September 2002 Archives

It's been an exciting (sorry, that was a typographical error... excruciating) month of TeeVee Awards here, but Mr. Dead Pool is knocking on the door, telling us to beat it.

And so we bring you, as quickly as possible, our final two TeeVee Awards.

Once upon a time, there was a show called Twin Peaks. And to the extent that any one actor was its star, Kyle MacLachlan deadpanned his way into the hearts of millions of cultists who, frankly, sometimes get on our nerves. But that wasn't really the fault of MacLachlan, who kept his face completely expressionless as he walked through the chaos of David Lynch's television show, talking mostly about pie and coffee.

On Wolf Lake, Worst Actor Lou Diamond Phillips did pretty much the same thing, except that it didn't work very well. He was playing a police officer surrounded by strange goings-on (well, one going-on: werewolves), and his response to everything was stone-faced stoicism. A wolf would run across the background while spooky music played, and then there would be a close-up of Lou's face. Was he excited? Scared? Hungry? Balancing his checkbook? There was no way to tell.

Phillips, of course, has been acting long enough that he has to be considered "established," even though much of his c.v. is made up of movies with titles like "Extreme Justice," "Shadow of the Wolf," and "Young Guns II." But all that relatively-big time experience never translated into a good performance on Wolf Lake, as Phillips turned what should have been an at least intermittently-interesting show into a Rorschach test, with the audience trying to read an emotion, any emotion on Lou's face.

How big a flop was Wolf Lake? So big that after it was shitcanned, Lou Diamond Phillips was able to guest-star in a couple episodes of 24. And not even episodes that close to midnight. Did we mentioned that his character was brutally murdered on 24? "That's for Wolf Lake," said Balkan war criminal Dennis Hopper as he pulled the trigger. And rightly so.

Now for the exact opposite side of the coin -- our Best Half-Hour Actress award. For this, we turn to a supporting actress in a star-driven sitcom. It's not every day when you can impress us when you're just an accoutrement to the comedy star who's had a show fashioned around them.

We like Andy Richter Controls the Universe a lot, and we're happy to hear that it was renewed for midseason. And we like Andy Richter, who came to be one of our favorite things about Late Night With Conan O'Brien, even though during the show's first episode we thought he was some sort of drifter who had camped out on O'Brien's couch accidentally, only to find himself in the middle of an NBC talk show. In his sitcom debut, Richter turns out to be a decent actor who can bear the load of being a comedy star well.

But we really enjoy it when Richter plays off of Paget Brewster, our award winner. Brewster plays Andy's boss and former girlfriend, but rather than filling the dumb-galpal role, Brewster's character is alternately a morass of neuroses and a woman of reason and authority. Brewster takes this set of contradicting behaviors and knits it into a funny, likeable character. What can we say? There aren't a lot of strong women's roles in comedies these days. Playing a troubled mom just doesn't bring out the best in people. Brewster has sunk her teeth into a different kind of part, and we're all the better for it.

And that, as we say, is that. Bring on the new season!

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell, Monty Ashley.

Here at TeeVee headquarters (which is more a state of mind than a physical location, or at least that's we tell Monty when the rest of us are at some big TeeVee banquet), we know a thing or two about bad television shows. We devote big sections of our big, juicy chess-club brains to encyclopedic knowledge of shows that more sensible people took one look at and immediately forgot. You know, shows like Shasta McNasty and The Secret Diaries of Desmond Pfeiffer.

So when it came time to pick the worst half-hour show of the year, there was no shortage of nominations. You might have forgotten about Bob Patterson and Inside Schwartz, but we're practically professionals here, and it will take years of therapy for us to even think about forgetting them. Normally, this decision is filled with acrimony and bitterness, where our usual witty repartee breaks down to something along the lines of "Oh yeah? You're a Harsh Realm! So there!"

But this year, we all looked at the year and came to the same decision: Baby Bob was the worst half-hour show of 2001. It had a concept so bad that by the time we were convinced it was a real show and not an imaginary invention to illustrate the Platonic ideal of badness, it had already burned off its initial order, been acclaimed as a minor hit, and been renewed as a midseason replacement. But its first appearance on the air lasted long enough that even now, we're afraid that all the self-hypnosis tapes in the world won't let us block the memory from our minds.

The idea behind Baby Bob was that there was this baby, right? And his name was "Bob." And he -- wait for it -- talked.

That's right, it was a talking baby. And that's pretty much as far as the joke went. We managed to watch one or two episodes (because sometimes, it's important to watch the absolute worst show available), and none of us can recall the baby ever saying anything amusing. The show apparently relied solely on the incongruous nature of a talking infant for laughs.

Except that talking babies aren't funny. Sure, it's diverting for a moment to see their lips move, but after that all you've got is a vaguely disturbing special effect. And, more to the point, it's a special effect that was already overused several years before the show made it to the airwaves. So instead of the audience goggling in awe at the magical talking baby, people just end up being reminded of that talking chihuahua we all got sick of awhile ago.

It didn't help Baby Bob any that there was already a show with a talking baby on the air. And on Family Guy, which is normally happy with the cheapest joke available, the talking baby is also a genius. And an evil genius at that. The talking babies of entertainment history, by which we mean the stars of the first two Look Who's Talking movies, all had gimmicks. If you're willing to pretend that "being the voice of a celebrity, except in the second movie, which also had Gilbert Gottfried" constitutes a gimmick, that is. And we admit that it isn't much of a gimmick, but it's better than Baby Bob, which comes a mere thirteen years later, and didn't even have that.

Okay, there was one innovation that Baby Bob introduced: when its baby talked, people could hear it. This wasn't one of those deals where Bruce Willis gets to smart off in voice-over and only the audience can hear him; this was a show where a family had to deal with the wacky complications of finding out that their baby talked.

Except, again, that the complications weren't all that wacky. If you sat down for an hour and thought about the comedic implications of a baby that could talk, we're pretty sure you'd come up with something better that "Bob's parents use him as a spy to find out the lowest price two art gallery owners will take for a painting, but their scheme does not go as planned." Incidentally, we don't know why that last part is even in there; television schemes never go as planned. People on television shows who hatch zany plots should have noticed that by now; ever since Lucy Ricardo failed in her five-hundredth attempt to join Ricky's band, it's been pretty clear that the more complicated your scheme is, the less likely it is that it will work. It's just how sitcoms work.

So, let's recap. Baby Bob is a very bad television show. It got on the air because some CBS executive lost a bet. Then people inexplicably started watching it. Now we occasionally wake up screaming and lose all ability to write clever sentences about basically uninteresting television shows.

So here's to you, Baby Bob! You suck!

Additional contributions to this article by: Monty Ashley.

Outside of complete indifference or a schadenfreude-induced chorus of joyous hosannas, there are exactly three ways you can react to the news that a television program has been cancelled, seemingly for no good reason at all.

1. You can start hoarding your allowance, cutting back on your tithing, and passing the hat around to like-minded friends and associates to generate enough petty cash to either rent advertising space on a Ventura Freeway billboard or buy a splashy full-page advertisement in Variety, exhorting boneheaded TV executives to rethink their rash decision.

2. You can launch a massive letter-writing campaign, the likes of which haven't been seen outside of the courtroom denouement of "Miracle on 34th Street" -- the original, not the crummy remake -- to flood the inbox of every craven network suit with entreaties to restore your favorite show to its rightful place in the prime-time lineup.

3. You and your no-account Internet pals can concoct some phony-baloney award so that you can fete the doomed show one last time before cheerless network executives stuff the remains into a cardboard box and bury them in a potter's field.

(There is a fourth option, just in case you happen to have a fairly well-received show -- we'll call it Farscape, just for argument's sake -- that has two full seasons left on its contract, and it ends up getting boned anyhow, despite the fact that it may well be the flagship show of its network, other than maybe Dark Shadows reruns. What you do then is, you curl up into the fetal position and realize that you'll never understand this wacky TV business. You also curse a lot.)

Since we're not exactly rolling in cash here at TeeVee, especially after Michaels steadfastly refuses to help out the cause by reallocating the portion of his salary earmarked for hard-core pornography, option number one is right out. As for letter-writing campaigns, while we're sympathetic to the efforts of others, we haven't been able to put our hearts into mass-mailing operations since our ill-fated attempt to convince the producers of Happy Days to do whatever it took to retain the services of Ronnie Howard and Donny Most. One minute, the two of them are trading barbs with Potsie, the next they're shipped off to Greenland, never to be seen again. And there wasn't a thing we could do to stop it. Not happy days. Sad days. Very sad days.

That leaves us with option three, and, frankly, if there's anyone who knows anything about concocting phony-baloney awards, it's us. Inventing another TeeVee Award out of whole cloth doesn't cost us a thing -- hey, it's not like we actually end up presenting these things to anybody, even when the winners are nice enough to write us and ask for their trophy (Um... check's in the mail, Futurama guys!). Giving a well-deserving show a proper Christian burial seems like the least we can do.

Well, the least we can do is to do nothing. But that doesn't seem particularly charitable, now does it?

Besides, for whatever reason, we had more than enough candidates from which to pick for our first-ever Unjust Cancellation crown of thorns. Maybe the events of the past year have left television executives as cranky and out of sorts as the rest of us. Maybe someone forgot to turn on the safety-lock next to the panic button. Or perhaps there's been a rash of instances where show runners have been giving programming executives impertinently funny looks. Whatever the reason, the folks that run the TV networks have spent the last 12 months making like Keanu Reeves at the end of "The Matrix," gunning down show after show in a pornographic hail of bullets until the clip hits empty, reloading, and then firing some more.

Nevertheless, we narrowed it down to four.

Thieves was a much better show than anyone -- particularly those in the employ of The Walt Disney Company -- ever thought it would be. Funny, smart, well-written and well-acted -- in a just world, we would be looking forward to a second season of this modern-day melding of Moonlighting and "To Catch a Thief." But ABC slapped the show in a dead-end Friday night time slot -- usually a pretty good hint not to make any long-term plans -- and then acted surprised when the show didn't set the Nielsen ratings on fire. An unfair end for a damned fine show, certainly, but not terribly surprising.

Besides, the rest of us hear Michaels heap unqualified praise upon the comedic abilities of John Stamos, and we can't help but think that maybe we shouldn't have moved the poor dope's desk next to all those open paint cans.

Excessive exposure to fumes probably doesn't account for the miserable treatment bestowed upon The Tick, a wickedly fun take on superheroes that disappeared from Fox's schedule nearly as soon as it appeared. Then again, it was hard to tell who was more ambivalent about the show's prospects for success -- the network or disdainful fans of the earlier animated incarnation.

"The live-action show isn't nearly as good as the cartoon," they'd say.

"Why not enjoy both shows on their own merits?" we'd suggest.

"They got rid of all the old characters like Die Fledermaus," they'd sniff.

"True, but Nestor Carbonell gives an inspired performance as his replacement, Batmanuel," we'd counter.

"Well, it doesn't matter because Fox yanked the show off the air after only six episodes," they'd sigh.

"Fuck," we'd reply.

But really, who can be surprised by any of this? Fox sat on the finished Tick episodes for nearly a year. It slapped the show in a nearly hopeless time slot, opposite of Friends and Survivor. It didn't even bother premiering the series until November sweeps, when all of its rivals were already going ahead full-steam. These are not the things a network does when it envisions a long and healthy run for your favorite program.

Speaking of favorite programs, we pimped Undeclared like we owned stock in the company. We praised its terrific writing, we nodded approvingly at the stellar comedic work turned in by Seth Rogen, we marveled at how the characters had sex more often in the first season of the program than we had during our entire collegiate experience, graduate school included. Basically, we did everything to try and get you people to watch that show, short of driving to each of your homes Tuesday night, changing the channel to Fox, and hiding the remote. And in the end, it didn't do a dime's worth of good.

Because Judd Apatow is cursed. Has to be the reason. Maybe he broke a mirror five or six years ago. Maybe he lives in a house teeming with black cats and ladders and piles of spilled salt. Maybe he stole that tiki idol that caused the Brady kids all that trouble a few years back. Doesn't matter -- that cat couldn't buy a break if it was on special at Wal-Mart.

So that leaves the one show that wasn't doomed from the moment of conception, imprisoned in an unforgiving time slot on a night nobody was watching TV in the first place, or otherwise victimized of supernatural forces beyond the realm of human understanding -- The Job.

Let's forget for a moment that The Job was a blisteringly funny half-hour of television. Let's overlook the top-flight work from Denis Leary, on-camera as the show's star and off-camera as its co-creator and frequent writer. Let's turn our attention away from the rest of the cast, particularly Lenny Clarke, Diane Farr and Bill Nunn. And let's just gloss over the fact that the producers of The Job apparently labored under the assumption that its audience was bright enough to be interested in flawed characters who didn't always learn important life lessons in tidy 30-minute packages. Let's ignore all of that -- and not just because ABC apparently did.

No, the reason we're declaring The Job's cancellation to be the most unjust in a year of stupefying programming decision has nothing to do with the show's obvious quality. Rather, it all boils down to ABC. Because while The Job's ratings may have been lackluster, while most TV viewers probably couldn't have found the show on the prime-time schedule if you drew them a map, while plenty of programs with better overall numbers have met an equally abrupt fate, what exactly did ABC have waiting in the wings that would do any better?

A whole lot of nothing is what.

Consider: My Wife and Kids, The Drew Carey Show and the blindingly terrible According to Jim will return to prime time this fall. These three stooges are somehow creatively and financially more rewarding for ABC than The Job? Unlikely.

ABC's new half-hour programs for the fall include shows about the trials of an assistant to a pompous TV anchorman, John Ritter as a harried dad raising sad sack teen-agers, and Kathie Lee-like morning show hostess played by Bonnie Hunt, who's giving Judd Apatow a run for his money in the "Out of Favor with the Cruel Gods of TV" department. These are the shows that will succeed where The Job somehow failed? Given ABC's track record for developing hit shows, highly dubious.

ABC has filled The Job's old time-slot with The Bachelor, the inexplicably watched reality series where a fellow so loathsome that, despite his apparent wealth and prospects, must go on national TV to beg a woman to be his bride. Why not just change your slogan to "We've stopped trying?"

So The Job takes the prize, not just because it's a good show stupidly shunted aside, but because ABC could have taken a chance and left The Job alone to maybe build an audience. What -- people weren't going to watch the network any more than they already don't? It's not as if, by giving a solid show a chance to flourish, ABC could do any worse.

But unfortunately for all of us, ABC seems hell-bent on doing exactly that.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

Last year, we gave our Worst Actor award to the horrid George Gray, who augured the destruction of the TV series Junkyard Wars, a perennial favorite around the TeeVee headquarters. Gray, an American simp brought in to replace the British Robert Llewellyn, was just the first step in that show's demise, followed by the ridiculous American contestants, the ever-increasing and wince-inducing puns, and finally the departure of series creator Cathy Rogers, who has been replaced by a new contestant gimmick and a former MTV veejay. Yuck.

But Gray was the beginning of the end, and so we took an acting award and gave it to him, the host of a basic cable game show series. Some took umbrage, pointing out that George Gray wasn't worth our wrath (wrong!) and that, more importantly, he wasn't an actor.

Fair enough. So this year, we inaugurate a new award: the George Gray award, or put another way, the Worst Host award.

Last year, we had never heard of Trading Spaces, another Americanized information show on TLC based on a British original. Like its progenitor Changing Rooms, Spaces is about two acquaintances designing a room in one another's houses. Although it can be entertaining, after you've watched a handful of them you realize that most of the designers are incompetent and their limited budgets force them to do shoddy work that likely won't last a week after the show's cameras depart for their next all-too-willing victims.

Okay, we've got some issues with this show, especially since it can't hold a candle to either the British original or its British spin-off, the gardening series Ground Force, both airing on BBC America.

But more than its premise, its stupefyingly stupid designers, and its atrocious and repetitive theme music, the thing we hate about Trading Spaces is Paige Davis. Davis, the show's host, is perky. Really perky. So perky that even Mary Hart would want to take an axe to her.

Worse, Davis brings her robotically creepy smile and attitude to the scenes of various design crimes, from the pointless demolition of an antique mantle in a classic bungalow to the famed fire-code-flouting cover-up of one contestant's beloved fireplace. No matter what the atrocity, Paige is more than happy to smile about it and gleefully detail the carnage.

Make no mistake: we dislike Paige Davis with the fire of a thousand burning suns. So much so, that not only did she remind us of George Gray, she forced us to create an award in his name, just so we could give it to her.

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell.

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Vic Mackey's tearing down the highway of misplaced morals at 80 mph in a gas-guzzling SUV. Mackey, the central figure in the FX's breakout hit The Shield, is a tough-as-nails cop with a gruesomely Machiavellian approach to his job and a family whom he loves deeply and blindly. Mackey's a tricky character on the switchblade's edge of cliche, but as Best Actor winner Michael Chiklis plays him, Mackey transcends his formulaic origins and turns into a one-man microcosm of hands-on social reform.

In Chiklis's hands, Mackey's complexity is entirely believable. The character switches through more roles in one hour than the cast of Saturday Night Live does in a season, among them: morally certain father figure to a group of overgrown bullies with badges; untouchable bulldog of the precinct; the fist at the end of the long arm of the law; the one man watching out for people without safety nets; loving husband and father. Chiklis switches among all these roles and their different required body languages effortlessly while maintaining an undercurrent of tension in each; he plays Mackey as someone who knows he's juggling a lot of balls in the air, and he doesn't have the luxury of dropping any of them.

Within the first few episodes, we learned that Mackey's success at work is due to treating his chosen favorites as family, and taking their triumphs and betrayals personally -- so personally, in fact, that he shoots the one member of the team who's working for Internal Affairs. The charisma Chiklis summons to persuade his troops that the execution was entirely justified is breathtaking; within minutes, everyone is convinced that the killing was necessary, and goes along with covering up their crime before resuming fighting Mackey's definition of the same.

The personal touch is what makes him so successful on the streets. Mackey is a guy with little patience for paperwork, and even less for due process: his solution for resolving a feud between two rappers was to lock the two of them in a derelict railroad car one night. When only one walks out the next morning, Mackey is shaken for a minute as he realizes that he has effectively condemned one man to death -- but recovers enough to offer the survivor breakfast. Chiklis' blink-and-you'll-miss-it snapshot of someone shocked into personal reckoning before regaining his faculty for self-deception brought home the idea of someone fighting for his life in a locked room with much more impact than actually filming the fight would have done.

However personal Mackey makes his job, the threat of the job affecting his personal life is his fatal weakness. Over the last few episodes of the show's first season, old friend Ben Gilroy asks Mackey for a favor, the results of which lead to Gilroy planting evidence in Mackey's house and obliquely threatening his family. Mackey's response, as played by Chiklis -- his usual persuasive manipulation and tightly coiled rage borne along on a undercurrent of fear for his family -- ratcheted up the tension for viewers too, and made us actually care about whether or not an unrepentant bad cop was going to escape unscathed from a mess of his own doing.

Ultimately, that's what makes Chiklis our choice for Best Hour Actor. He takes a character whom we should despise and makes him frighteningly relatable. If Mackey's driving down the highway to hell, we're in the passenger seat, watching him intently for the moment when he finally sees where he's going.

Additional contributions to this article by: Lisa Schmeiser.

Elections can often have unexpected results. Take the last presidential skirmish, which as you recall was a fairly remarkable occurrence. Even if George W. Bush had won Florida by an undisputed number of votes -- tens of thousands -- he would have been elected President despite his rival having more overall votes cast in his name across the nation. Such are the quirky rules of our electoral system.

Not that we're putting ourselves in the same league with the Founders of the Republic, but we here at TeeVee also participate in quirky elections from time to time. Our TeeVee awards -- now winding down after taking up an eternity of your valuable late-summer reading time -- are one such event. Everyone votes, and votes again, then Snell tallies the votes and everyone scratches their heads. Are there back-room shenanigans going on? Case for: Sarah Michelle Gellar wins the Best Actress award every year. Case against: Not a single award for Stargate. We're don't know what to think, frankly.

But nothing baffled us more than our strange choices for two awards this year: Best New Show and Best Hour Show. You see, we chose Alias as the Best New Show, and received several congratulatory letters from readers who felt we were very smart to choose ABC's phenomenal spy series over Fox's much-more-hyped 24. 24, also a new series, clearly had fallen behind Alias in the voting, making Alias the presumptive Big Winner of the TeeVee Awards.

Uh, yeah. But how does that explain that one of our winners for Best Hour Show is 24 -- and the other one isn't Alias? Damned if we know. Here's our official rationalization: Alias gets an award not only for its present, but for its future. It's got huge potential, and we wanted to recognize that. Also, that Jennifer Garner sure is purty.

But 24 gets a piece of the big award because its unique story structure, its visual style, its appropriate use of Kiefer Sutherland, impressed us this year. Is 24 a realistic show? Anyone who saw the episode where Jack Bauer runs through a field at noon with a late-afternoon shadow trailing behind him, or any of the other 23 episodes, knows the answer. But like Alias, 24 is really not at all concerned with realism. Thank goodness.

No, 24 is all about tension, and as a tension-inducing, nailbiting, freak-out of an action-adventure show, it succeeded wildly. With the exception of a brief break about 1 p.m. that was clearly a trap-door exit in case the series was cancelled after 13 episodes, the show managed to ratchet up the tension and keep it building. Sure, the scenes of Jack's family being placed in jeopardy went on a bit too long and strained our suspension of disbelief a bit too much, especially when amnesia was a part of the equation.

But those are minor quibbles to a show that managed to keep us equal parts riveted, excited, and exhausted for 24 hours this season. Our hope is that next year, 24's producers will manage to learn from this year's mistakes and make the show even better. But if they don't, it won't matter -- nothing can take away the 24 hours of remarkable television that we got to witness last season.

Our other Best Hour Series winner is, well, a departure for us here at TeeVee, largely because some of our members are not known as fans of the Silly Sci-Fi For the Kids. But make no mistake: just because Farscape is set in outer space and features several Space Muppets as main characters doesn't mean it's for kids. In fact, it's one of the more challenging and adult series to come along in quite a while.

The show's third season, which is the basis for its share of the Best Hour Show award, was a triumph of storytelling and characterization for the Sci-Fi Channel's longest-running series. In a brilliant decision, the show's producers split the cast in two, putting half the characters on the living spaceship Moya, and the other half aboard Moya's son, Talyn. The most brilliant decision: to use a wacky sci-fi premise to make two copies of the show's main character, John Crichton (Ben Browser), allowing Crichton to appear in every episode while the two plot lines ran over alternating weeks. Even more, the resolution of the dual-Crichton storyline led to even more dramatic potential, as the copy who survived had to deal with the ramifications of the way the martyred Crichton had lived.

Featuring bizarre methods of telling stories and a confidence in its audience that led to a minimum of the exposition and technobabble that tend to choke other sci-fi series, Farscape is a brilliant example of a genre-blending, humorously dramatic, depressingly uplifting, outer space show for adults.

The bad news is, as we write this applause for this, one of our favorite TV series on the air today, word has reached here that the Sci-Fi Channel has cancelled Farscape, opting out of its prior agreement to produce a fifth season of the series. If that decision stands, and no new network steps in to fill the void, it will be a crying shame. Television will not have just lost another silly sci-fi puppet show loved by the kids -- it will have lost one of the most complete and appealing science fiction shows of all time.

And no flimsy award from a fly-by-night web site whose awards are orchestrated in some mysterious back room can ease that pain.

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell.

You've probably never heard of Home Movies, the unique Cartoon Network show that has captured this year's TeeVee Award for Best Animated Series. Produced by the same people who used to make the terrific Dr. Katz on Comedy Central, Home Movies started out on UPN, where it ran for all of 12 minutes before being recycled into Cartoon Network's Sunday night Adult Swim block

The show follows the adventures of eight-year old wannabe-Spielberg Brendon Small and his two best friends, Melissa and Jason. We know what you're thinking - oh wonderful, another sitcom featuring wise-beyond-their years kids. And truth be told, some of us here at TeeVee didn't jump on the Home Movies bandwagon right away for precisely that reason. But after giving the show a chance, one quickly learns just how funny precocious, silver-tongued third graders can be.

While most sitcoms on the air today prove that no writing means no laughs, writers Brendon Small and Bill Braudis have turned scripts into a starting point, not an ending. After going over an initial script, the voice actors are turned loose to ad-lib, creating a mixture of pre-written and improv comedy. The result is a series that is somehow both completely deadpan and incredibly lively. There's an energy and spontaneity to the dialogue that a writer's room full of story editors, producers, creative consultants and executive producers could never hope to duplicate.

While Bouchard and Small, who plays his namesake in the show, have created a little legion of the wittiest characters on the air, our favorite is the elementary school soccer coach, McGurk, voiced by H. Jon Benjamin. A world-weary, thirty-something cynic, McGurk is exactly the kind of teacher that causes parents to switch school districts. Yet his connection with the kids and especially Brendon is a beautifully twisted piece of comedy. Whether he's giving advice on women or bringing Brendon to the morgue while he identifies a dead body, McGurk's monologues are often the highlight of most episodes.

McGurk is typical of the adults on Home Movies, most of whom are thoroughly unbalanced while their children remain rocks of sanity and reason. That's not to say Brendon and pals spend the whole show lobbing set-up lines at their elders. Jason's lazy, nasal delivery contrasts nicely with Melissa's steady dependability and Brendon's nervous energy, particularly when the three are filming the latest in a long line of ultra-low- budget videos. It's scenes like these that really show off the actors' ad-lib skills and produces dialogue so sharp it could cut the script of weak-kneed sitcoms like Yes, Dear into tiny pieces.

And it's not like Home Movies was competing against dreck like Yes, Dear for the award. This is the little show that could, knocking off titans such as The Simpsons as well as its own network teammate, the consistently hilarious The Brak Show. If you haven't yet, find this series now and learn why, contrary to the well-established TeeVee Rules of Funny, sometimes it's best to let children be both seen and heard.

Additional contributions to this article by: Gregg Wrenn.

We owe Justin Long a really big apology.

Long, who seems like a nice enough young man, plays the part of Warren Cheswick on the NBC TV series Ed. And for a good chunk of the past two seasons, his mere appearance in an episode of the hour-long dramedy was enough to send a plurality of Vidiots into howling fits of fury.

It's nothing against Long, who appears to be doing the best with the material he's handed. But the character he plays, in the considered opinion of the anti-Cheswick Vidiots, is a stammering dolt -- uninteresting, unlikable, the penny on the railroad track that caused the Ed express train to routinely derail. The producers intend for Cheswick to be some sort of everyman, an indefatigable, never-say-die underdog whom you can't help but root for. Unfortunately, since they've also made the character grating, self-involved, shallow, oblivious to the world around him and a slave to convention, the only thing you wind up rooting for is him to be bundled off to the Infernal Region, ideally after a particularly grisly and gruesome demise, perhaps involving a wheat thresher or maybe even a bone saw.

To be fair, not every Vidiot feels this way. There are some in the happy TeeVee family who think nothing but warm thoughts toward Warren Cheswick and what he brings to the Ed table. Maybe they're struck by the cleverness of supplying titular character Ed Stevens with his own awkward doppelganger. Maybe they see a little bit of themselves in Warren. Maybe they're just touched in the head. The point is, we haven't ever given Boychuk's opinion much credence, and we're not about to start now.

So the tyranny of the majority rules -- Cheswick is deemed to be a nuisance, an irritant, the millstone around Ed's neck. And so he has been banished from our TVs, disappearing as quickly as the fast-forward button on our TiVos can race through a Cheswick-blighted scene.

But something funny happened this year, after we stopped fast-forwarding or averting our eyes or sticking our fingers in our ears and saying "La la la, can't hear you, Cheswick, la la la." The parts of Ed that didn't feature the Warren Cheswick character -- they weren't much good, either. In fact, the entire second season of Ed was as uncomfortable and unpleasant for us to watch as -- if body language is anything to go by -- it was for the actors appearing on the show.

Hence, our apology to Justin Long. With Ed awash in myriad problems, his character is no longer the worst thing about the once-quirky, now-confounding show. In fact, we kind of miss the days when our biggest beef with Ed was too much Warren, too much of the time.

It's been quite a descent for Ed, which, in the space of one year, has gone from sharing joint custody with The Job of our Best New Show award to feeling the full weight of our wrath as the most disappointing show of the past season. And this wasn't a close call, by any means -- Ed was a unanimous selection for this dubious honor. Considering we're the same decisive folks who, when asked to pick the Best Actress for an hour-long show, split the title between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Marg Helgenberger, Ed's walkover win is all the more impressive -- in a wide-eyed "How in God's name did this happen?" sort of way.

So what does make a show go off the rails as dramatically as Ed has? How does a program go from delightful and cleverly done to leaden and painful to watch within 12 months? There's no one culprit at work here -- no Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act protracting the Great Depression, no Babe Ruth-for-cash deal to send the Boston Red Sox into a seven-decades-and-counting tailspin. Rather, Ed's troubles stem from a bunch of little things, nothing you might even notice on its own, but, taken together, enough to turn a formerly great series into a thundering bore.

The NBC promotional machine certainly isn't helping matters with its usual hyperventilating efforts. "Ed's Most Important Case Ever!" NBC's voice-over announcer will proclaim, or "The One Case Ed Can't Afford to Lose!" And really, it's just the same quirky, offbeat trials he was handling last season, with maybe a thrown-in homily about how it's not a good idea to be mean to people just because they're different from you or isn't it a shame how we let money get in the way of things like friendship. Saving the job of the school's drama teacher from the secretly homophobic school board member is not exactly straight out of "The Life of Emile Zola," and it's kind of counterproductive on NBC's part to pretend that it is.

More damaging, Ed this year introduced enough ham-handed plot contrivances and convenient occurrences to make one of Horatio Alger's stories seem like experimental German cinema. Take the episode where Ed, played as well as can be managed under the circumstances by Tom Cavanagh, reaches out to a judge who has apparently gone off the deep end. The newly nutty judge, we're told, has been a seminal figure in Ed's life, the reason he pursued a law career. Why, back in Ed's younger days, he used to go to the judge's courtroom just to soak up the legal ambiance, so profound was the judge's effect on our hero's life path. That this was the first time in nearly 45 episodes of Ed that we've even heard of the judge should make the scene no less poignant or interesting. We guess.

Or there's the episode where Ed reunited with his high school basketball team, recognized around these parts as the nadir of Ed's Marianas Trench of a second season. Ed, you see, was on the high school basketball team when it played for the state championship and, in fact, missed a crucial free throw that evidently cost his team the game. As you might imagine, this moment deeply affected Ed -- in his words, altering the entire course of the rest of life. Which must be the case, since the incident apparently traumatized him so much that he never bothered to mention it up until now. But that missed free throw must be haunting Ed -- it says so here in the script.

Entire dissertations could be written chronicling how that one episode encapsulated Ed's subpar sophomore effort, but we'll try and keep it to a paragraph or two: in that one episode, Ed as a character transformed from a fairly likable everyman trying to start his life anew in his hometown into an unsettling creep unable to let go of the past. In case you missed it, Ed becomes obsessed with that high school championship game -- so much so that he rounds up his old team and pays his opponents and even brings the referee out of retirement to recreate -- and, in theory, to atone for -- that previously forgotten but nevertheless momentous foul shout. That he winds up missing the basket, intentionally as it turns out, does not make the scene any more bearable or Ed any less loony. Why not just rename the character Ed Havisham and have him wander about Stuckeybowl in a weathered old wedding gown and be done with it?

It reminds us of a 10-year high-school reunion RSVP we saw a few years back. "I'd love to be there," one of the classmates scrawled on the invitation. "But I'm afraid I'll be busy that night getting on with my life."

Ed clearly isn't getting on with his; the character can't even move beyond the will-they-or-won't-they tedium of his relationship with Carol Vessey (whom Julie Bowen apparently decided halfway through last season to portray as a simpering dolt). Back in the good times, it looked like the producers of Ed were thankfully moving the show beyond the possibility of an Ed-Carol union -- although this year, that solution took an unhappy turn with the introduction of Carol's new love interest, Dennis the Sullen Alcoholic Principal.

Either someone hit the panic button or an NBC executive wrote a memo or someone secretly replaced Ed's scripts with old Northern Exposure teleplays. Because by the end of this year, the Ed-Carol contretemps had the distinct flavor of Boob Tube Couples Past. Imagine the last couple of years of Moonlighting, only in this case, Maddie Hayes would have to get a restraining order to keep David Addison 500 feet away at all times. Or didn't you see the Ed season finale where it looked like a demented Ed might drive after Carol and Dennis, stalking them on their summer cross-country trip, and defending himself after he's accused of horrifically quirky crimes along the way?

Ed Stevens finds there's more than one way to hide a body as he fights extradition in the one episode of Ed you don't want to miss -- all new Ed, NBC Wednesday.

Look, we're not giving up on the show entirely. When the writers aren't thinking up new life-altering experiences Ed had years ago and only now remembers, the writing is actually not bad. There's some great work turned in by the supporting cast, notably Ginnifer Goodwin and Michael R. Genadry as the non-grating teenagers and Mike Starr and Rachel Cronin as the bowling alley flunkies. And if Ed's producers bring back Marvin Chatinover for regular appearances as Dr. Jerome, we are willing to forgive a great deal.

But the jury is still out on whether Ed's third season will be more like its first than its second. Our finger is hovering over the TiVo fast-forward button just in case. And this year, we don't expect it to stop if we don't like what we see.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.