifth season of "Jersey Shore" on MTV. Snooki and the gang are back in Seaside Heights after having spent the last season looking for the GTL lifestyle in Italy.

A new season of "Californication" begins Sunday on Showtime and its web site hints that Golden Globe nominee David Duchovny, who plays a sex addict in the show, is back to his old ways in the new episodes.

Also on Sunday is the debut of a new drama "The Firm," which updates John Grisham's breakthrough novel. Josh Lucas plays Mitch McDeere, a role Tom Cruise filled in the movie version of the novel. NBC is giving the show a two-hour premiere.

January is known as a wasteland for new movies since headlines and audiences are being gobbled up by all the Oscar hopefuls rolled out in the previous six weeks. Opening this week is "Loosies," the story of a New York pickpocket starring "Twilight" star Peter Facinelli, who also wrote the screenplay, and the horror film "The Devil Inside."

Movie lovers might be better served by renting DVDs for some of the films they missed in 2011, like "Contagion" and "I Don't Know How She Does It," both of which are released Tuesday. "Contagion" is the Steven Soderbergh action-thriller with an all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Bryan Cranston and Sanaa Lathan. "I Don't Know How She Does It" stars Sarah Jessica Parker as a finance exec juggling family and career.

January is not a good month for music releases either, and you will see very few albums dropping in this month and virtually none this week.

Better to curl up with a good book -- there are dozens of new ones hitting store shelves, including "Through the Year with Jimmy Carter" a compilation of 366 meditations by the former president which will be published, appropriately, on New Year's Day.

The prolific James Patterson has "Private #1 Suspect," written with Maxine Paetro, coming out Monday and mystery writer Faye Kellerman is bringing back her husband-and-wife team of Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus in "Gun Games," published Tuesday. Another popular sleuth, Chicago investigator V. I. Warshawski is coming back to life in Sara Paretsky's "Breakdown," also to be published on Tuesday. It has been 30 years since Warshawski made her first appearance in 1982's "Indemnity Only."

And Janet Evanovich, who writes the Stephanie Plum mysteries by the numbers ("Explosive Eighteen" is the latest) is teaming with author Dorien Kelly on "Love in a Nutshell," due out Tuesday. It's about newly divorced and newly unemployed woman who retreats to her parents' summer home in Michigan to lick her wounds and finds romance, friendship, suspense and sabotage as she tries to turn the family manse, called the Nutshell, into a profitable B&B.