May 2003 Archives

For those of you who've been playing along at home since my article earlier this year about 24's mile-wide woman-hating streak, here's a scorecard showing how all this year's characters with two X chromosomes fared in the end.

MICHELLE DESSLER: Aside from a wildly inappropriate bit of face-sucking with Tony Almeda in the middle of a national crisis, Michelle may just be the most positive female character in 24 history. She stood up to Tony and the entire CTU to help Jack Bauer when he needed it most, found the computer files that helped prevent an unjust war, and then refused to let Tony shield her from accepting the consequences for her rebellion. And she didn't cry half as much as Sydney Bristow doing it. Michelle, you rock.

KATE WARNER: If you're dumb enough to invite a passel of gun-toting criminal rednecks into your home -- and even disarm the security system for them -- please, please don't try to bribe them with Euros. Especially if they've just beaten your friend to death for looking vaguely foreign. Kate did, however, manage to talk down a jittery, gun-toting Kim with calmness and compassion. Various pieces of office furniture have proven to be more cunning and dangerous than Kim, but it's still something.

KIM BAUER: After the police were kind enough to acknowledge how ridiculous her whole murder-fugitive plot line had been, it looked like Kim might be on the road back to non-stupidity. And when her wife-murdering ex-boss cornered her, she managed to get the drop on him with admirable moxie. But with a loaded gun in her hands and the scumball semi-conscious on the floor next to her, she dissolved into a whimpering puddle and had to get some hand-holding from Daddy to put a couple of bullets in the S.O.B. I'm guessing she didn't inherit any of Jack's genes for stupendous ass-kicking.

SHERRY PALMER: A last minute change-of-heart saved Sherry from being the show's least flattering portrayal of womanhood. Despite a season full of backstabbing and demented self-importance, she walked right into the crosshairs of a sniper rifle and proceeded to bluff a crucial confession from a fairly gullible villain. On the other hand, she got involved in a nuclear terrorism plot just to get back at her ex-husband. One suspects that at least a few 24 writers have gone through really, really bad divorces.

LYNN KRESGE: When her dedication got her locked in a storage room by President Palmer's enemies, Lynn escaped with MacGyverish ingenuity, whomping her captor with a fire extinguisher for good measure. Lest she seem too smart or competent, the producers immediately knocked her down several flights of stairs, rendering her concussed, babbling and utterly helpless. Nice, fellas. Reeeeeal subtle there.

CARRIE THE EVIL ONE: Michelle's perpetually awful CTU nemesis wasn't just loathsome-- she was loathsome in a pathetic, powerless, sycophantic way. She spent most of the season's latter half tattling on Michelle and Tony like a kindergartner, with absolutely no hesitation and unrestrained glee. She attached herself lamprey-like to any available man who could secure her more power or influence. And, we learned, she seduced Michelle's brother, wrecked his family, dumped him, and drove him kind of insane. She did make it through the season with life, limb and job intact -- although in her case, that's kind of disappointing.

MARIE WARNER: Kate's psycho sister ended the season in chains, still nutty as a fruitcake, and looking like a demonically possessed Precious Moments figurine.

NAKED MANDY: The mass murderess last seen in Season One showed up in the finale, fully clothed, which I guess is two victories for her right there. That said, she, uh, kinda killed the President. Bad Mandy! Bad!

EVIL OIL COMPANY GUY'S EVIL SECRETARY: Stabbed in the back by her boss offscreen. But she was evil, so that makes it OK, right?

NINA MYERS: Wait, Nina who? Was there someone named Nina on this show?

TERRI BAUER: Still dead.

Let's face it: you hate your job. Based on the fact that this web site gets about ten times as much feedback on weekdays as it does on weekends, odds are pretty good that most of our visitors are either unemployed or surfing the net at work. And if, compared to doing your job, skimming through this drivel is actually a step up, your work must suck very hard indeed.

Still, as miserable as your average workday is, it might help you to remember that there are careers out there that are far worse. You could be one of the thousands of college-aged kids in Alaska whose job is to stand for twenty hours at a clip, staring at fish guts as they roll by on a conveyor belt. You could be a recycling plant worker, doomed to spend your days in a reeking cloud of dumpster stench, sorting through somebody else's phlegm-coated bottles and cans. You could even be the guy I knew in college who earned his wages by collecting circumcised foreskins from hospitals and shuttling them to burn clinics for use as skin grafts; a task fraught with the ever-present fear that any miniscule bump in the road might cause the foreskins to rub together, whereupon they would expand exponentially until the truck explodes, spraying its leathery cargo higgledy-piggledy across the highway.

Worse yet, you could be the man in charge of programming at The WB.

Yes, no matter how dismal your job may be, it cannot hold a candle in terms of pure misery to that of Jordan Levin, The WB's President of Entertainment. His is the singularly odious task of piecing together a marketable prime time schedule from some of the lowest-quality television ever made.

You see, The WB and UPN are sort of like television's minor leagues. Producers who haven't yet earned their chops in Hollywood go there for their first shot at fame and fortune. If their shows are any good, they get to move up to the bigs. If their shows are pure garbage... well, they'll always have a home at The WB. As a result, the raw material that Levin and his minions have to work with is generally, to put it kindly, really fucking awful.

Imagine being commissioned to create a work of art on par with those of the great masters, then being handed a bucket of turds with which to create it. You may set out to sculpt Michelangelo's David, but due to the limitations of the medium you're always going to produce something more like that painting of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Sure, for a week or two, a few curious or demented folks will come to gaze upon your works. But soon enough most will return to the warm familiarity of the Warhol exhibit at NBC, the Norman Rockwell collection at CBS, or the equally repellent but still somehow more socially acceptable Mapplethorpe showing at Fox. In the end, your only hope is to lure in enough twisted coprophiliacs to convince your patron that he should hand you another steaming pail of offal for next season.

It's hard to even conceive of the soul-sapping sense of futility Levin must combat. Each day he spends hours on end staring at the scheduling grid on his office wall, shuffling around gigantic Colorforms with awful phrases such as Reba and Family Affair written on them. It's like a huge magnetic poetry set that was accidentally shipped with only ugly, unpleasant words that nobody wants to read, and Levin's job security depends on his ability to construct Shakespearean sonnets with it. And all the while he knows that Zucker and Moonves and the other sonsofbitches are sitting back in their penthouse suites, sipping flavored vodka martinis and laughing -- laughing! -- at him and his ineffectual efforts.

As if that weren't bad enough, the poor bastard has to actually watch every show he puts on the air, sometimes as many as two full episodes. And if the stuff that ends up on the schedule is the cream of the crap, just imagine how dreadful the shows that don't make the cut must be. I've heard rumors that the world's governments are considering organizing another Geneva Convention in order to officially condemn the use of rejected WB pilots during prisoner interrogations. Unfortunately for Levin, as long as he keeps drawing a paycheck, he doesn't meet the criteria to be considered a prisoner.

Truly, this is a man who deserves our pity. And yet, I find it difficult to sympathize with the guy. That's partly because he makes enough money every day to buy me and my whole family and still have enough left over for a gram of coke and a trio of high-class "escorts". Mostly, though, it's just hard to feel sorry for Levin when it seems as though he's actually trying to fail; because that's the only sensible explanation I can come up with for this year's batch of new shows.

So that you may understand the depth of Levin's folly -- and because the ratings indicate that a good many of you have wisely avoided The WB like the plague since its inception -- a quick run through the network's history is in order.

For a couple of years after The WB's 1995 launch, the network's scant few hours of original programming were anything but. The lineup consisted mostly of very bad sitcoms; either disgustingly saccharine family fare like Kirk and Brotherly Love, or hackneyed retreads whose only novel aspect was that their casts included more than the industry-mandated quota of two minorities per series.

In 1998, The WB had its first real taste of success with Dawson's Creek, the television equivalent of a Sweet Valley High novel, only with bigger words and less nuanced characters. The unexpected popularity of Dawson revealed to surprised WB execs that not only do teenage girls exist, they also occasionally watch television. It also revealed that what teenage girls apparently most crave is to see angst-filled young men and women soliloquize using totally age-inappropriate vocabulary, then screw.

One season earlier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer had uncovered another relatively untapped well of viewers; the main difference being that the sci-fi nerd demographic is less interested in actually seeing characters screw, preferring instead to write frothing twenty-page diatribes on the subject to anybody on the Internet who is willing to read them. Buffy was already fairly popular with that crowd, but when the girls that came for the Van Der Beek stayed for the vampire-slaying pie, things really started to take off.

Since then, the network's most popular shows have gotten that way by catering to geeks, or girls, or geek girls. In fact, the only thing The WB has ever given normal males -- meaning the ones who don't have a line of credit at the local comic book store -- is Nikki Cox. And as she's recently graduated from dressing like a hooker on The WB to actually playing a hooker on NBC, those guys might as well just remove the network from their TV's channel list completely.

For any WB exec with half a brain in his head, the way ahead should be clear: simply glut the schedule with superheroes and girlie fare, and let the Nielsens fall where they may. But this is the network that kept The Wayans Bros. on the air for four excruciating years, so perhaps even half-sentience is a bit much to ask.

Levin was at least smart enough not to throw out any of his proven performers. The excellent Gilmore Girls and the TeeVee-approved thriller Angel both return to their usual time slots. Dreamy Tom Welling and that bald kid will reprise their respective roles for a third season of Jim Henson's Superman Babies (better known in the U.S. as Smallville). Charmed is also back for another go-'round, which is odd because nobody I've ever met has actually watched the show. But it's apparently an unwritten law in Hollywood that any Aaron Spelling vehicle that features boobs as central characters is guaranteed at least a six-season run. And speaking of long runs, 7th Heaven this year celebrates its milestone 150th season of helping religious people delude themselves into believing anyone still gives a damn about family values.

Everwood will also be back for a second season. It's one of only two turds from last year's bucket that actually stuck to the canvas, possibly because of its high corn content. One of the chief conceits of Everwood is that men, especially fathers, are basically idiots who invariably screw everything up, and they could all use a great big dose of sensitivity. Despite that, the show still managed to resonate with enough teenage girls to warrant a renewal. Weird.

The only other freshman show to survive the reckoning is What I Like About You, an affable comedy that stands out as the first WB sitcom I've ever been able to watch without cringing. Actually, that's not entirely true; I do seem to recall once enjoying an episode of Grounded For Life, which is also coming back for another season. But as I had completely forgotten about Grounded's very existence until I typed that last sentence, I really can't give it my highest recommendation.

Two more comedies also cleared the bar, effectively demonstrating just how low that bar is set. Sadly, one of them is the execrable Reba, which has again proven to be harder to get rid of than herpes, and twice as painful to sit through. Thanks a lot, heartland Nielsen households! Also, Jamie Kennedy will continue to Experiment for another year, although to what end I have no idea. Perhaps he's working to cure his time slot peers, Survivor and Scrubs, of their need to compete with him for viewers. In which case I'd say he's making excellent progress.

Not every show was renewed, of course, and as is the way with The WB, the brunt of the damage was taken by the sitcoms. Family Affair, Do Over, and Off Centre have all been given the well-deserved boot. Sabrina, the Teenage Witch -- its title shortened to Sabrina this year to reflect the fact that Melissa Joan Hart is now eligible to collect social security -- was likewise sent packing after enjoying a seven-year run. While many of the show's fans will be sad to see it go, others will take solace in knowing that Hart is now one step closer to doing real porn.

Sabrina's passing also marks the death of The WB's ill-advised attempt to replicate the success of ABC's TGIF lineup, and that means curtains for the well-intentioned but miserably-executed Greetings From Tucson. Ironically, this decision comes down just as ABC is announcing its new "Kill Me, It's Friday" lineup, which packs the star power of George Lopez, Breckin Meyer, and Kelly Ripa into one unspeakably horrible night.

Three WB dramas have also gone the way of the dodo. Birds of Prey barely got off the ground before flying headlong into extinction, despite its attempts to parrot the successful formula pioneered by Smallville. Birds' failure is widely attributed to two factors: the major liberties its premise took with the Batman franchise, and its overwhelming suckitude. Also gone is mid-season replacement, Black Sash. No, I've never heard of this show either, but I'm told that it featured martial arts and a hip young cast, and that it crapped out in less than a month.

Of those shows that won't be returning to the schedule, none leaves a more noticeable gap than the aforementioned Dawson's Creek. Dawson decided to leave of its own accord rather than wait to be shown the door, its ratings creek having dried up to a mere rivulet several years back. Amusingly, Dawson decided to end its run with an episode that took place several years into the future, which meant that for the first time in the show's history its cast only looked five years older than their characters, down from the usual ten.

Which brings me, at last, to the new blood. If anything, the loss of Dawson's Creek should have given The WB all the more impetus to fill the empty air time with more teen steam. And indeed, beautiful young adults comprise the cast of Run of the House, a new half hour comedy airing Thursdays at 9:30. According to the WB web site, the show is an examination of a recent sociological phenomenon supposedly known as The Boomerang Generation, which "refers to kids who grow up, leave home for college, and then come right back to the nest." I guess The Freeloading Drain to Society Generation just didn't have that snappy ring to it.

In Run of the House, three such slackers are tasked with bringing up their 15-year old sister while their parents, apparently members of The Neglectful Generation, are gallivanting around the globe. Normally, a teenage girl who might otherwise have the house to herself would be resentful as hell of her siblings trying to act as proxy parents. But in this case, one of those sibs is Joe Lawrence, the all-growed-up version of Joey Lawrence, erstwhile teen heartthrob and singing sensation. And when Joe's in tha hizzouse, the fun's sure to be a-poppin'. Whoa!

One thing Run of the House has going for it is creator Betsy Thomas, who wrote for the well-loved My So-Called Life, and has managed to avoid embarrassing herself in television since; although this may be because she hasn't done much of anything in television since, with the exception of one ABC sitcom that was cancelled before it ever aired. Also, the cast consists mainly of people who will appeal to network's biggest demographic, which is a good thing because the other new sitcoms in The WB's stable don't even come close.

Remember how The WB used to think they could sell ad time by taking terrible, generic comedies and putting black people in them? Well, 8 years and about a hundred cancelled sitcoms later, they're still fucking trying. Apparently they're hoping to relive the glory days of 1995, when the network's entire ratings share consisted of retro-loving channel surfers who paused for a moment on The WB because they thought they had run across an old episode of Good Times.

That would also explain why Good Times' John Amos is in the cast of in All About the Andersons, airing Fridays at 9:30. This family comedy tells the story of a black aspiring actor and single father who moves back in with his dad, the aforementioned Amos, to help make ends meet. Unfortunately, Pops has since rented out Junior's room to a presumably uptight white medical student. Oh, ho ho! Let the good times roll!

Fridays at 8:30 we get Like Family, in which hilarity ensues when a white single mother moves in with her friends -- a black family -- to help make ends meet. Say, does that description sound kind of familiar to you? No? Go watch a couple of reruns of The Jeffersons, or Diff'rent Strokes, or Chico and the Man. And after you're done with that, go back and reread the last paragraph.

Yes, not only is The WB still mining premises as old as the hills for its new sitcoms, this season it has actually based two different shows on exactly the same ancient premise. And according to the blurb for Like Family, "the two families argue about everything but skin color," which means that the only thing that was once interesting about this tired concept has been carefully excised so as not to offend anyone. In other words, this is just the umpteenth stupid show about two families with different outlooks on life who are living under the same roof. It's The Brady Brides, if Marcia and Wally were from the 'hood.

When is The WB going to learn that a crusty old premise cannot be made fresh simply by populating the cast with African-Americans? The fact is -- and both The WB and Subway would do well to remember this -- you can't make a shit sandwich taste any better, no matter how dark you toast the bread.

While we're on the subject of carbon copies, we may as well discuss Steve Harvey's Big Time. The origins of this show can be traced back to Fox's The Bernie Mac Show, which became a surprise hit and critical darling thanks to the considerable charisma of Mac himself and top-notch writing. The people at Fox, never ones to miss an opportunity to turn a triumph into an embarrassment, figured they could simply slap another of the Original Kings of Comedy into any cruddy old show and reap the same benefits. Thus was born the uninspired and laughless sketch comedy of Cedric the Entertainer Presents. And this fall we get to enjoy the uninspired and laughless Real People rip-off, Steve Harvey's Big Time.

Anyway, if your cup of tea is watching Steve Harvey make hi-larious quips between segments featuring bungee jumping nuns and contortionists who wedge themselves into filing cabinets, be sure to tune in Thursdays at 8. If nothing else, at least it will fill the time until Scrubs comes on.

But The WB has never been a network built on comedies; a good thing, too, since all of The WB's sitcoms combined couldn't prop up a paper clip. What of the network's bread and butter, its hour-long dramas?

Well, this year The WB is introducing exactly two. The first is the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Fearless, which follows a team of hot, young FBI agents as they chase down bad guys and stuff. One of these agents, played by former ugly duckling and lead pussycat Rachael Leigh Cook, was somehow born without the ability to feel fear. Hence the name, I guess. It's hardly high concept, but it certainly sounds like the sort of nonsense that usually goes over well on The WB.

There is one thing that bodes very badly for Fearless, though. EFor several years, CBS has been Bruckheimer's network of choice, yet he sold this show to The WB. This implies that Fearless is so bad that even Les Moonves wouldn't touch it; and considering that Les has just renewed CSI: Miami, that's really saying something.

I suppose it's possible that CBS thought Fearless wasn't a good fit for its older target demographic. If that's true, then why not shop it to UPN, another Moonves-led venture that would be happy to have a little chunk of The WB's audience? Is there such a thing as a show so bad that even UPN won't touch it? Tune in Tuesdays at 9 PM to find out... if you dare!

Finally, there's Tarzan and Jane, airing Sundays at 9 PM. As you might guess, this is a retelling of Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic boy-raised-by-apes tale. And when I say it's a retelling, what I mean is that the producers just made a bunch of shit up and tacked on the name Tarzan.

I guess the idea is that after two decades in the jungle -- which would make Tarzan, surprise surprise, a hot twentysomething -- Tarzan is captured by his billionaire uncle and taken to New York City. Once there, Tarzan escapes his uncle and, according to the WB web site, "From his rooftop perch, Tarzan protects the city with the primal morality that proclaimed [sic] him king of the jungle." No, I didn't make that up. Jane, in this case, is a hot, twentysomething police officer. Jane is already engaged to another cop, but upon meeting Tarzan she finds herself instantly drawn to the primal morality she senses burning deep within him. Well, that and his tight, twentysomething buns.

You know, it may be a little premature of me to say this, but I think I liked this show better the first time it aired, when it was called Beauty and the Beast. I mean, Ron Perlman as the Beast wasn't all hot and young like Tarzan's Travis Fimmel, but at least there were more obvious signs of his primal morality than a thousand yard stare and a haircut stolen from one of the kids in Hanson.

And another thing: I can understand wanting to bring the proven concept behind Smallville to bear on other projects, but Tarzan? Weren't there any more contemporary American legends available for the producers to rape? I'd wager that, were all parents not obligated to drag their kids to every single Disney film, most of The WB's current batch of viewers would never have heard of Tarzan at all. What's next, Flash Gordon? Pecos Bill? Barbershop Quartet, The Series?

Worse still -- and this is the one thing that I will consider unforgivable if it's not fixed by the time the show airs in the Fall -- there is as yet no indication of the presence of apes, or monkeys of any kind, in Tarzan and Jane. You have been warned.

So that's The WB's new fall schedule. Well, actually, there is still one hour of schedule left unfilled, but The WB elected to rerun the first season of Smallville in that slot rather than embarrass itself any further.

Let's tally this up: we've got three unremarkable, presumably horrendous sitcoms, one pseudo-reality show, one teenybopper version of Profiler, and one bastardization of classic American literature. Of these, only Tarzan and Jane seems to be the kind of show that has made The WB the favorite network of those who have recently experienced menarche. And because that show is based on a franchise that nobody's cared much about since the late fifties, I wouldn't expect it to pull in much of an audience.

What could have inspired Jordan Levin to concoct a schedule that runs so counter to common sense, that in fact takes several giant steps backwards toward The WB's dark ages? Barring some kooky scheme to sell the foundering network at a substantial loss for tax reasons, the only answer I can come up with is a deep-seated fear of achievement. Perhaps Levin actually enjoys the lower level of pressure in television's minor leagues. Maybe he fears that achieving success at The WB might earn him, like Garth Ancier before him, a call-up to NBC, whereupon he would live in constant fear of being replaced by some little bald guy.

Whatever the reason, it looks like another year knee-deep in programming dookie for this unfortunate exec.

Personally, I'd rather drive the foreskin truck.

As Buffy and her little friends are battling the forces of evil in a final showdown in Sunnydale, word comes that the Korean War has ended. Everyone is laid off, except for pompous newscaster Ted Baxter. Xander decides to finally consumate his on-again-off-again/will-they-or-won't-they relationship with prickly barmaid Dianne Chambers, but the wedding is called off at the last second when Giles reveals that he's really Robin Masters. Just as the gang is about to be thrown into jail for violating the Good Samaritan laws, Buffy wakes up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette and discovers that the last seven years have actually been a dream. Then the camera pulls back to reveal an autistic kid holding an "Angel" snowglobe.

I'm not 74 years old. So imagine my surprise when, upon reflecting on my choice of television networks, I discovered that I watch CBS more often than NBC. True, my Without a Trace viewing is mostly an act of protest against the Peacock's insistence on ER as a viable series, but seeing as how I'm at the lower half of the coveted 18-49 demographic NBC brags about owning, I hope my nettlesome viewing habits cause NBC President Jeff Zucker some sleepless nights. Anything to punish him for Fear Factor and Good Morning Miami.

Zucker could take some programming lessons from his CBS counterpart, Leslie Moonves. Despite winning the overall ratings race, Moonves decided not to stand pat on a proven schedule and will debut seven new series in the fall while moving some of his present triumphs to new nights and times. The Eye Network's shows may constitute the most vanilla prime-time on the air, but it's nice to see executives that actually worry about getting complacent.

The first step in keeping CBS energized seems to be to establish its identity as the Initials Network, setting what must be a new broadcast record with fully four hours of its schedule next year composed of acronyms. In addition to established hits CSI, JAG and CSI: Miami, Navy CIS joins the Tuesday night lineup. In a rare stroke of spin-off genius, CBS has created a program that combines two of its biggest hits: CIS takes Mark Harmon off of JAG and plops him in a show could just have easily been titled CSI: Submarine. Not that Harmon's Naval Investigative Service character will be restricted to subs -- you can rest assured he'll be analyzing DNA from destroyers and taking fingerprints off F-14s.

If JAG creator Donald Bellisario, CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Law and Order showrunner Dick Wolf were smart, they'd get together and create the ultimate spin-off: CSI: CI CIS.

Bruckheimer will have more than CSI to keep him busy this year as he really stretches his producer wings to present Cold Case, a new crime drama about a Philadelphia homicide investigator who solves old cases. While another new crime drama, The Handler, sounds like it should be produced by Bruckheimer, it's not. This one centers on a Los Angeles-based FBI veteran who trains new agents. At first glance, the only reason anyone should care about this is that the show stars the terrific Joe Pantoliano, who, when we last saw him on The Sopranos, was having a hard time keeping his neckties on.

If there were any doubt about which is the real law-and-order network, CBS seems bound and determined to eradicate it. Nine of CBS's 24 fall shows center on police, forensic scientists or ex-cops turned detectives. Throw in The Guardian and Judging Amy and you've got 11 hours a week devoted to the legal system.

Strangely, David E. Kelley's new CBS series is not about the legal system, although one of the characters is the Chief of Police. Kelley's new offering is The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. a small-town drama about three brothers living in a quirky, small New England town. If the first words out of your mouth are "Wasn't Picket Fences cancelled a long time ago?" go to the head of the class.

Leading into Brotherhood's 10 p.m. Wednesday time slot will be The Stones. Anchored behind the newly-moved King of Queens, this sitcom tells the story of parents going through a divorce while still supporting two leech-like grown children who live with them. With a sweet time slot and the proven CBS track record of family comedies that are just the right combination of bland and inoffensive, The Stones promises to be one of those shows you watch and forget about, only to look at a TV Guide in four years and exclaim, "The Stones is still on the air?"

The other new sitcom Two and a Half Men, is also a family comedy, but it's a family comedy with a difference: Charlie Sheen. Sheen and Jon Cryer star as swinging bachelors suddenly forced to live with their 10-year old nephew. Sure, the premise isn't exactly groundbreaking but I hear the scene where the kid discovers Sheen's little black book will make you laugh while it makes you think.

Finally, while Touched by an Angel may have left this mortal coil, CBS picks up the slack with a drama called Joan of Arcadia that revolves around a teenage girl than talks with God. No word yet on what God has to say but it probably isn't anything useful like who to bet on in the Super Bowl. Early rumors indicated the producers rejected sponsorship from the makers of several anti-psychotic drugs and that they had to rewrite a script after Rev. Donald Wildmon protested that God would have better things to do than make Joan prom queen. Can you imagine the poor guy that asks Joan out? First dates are nerve-wracking enough -- but when your conversation has to compare with the Almighty's, dinner at Chili's and bowling just won't cut it.

1. The one where Buffy slays a bunch of vampires.

2. The one where one of the main characters gets killed, only to unexpectedly return in a future episode.

3. The one where the main character who was good suddenly turns evil. Or was it a main character who was evil and suddenly turns good? I forget.

4. The one where everybody sings; I believe it was called The Music Man.

5. The one where nobody sings, electing instead to be really really quiet.

5.5. Actually, I didn't see that last one, but I'm told that it's one of my favorites.

6. The one where Connor entombs Angel at the bottom of the ocean.

7. The one where Mal ends up married to Saffron, then Saffron beats up Mal and Wash, and then the Serenity is captured by pirates.

8. The one where Willow jams a flute up her tookie.

9. The one where Buffy discovers that her father has died, then she turns evil and beats up Spike, who is revealed to actually be Angel, only he can't talk because Xander has turned into a warlock and cast a spell on Angel's tongue so that it's good (even as the rest of Angel is evil) and therefore refuses to say anything on principle. I think there was also some singing in this one.

10. The one that I actually saw thirty minutes of.

After six and a half seasons and 144 episodes, it's time to say goodbye to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show's been around almost as long as this site, and we've been fans from early on. I chanced upon the show's premiere at about the same time I was reviewing the horrible Pauly Shore vehicle Pauly -- just to give you some idea of the time sequence here.

My goal, if we're generous enough to ascribe goals to a bunch of college pals posting screeds about TV on the new medium of the Web in the heady days of 1997, was probably to compare the awfulness of Fox's Pauly to the awfulness of The WB's Buffy. Who knows? Instead, it became a study of contrasts: the established network creating awful programming while the fledgling crap-fest known as The WB actually created something interesting.

More, importantly, it allows me to quote myself six years later:

It's hard to count just how many ways Buffy the Vampire Slayer should be horrendous. And so it's only fair to single its creators and producers out and tell them they've sneaked on one of the most fun shows I've seen this year.

See? Told you so.

So without any more ado -- and without any mention of the many times we've bestowed our fictitious TeeVee Awards on Buffy while the industry's major fictitious awards, the Emmys, have ignored the show -- we present a small salute to Buffy, as the three Vidiots who hold Buffy dearest (myself, Monty Ashley, and Gregg Wrenn) present our favorite episodes.

So long, Buffy. Job well done. Time to ride off into the sunset.

--Jason Snell

Despite what I have written in this space, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While its spin-off Angel may have taken the crown as the most fun you can have in prime time, Buffy stands alone as a monument to artistic accomplishment in what is usually a fairly artless medium. In a recent A&E special about the series, creator Joss Whedon said he wanted to make more than a TV show, he wanted to "create an icon." Over the past seven seasons, he's done just that.

1. "Once More, With Feeling." Simply the most amazing hour of television I've ever seen. The cliché of a TV show affecting one's real life always rang hollow until this episode. A couple of years ago, I left the opening stages of a television career for something unrelated, in large part because prime time seemed nothing but a vast desert of Temptation Island, Dateline NBC and Shasta McNasty. "Once More With Feeling" proved that TV wasn't dead. Joss Whedon's musical was so creative, so original, so inventive I spent the next week wondering if I had made the right choice. It didn't change anything in the long run, but that's the only time a piece of TV has ever left such a mark on me.

2. "Becoming, Part 2." The second-season finale proved just how powerful Buffy could be. Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance is her best of the series, with the exception of "The Body." We get to see evil Angel, a superb fight and an excruciating death when Buffy kills the man she loves. Every other series on TV at that time would have weaseled its way out of killing Angel, but the Buffy producers refused to pull any punches (and then brought Angel back from hell the next year).

3. "Innocence." A hot chick. A rocket launcher. What else could you possibly want?

4. "Fool For Love." Spike's story in his own words. The battle between him and a Chinese slayer is one of Buffy's best and James Marsters' performance proves just how deep the Buffy acting bench is. There's a stunning scene in which Spike talks about the secret death wish all Slayers harbor. Marsters' perfectly cold-blooded recital of a Ginsu-sharp speech during a couple of intercut fight scenes is three of the series' finest minutes.

5. "Passion." Angel at his evilest and Giles finally breaks out of stuffy librarian mode. Leave it to Whedon and crew to make a voice-over narration work.

6. "Conversations with Dead People." Who says Buffy's lost steam the last couple seasons? Well, I did. But you wouldn't know it from this show. As smartly written as any episode, the centerpiece is Buffy's encounter with a former classmate turned vampire-slash-psychologist. Once again the Buffy writers continue their remarkable streak of being genuinely moving without falling into sappy melodrama while Dawn's encounter with her mother's ghost is scarier than any X-Files episode.

7. "Hush." Like "The Body" and "Once More, With Feeling," this one seems to be a requirement for any "Buffy" Top 10. Forty minutes without a word and it was still the most interesting thing on TV that month. OK, Joss, you're a genius. We get it. Show-off.

8. "Selfless." With the exception of Spike, Anya is my favorite character not from the original cast. Emma Caulfield may spend most of her time as comic relief but she can act serious better than any other cast member outside of Gellar. This episode gives Caulfield a chance to shine in both comedy and drama as it explores Anya's past. In a series that has given us dozens of remarkably striking images, the brilliant cut from a musical "Once More, With Feeling" flashback to Anya impaled on a wall is one of the most incredible.

9. "The Body." The first half-hour hits like Ronnie Lott. Gellar's agonizing performance as she discovers her dead mother will take your breath away. The scene in Willow's dorm room where Xander, Willow, Tara and Anya talk about the death is just as wrenching, especially Anya's questions about human mortality. My favorite moment is just a little thing, though: A distraught Buffy is talking to a paramedic who arrived too late to save her mother and the camera never shows anything above the man's shoulders. His head is cut out of the entire scene, even while he's talking. It's that kind of small detail that showed Whedon is as accomplished a director as he is a writer.

The second half hour is a lot of Dawn, who I just don't like. Go ahead, Buffy zealots, take your best shot.

10. "The Zeppo." I was never a big fan o' Xander, but this is an exception. "The Zeppo" is one of the series' funniest episodes with a beautiful parallel structure that features Xander trying to be cool while Buffy and the rest of the gang avert yet another apocalypse, only this time they're saving the world offscreen.

--Gregg Wrenn

This is probably a different list from most people's.

10. "Faith, Hope, and Trick." I'm a big fan of supporting characters who entertain me. And I'm not just talking about Faith; I always liked Mr. Trick. He had it goin' on! Plus, he was willing to let his master get killed, because it seemed easier than stopping two vampire slayers. And then, just as Buffy explains all about how she had to kill Angel after he got his soul and everyone has a good emotional scene, Angel's back! And to make it extra-disturbing, he's naked and glistening!

9. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Hey, quit mocking the movie. It's a lot of fun. Plus it's got Luke Perry and Paul Reubens. The reason I didn't watch the show when it first started was that everyone kept saying "Don't worry, it's nothing like the movie." And I happen to like the movie, so there.

8. "Selfless." My favorite character is Anya. She's been in first place for several seasons now. She's "forthright," by which I mean that she says everything she thinks. And she's always right. Always! She's just much funnier and more perceptive than everyone else. So I enjoyed the look into her backstory.

7. "Bad Eggs." I'm also a big fan of any character who occasionally shows an ounce of common sense. And in this episode, there were a couple of cowboy vampires called "The Gorge Brothers". And do you know what they did the first time they met Buffy? They ran away! And at the end, even though Buffy's killed one of them, the surviving one quite sensibly runs away again. And his reward is to still be alive at the end of the episode!

6. "Once More, With Feeling." I like musicals! And if you ask me, there's a distinct Sondheim influence in it.

5. "Homecoming." I don't know why I enjoyed this episode so much. Part of it, obviously, is that not only is Mr. Trick back, but he brought back the surviving cowboy vampire (who escapes again!). But really, I just got a kick out of Buffy and Cordelia both trying to be Homecoming Queen.

4. "Angel." This is where the series really started to be about something, as Angel turns out to be a vampire and the Anointed One turns out to be named Colin. (Colin? Really?) Also, considering that Darla got killed in this episode, she sure shows up a lot in later episodes and on Angel's own show.

3. "Doppelgangland." Because, well, Evil Willow is hot. Also, when Good Willow is pretending to be Evil Willow, it's pretty funny. And it's a tricky acting job, when you think about it.

2. "Prophecy Girl." I put this in solely for Buffy's speech about how she's sixteen years old and doesn't want to die. I nearly rejected it, though, because of the spot where Angel says that Xander has to do the CPR, because vampires have no breath. It would have been more convincing if Angel weren't panting and taking deep breaths while he said the line.

1. "The Prom." "We're not good friends. Most of us never took the time to get to know you. But that doesn't mean we haven't noticed you. We don't talk about it much, but it's no secret that Sunnydale High isn't really like other high schools. A lot of weird stuff happens here. But whenever there was a problem or something creepy happened, you seemed to show up and stop it. Most of the people here have been saved by you, or helped by you at one time or another. We're proud to say that the Class of '99 has the lowest mortality rate of any class in Sunnydale history. And we know at least part of that is because of you. So the senior class offers its thanks. And gives you this. It's from all of us. And it has written here, 'Buffy Summers, Class Protector.'"

--Monty Ashley

10. "The Replacement." As this list will make clear, Xander is my favorite character on "Buffy." Joss Whedon has said that Xander is the logical extension of what Buffy is trying to say about female empowerment: he's a guy who is just fine with the idea of a woman as the leader of the pack. He's also a great, funny character -- and the perfect ending to the show would have been to have Buffy and Xander end up together. Damn that Spike for complicating things. In any event, this episode is all about Xander, since he's split into two (love the de rigueur "Star Trek" reference: "Kill us both, Spock!") and has to learn the hard way just what potential for strength lies within him.

9. "The Puppet Show." At several points in the first, truncated season of Buffy, I realized just what a special show I was seeing. But it was clinched with "Puppet Show," a combination of horror and fall-down-laughing humor that was perfectly aware about the hoary plot device (ventriloquist's dummy comes alive! aiee!) that lay at the center of the episode.

8. "The Wish." A chance to turn the entire premise on its head for an hour, as Cordelia makes a wish (to future series regular Anya) and discovers herself in an alternate Sunnydale ruled by Vampires. Willow and Xander are there -- in top form as evil vamps -- and best of all, Cordelia herself gets killed before the story can even get rolling. In the end, a scarred and battered Buffy who's been spending her time at the Hellmouth in Cleveland (finale reference alert!) arrives to save the day, or at least get killed and allow Giles and company to return reality to its rightful place.

7. "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest." The series' two-hour premiere really is unlike most pilots, in that it's both representative of the series as a whole and actually good. Xander, Willow, Buffy, and Giles emerge fully formed here, and we even get a red herring character, Jesse, who looks like a regular until he's turned into a vampire and staked. Tough break, Jesse! You missed out on 142 great adventures.

6. "Becoming, Part 2." Buffy runs Angel through with a sword, sending him to hell just as his soul is restored. It doesn't get any more tragic and operatic than that. Plus, Spike gets pragmatic and lives to fight another day.

5. "The Zeppo." Xander again, this time in an episode that plays with the series format by showing what happens to our so-called extraneous character while the rest of the cast is saving the world. An apocalypse is averted entirely in the background, while Xander confronts his own issues -- and saves the world himself -- in the foreground. A great character-driven episode that also has something to say about how the show's plot devices and cast interactions function.

4. "Once More, With Feeling." It's got to be on just about everyone's list, and justifiably so. But this episode isn't a success because the songs are great, or because the cast sings them well -- most of them are not Broadway-bound, let's just say that. No, it works because the songs fit perfectly with the show's plot and characters, making a cohesive whole that's far more than the sum of its parts. I will admit that this episode also holds a place in my heart because while it aired, I was in the hospital with my wife, who was about to give birth to our daughter.

3. "Hush." Joss Whedon's best performance as a writer-director, a largely dialogue-free episode that shows off the pure acting talent of his cast. Sure, the bad guys are pinched from "Dark City." But they're still creepy. And isn't that Riley lad perfectly palatable when he's not speaking?

2. "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." The ultimate Xander episode, and one of the funniest things I have ever seen on television. Xander is "cursed" with a love spell that makes every woman in Sunnydale (except his intended target, Cordelia) fall madly in love with him. Sounds great, until the jealousy mounts and the women get all "Fatal Attraction" on him.

1. "Passion." An incredibly brutal episode, unflinchingly dealing with what must be the logical outcome of previous episodes. Angel has turned evil, but keeps all his intimate knowledge of Buffy and the gang -- and uses it to intimately torture them. Angel's voice-over narration as he watches Buffy from outside her window is chilling, and the series' saddest moment is when Giles returns home, believing that Jenny Calendar is awaiting him in bed -- only to find that she's been murdered by Angel, who set the entire romantic scenario up simply for cruel effect. Few, if any, series have had the guts to be so cruel to its characters. The effect is breathtaking.

--Jason Snell

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

There aren't many new shows on UPN. The network only programs two hours a day, doesn't do weekends, and Friday is a movie. So once you figure that Thursday is given over to WWE Smackdown! (exclamation point included, as per law) and there are a couple sitcoms that didn't get cancelled (The Parkers and One by One), you're pretty much out of space. Even so, they've decided not to bring back a whole lot of shows.

First, of course, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The beloved series ends seven years on the air, the last two of which were on UPN and really sucked. The big question was whether UPN would try to hold onto the Buffy demographic, or let them go on the theory that they've probably all been alienated by the show itself. The answer, as it happens, is that they're going to be throwing terrible half-hour comedies at the wall in the blind hope that something will stick.

They're also not bringing back Twilight Zone, possibly because it got lower ratings than the Sci-Fi channel's reruns of the original version. Apparently, not everyone finds Forrest Whittaker as creepy as I do. And did you ever see Platinum? It was pretty good, although I'm basing that opinion on having watched the first half of two episodes. Still, that's more than anyone else saw. Also cancelled were Haunted and Abby, about which I know nothing. They could be making up the show names for all I know.

Okay, let's get to the new stuff.

The first thing that UPN hopes you will find funny and easy to relate to is All of Us, a show based on the lives of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith. You know, like the difficulties inherent in being young, fabulously wealthy, and absurdly talented. Frankly, I didn't even know people were sitting around laughing at the Smiths' problems. Although I have to admit I got a chuckle at the idea that Will was going back to the "Bad Boys" well, presumably in an attempt to wash the taste of "Wild Wild West" out of people's minds.

Oh, wait. It seems the show will be a bit more ordinary than I thought. There's a guy with a child and an ex-wife, and he's got a new girlfriend, so the Situation (which will lead to Comedy) is that he's trying to build a new life while still keeping his ex-wife involved in his child's life. In what may be a first for television, this actually isn't ridiculous. I know at least two people in that situation, which is two more than the number of teeny black orphans I know that got adopted by rich white families.

Dropping farther down the ladder is The Mullets. It seems there's a family of dumb people, and they've got mullets, and there's Loni Anderson. And the big joke is that they're all idiots. Whoopee.

In the Inevitable Star Vehicle, we've got Eve in The Opposite Sex. She plays a total hottie who tries to go on dates and work while assisted by wacky friends.

Then there's Rock Me Baby. Dan Cortese has somehow forced his way back on television, and he's playing a thinly-disguised version of Howard Stern. He's a radio shock jock with a wife, and he has to balance his duty to his job (his boss insists he be "edgier") and his duty to his wife (his wife would prefer he cut back on the stupid gross stuff). Because this is a television show, the stupid gross stuff will obviously win out. Say, have you noticed how often television characters have to "balance" stuff? Eve has to balance dating and work, Dan Cortese has to balance his home life and his professional obligation to lower the common denominator, and the guy playing Will Smith has to balance his girlfriend and his ex-wife. I don't know if anyone's balancing anything in The Mullets, but I wouldn't be surprised.

There's also one new drama, because after all, they've got to put something on after Enterprise. And that something is called Jake 2.0, which sounds to me like they thought of it over drinks the night before the announcement was due.

"Okay, so there's this guy Jake, right? And he's a computer geek."

"I hate it."

"Wait! Let me finish! And there are these things called 'nanites,' which are really tiny robots, and they infest his body and give him superpowers."

"Now we're getting somewhere!"

"So the government makes him the center of a... I don't know, a special-ops team or something. With a doctor and a chick and his roommate, and some other people. Yeah!"

"But if he's a computer geek, doesn't that mean the show's got to have a lot of typing?"

"No, because, see, the nanites let him, like, communicate with computers. Telepathically. And that way we don't need the typing."

And so on. If you ask me, it all sounds suspiciously like Automan. Which would be great!

So after all that, UPN's schedule is all sitcoms on Monday and Tuesday, Enterprise and Automan 2.0 on Wednesday, Pro Wrestling on Thursday, and a movie on Friday. To the extent that they've got a brand identity, I guess it's that they've got more African-Americans than other channels. Too bad most of the shows are so bad.

I came home from doing the laundry Monday night to find the husband completely entranced by the Three's Company movie on NBC. Since the husband is usually the one to avoid total crap while I TiVo it and claim, "But it's hilarious in an ironic way!" I was intrigued by his viewing choice, and within moments, got sucked in at well.

Basically, the Three's Company movie centers on how much pleasure ABC took from delivering humiliation upon humiliation to the deluded and arrogant Suzanne Somers; for about forty minutes, I was wondering whether ABC executives spent the early 1980s deriving all their personal joy from thinking up new torments for one measly actress who had overestimated her value, and how much longer I'd have to wait before their moustache-twirling, cloven hooves, forked tails, etc. became completely obvious to us, the viewers at home.

Anyway, as the victimized Suzanne Somers is initiated into each fresh Hell, the camera makes sure the ABC logo is featured prominently, as if to tell us, the viewers at home, "ABC is the network of heartless corporate blackguards!" Because, as we all know, NBC is the network with a heart, so long as your definition of "heart" is "providing lifelong employment for Dick Wolf and John Wells."

Anyway, I think in another ten years, when UPN is airing the made-for-TV movie about how ABC imploded in the early Aughties, we're going to be seeing a lot of shots where ABC executives like Susan Lyne and Lloyd Braun are standing in front of giant ABC logo and cackling evilly as they say, "We'll give America what it deserves ... Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa, sharing a screen! Mwa-ha-ha-ha!"

Yes, ABC is giving us Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa, in what they claim will be a comedy. Hope and Faith is about two sisters: one is a housewife, the other a recently-deposed soap opera queen, and through contrived circumstances, the two are thrown together to laugh and love and... and I'm sorry. I don't have the will to go on anymore, because this seems eerily similar to other failed sitcoms about antagonistic G-list celebrities and the people they demand love them, like Over the Top and Encore! Encore!. The only difference is that the megalomaniacal celebrity this time out is female. How forward-thinking of ABC.

Come to think of it, ABC seems to be staking its comedy strategy on the premise that we, the viewers at home, find people in the public eye fascinating and endearing. Two of the returning comedies -- Less Than Perfect and Life With Bonnie prominently feature a television show office so we can gawk at the antics of the people other folks presumably tune in to watch. We've already discussed the fame factor in Hope and Faith, but we have not yet examined the premise behind I'm With Her. In a nutshell, it's writer Chris Henchy working out his issues about being Mr. Brooke Shields; Teri Polo is the titular celebrity of the series and the weekly adventures of her significant other (tellingly, his identity isn't mentioned in most of the press materials; the hapless schmuck is played by David Sutcliffe) as he mediates his wife's fame are supposed to be funny and not, say, weird and uncomfortable as ABC's Alias viewers are reminded of Jennifer Garner's recent marital woes vis-a-vis her celebrity ascendance and her soon-to-be-ex-husband's career plateau.

The point is, ABC expects that we will tune in because we are interested in celebrities. They may have a point: we are a country that has not scorned the self-impressed idiocy of either US magazine or your typical reality show contestant in hot pursuit of notoriety, so there's clearly some interest on our part. However, the guidelines driving celebrity-obsessed media like InStyle and reality shows are the complimentary fictions that fame is easy to come by and celebrities are just like us, only more attractive and luckier. A sitcom which points out that neither myth is rooted in reality might actually force people to contemplate -- if only for an instant, before People runs another cover on a Friends cast member or the collective organism known as Bennifer Affpez -- that maybe there's more to celebrity than happenstance and a magic Hollywood fairy making your dreams come true, and maybe celebrities can be awful people who don't deserve half the good things they get. Since neither of those ideas is funny, it's going to be hard to see how shows that send up celebrities and celebrity culture will be.

Fortunately, ABC has its family sitcoms to fall back on. Although 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter is surprisingly not awful, thanks to the able comic stylings of former Suzanne Somers colleague John Ritter and Katey Sagal, the same cannot be said of the execrable and unfortunately returning According to Jim, and there's nothing to say at all about My Wife and Kids or George Lopez except that three years from now, I'm going to be taking a sick day and watching the USA network at 9:30 a.m. and wondering how in the hell either show made enough episodes to warrant cable syndication, the same way I do now whenever Boston Common shows up on my television.

The two most recent additions to ABC's family sitcom family are Back to Kansas, wherein Breckin Meyer is evidently perpetually shocked that his wife was not grown in a Monsanto lab, but in fact was born of human man and woman in Kansas, and It's All Relative, which had to have been pitched as "It's a sitcom about red-necked bigots and gays who are now related by marriage. Whoo-boy!" How fortunate that the humor in a show which associates specific character traits with the characters' annual income levels is in no way lessened by the implication that money is the critical factor in character. ABC's tapping right into the national zeitgeist by setting up a comic clash of economic classes with that one, aren't they?

That's not the only area in which ABC is attempting to ride current events. They've got a new show called Threat Matrix which focuses on an elite team of people working in the Department of Homeland Security. It should be riveting, what with the episodes centering around the indefinite detaining of non-citizens for reasons unknown to the detainee, and the special agents poring over the personal records of people they suspect as terrorists without having to go to the trouble of getting a warrant. ABC promises "stories ripped from today's headlines," so I look forward to the episode where the Threat Matrix defuses a terrorist threat by going over the library check-out records of people who have written smart-assed things about the government on penny-ante Web sites.

For those who tune into ABC solely to watch babes kick a little evil ass, there is second tough-girl series on this fall, Karen Sisco, which hopes that the teeming throngs who fondly remember the 1998 movie which opened doors for that nice, lucky Jennifer Lopez will flock to this "Out of Sight" spinoff. There is no Jennifer Lopez in the series; there is, instead, Carla Gugino. With luck, she will not be digitally erased from this series as if she never existed, but knowing ABC's track record, she should make backup recordings of whatever episodes air on Wednesday nights, just to be sure.

Finally -- since there is apparently an FCC regulation stipulating that no network be allowed to broadcast without at least one cop show -- there's a cop show 10-8. In a startling break from tradition, the show isn't about New York cops -- but it is about a New York cop who moves to Los Angeles, since the one thing that viewers are thirsting for are more New York cops, location be damned.

There are mid-season replacement shows, but the rate at which ABC is releasing its howlers into the wild, there's as strong a possibility of the network's folding in on itself when the collective suck of its shows creates a black hole as there is of any of these shows airing. The scheduling for these shows is a mix-and-match grab bag that all but acknowledges that ABC will be getting its ass kicked on Saturday, Sunday and Thursday.

The big problem, however, isn't that ABC's running shows in the wrong time slots; that's a programming tweak which can easily be corrected once counter-programming strategies for a new season are set. The problem is that ABC has absolutely no identity as a channel. Nearly every other network on the dial implements a strategy that is both simple and consistent: WB -- teenaged girls and the people who raise them; NBC -- electing (probably foolishly) to be the "quality" network with critically-acclaimed shows; FOX -- mold-bursting experiments with a testosterone bent; CBS -- a focus on telling entertaining stories over raking in Emmy noms. ABC, however, has nothing. It lacks a deep bench of entertaining dramas, it lacks any prestige shows (Alias is a guilty pleasure and NYPD Blue should have been euthanized two years ago), it lacks any breakout comedies, and its one reality hit, The Bachelor, gets progressively creepier with each incarnation.

This fall's new programs do nothing to shore up any of ABC's strategic weaknesses; if anything, they only emphasize how confused the network is about what it wants to be when it grows up. It wants to have family comedies! It wants to have current dramas! It wants ... frankly, at this point, the one thing ABC should be aspiring toward is a television season in which it's not yanking the previous year's offerings off the air in shame.

If that made-for-TV movie gets made in 2023, the 2003 fall season at ABC may well go down in history as a dramatic turning point for the network. Unfortunately, it's still not clear whether the network executives are the villains of the movie for unleashing Breckin Meyer upon us yet again, or if they'll be playing the hapless Suzanne Somers role, wondering what in the hell happened just when it seemed like everything was beginning to turn around.

So Fox held itself a Sweeps-inspired reunion special for seminal teen-angst series Beverly Hills 90210 to celebrate its lasting mark upon our cultural landscape and for paving the way for other angsty teen series like Dawson's Creek and Felicity and Oz. And while many of the former cast members appeared on the show -- surprisingly, Gabrielle Carteris was available -- others were nowhere to be found. Chief among the no-shows was long-time TeeVee favorite Tori Spelling, who won the hearts of viewers everywhere with her oft-riveting portrayal of the sainted, virginal Donna Martin.

Land a role in "The House of Yes," I suppose, and the success goes right to your head.

I think I speak for everyone with even a passing familiarity with the Beverly Hills 90210 oeuvre when I say that a reunion special without Tori Spelling is like having no reunion special at all. That's like putting on a production of "Hamlet" without Hamlet. Or at least, without the lantern-jawed no-talent offspring of "Hamlet's" director.

We've got a lot of problems in the world these days. The economy is a mess, and no one really has a clue about how to fix this whole SARS deal, and, boy, is that whole Middle East a thorny problem or what? But to listen to the collective wisdom of our nation's television reporters, the uneasiest head to wear a crown these days belongs to Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment. To hear the pundits tell it, Zucker, three years into his current gig at the Peacock Network, faces a knotty task that makes reviving the stock market, curing a mysterious epidemic or rebuilding a war-torn nation seem as daunting as deciding what wine to order with the fish -- find a hit series to replace Friends before the aging program finishes its victory lap at the end of next season.

Last week the New York Daily News -- the paper of record for pun-laden headlines -- seemed to carry daily updates on NBC's frantic search for a Friends replacement. The New York Times, in what we can only presume is a break from the newspaper's recent tradition of reportage based on fraud and deception, led off its coverage of NBC's fall-schedule announcement by raising the specter of Friends' imminent departure. And the most recent issue of Fortune features a picture of Zucker, bestriding the world like a short, bald Colossus, next to the headline "Jeff Zucker Faces Life Without Friends."

Then again, Jeff Zucker faced the exact same problem at this time last year. Nearly every indication was that Friends would wrap things up following its ninth season, go gently into that good night, and leave NBC high and dry and without a marquee show for the first time since Bill Cosby tried on a sweater and invited us all to enjoy a nice, refreshing pudding pop. Zucker's solution was a simple oneÑconvince the cast and crew of Friends to come back for a 10th season that would conclude in May 2004. And this he did, through what was undoubtedly a multi-front effort involving begging, dump trucks filled with money, and a weekend long film festival entitled "My Poor Career Decisions" featuring consecutive showings of The Pallbearer, Almost Heroes and Ed until Matt LeBlanc began sobbing uncontrollably and David Schwimmer's belt and shoelaces had to be taken away.

(As if to drive this point home, the Fortune article -- on newsstands now, featuring cover boy Steve Jobs vowing to revolutionize the music industry via 99-cent downloads of "Soak Up the Sun" -- features a picture of Zucker surrounded by the cast of Friends. He is chatting away amicably, happy and visibly relieved. The actors, on the other hand, look vaguely annoyed, hanging around long enough only for the oversized novelty check to show up for the photo opportunity before they can retreat to the safety of their mansions and their hangers-on and their David Cox-Arquettes.)

So who's to say that a year from now, Zucker won't pull the same rabbit out of a hat? Another year of boffo ratings, the promise of even more money, and the realization that America's cineplex patrons are not exactly clamoring for "Kissing A Fool II" or "Three More to Tango" might convince everyone involved in Friends to re-up for an 11th season. Who cares if we're rapidly approaching episodes in which Joey receives his AARP card and Monica and Chandler get into a hilarious squabble when they miss the early-bird senior's special at the local diner and Rachel shatters her hip? Ratings are ratings.

Make no mistake: NBC will need something to fill the breach if and when Friends ever leaves the airwaves. The network hasn't enjoyed a true breakout hit since Will & Grace -- and that will be six years ago, come this fall. Sure, Scrubs is an outstanding program, but its creative achievements haven't met with equal success in the ratings. It's not the like the show's audience has sunk into the sea in the Thursday-at-8:30-p.m. time slot, but the fact that we're wrapping up a Scrubs-free Sweeps with NBC having burned off all the new episodes by late April should tell you all you need to know about whether the network feels as warmly toward Scrubs as it does toward, say, Friends reruns from the late '90s.

The rest of NBC's roster of hits has either begun aging in dog years or watched helplessly as the heights of its creative apogee grow ever smaller in the rear-view mirror. Or -- in most cases -- both. Like Friends, Frasier could be headed into its final season; unlike Friends, the curtain call may not necessarily be completely voluntary -- though it is entirely overdue. With the departure of Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing is losing its creator and primary writer -- rather fitting, since the show has already lost its direction, critical buzz, 22 percent of its audience and its marbles. NBC proudly announced that ER will be with us for another four years, thus fulfilling the wishes of anyone who's ever dreamed of watching Noah Wyle age rapidly on camera. Not to pick on ER, since it's gone from being the top-rated show in the country to getting systematically pimp-slapped by different portions of CBS's Thursday night lineup, but to call that show a shell of its former self is an insult to the intricate, durable and thoroughly utilitarian qualities of shells the world over.

How grim are things for NBC? Dateline, the news magazine program that once enjoyed a Starbucks-like ubiquity on NBC's schedule, has been pared down to a mere two installments per week, thus slashing America's intake of lurid-crime tales and jury-rigged product exposes by a full third. Somehow, I think we as a nation will be able to pull through, though I can't make the same promise for Stone Phillips and Maria Shriver.

Of course, NBC's other franchise -- the mammoth, unstoppable juggernaut of Law & Order-themed programming -- continues to thrive, ceaselessly beating its paddles toward the shores of prime-time dominance. There's Law & Order: Original Flavor, of course, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Chunky-Style, I think -- all going strong no matter how many cast members Dick Wolf throws over the side. Also returning to Monday nights is Third Watch, which isn't a Law & Order spin-off -- Law & Order: Vanilla? Law & Order: Now with Firemen? Law & Order: Bosco's Revenge? -- though it very well could be, were it not very interesting and if people weren't stunningly indifferent toward it.

Three of the five shows NBC introduced in the fall return for a second season, led by American Dreams which sated viewers' insatiable appetite for pabulum, self-indulgent Baby-Boomer nostalgia and ham-fisted The-Turbulent-'60s-As-Metaphor-For-Family-Life hackery. Those same viewers were probably less pleased with the unconventional narrative approach and relentlessly depressing tone of Boomtown -- their loss, since Boomtown was among the handful of really good shows to make it to prime-time this season. NBC is moving the show to Friday nights where it's likely to find a more receptive audience without the expectations that come with a Sunday night timeslot. Boomtown's renewal can only be considered a pleasant surprise. Equally surprising, though decidedly less pleasant is the return of Good Morning, Miami. With the equally terrible sitcoms Hidden Hills and In Laws slated for a one-way trip to the boneyard, Good Morning, Miami's renewal means it will head into next fall as the undisputed worst sitcom in the English-speaking world. Still, on a positive note, the show's return will be welcome news to... well, not humanity, certainly, but I'm sure the cast and crew are thrilled to know they'll still receive paychecks. Even if it is blood money.

(Actually, Good Morning Miami's return to the airwaves is rumored to be on the condition that Heather Locklear join the cast, in the apparent hope that Richie Sambora's better half can do for this turkey what she did for Spin City -- namely, keep the show on the air long after anyone notices or cares.)

In another surprise, NBC decided to bring Ed back for a fourth year, restoring it to its pre-West Wing timeslot on Wednesdays. This move will undoubtedly astonish and please fans of the show as much as it will shock Ed's producers, who were so convinced that they were helming a death ship that they wrapped up the seemingly interminable Ed-loves-Carol contretemps in the season finale last month. Long-time fans of the show hope that, with the Ed-Carol silliness resolved, the show will regain the luster of its freshman season and explore new, wonderfully quirky directions. Cynics figure that the producers will probably panic, pretend that the season finale was a Bobby-Ewing-is-lathering-up-in-the-shower-style dream and backslide into the will-they-or-won't-they tedium that's made Ed unwatchable for the past season-and-a-half.

If you're wondering what camp I fall into, you're probably new around here. In fact, I suspect you just started reading a couple of paragraphs ago.

Crossing Jordan isn't on the fall schedule -- for now. NBC expects it to return midseason, after Jill Hennessey has had her baby and can go back to being the sexy, halter-top-wearing coroner with the nice bosom that America has clutched to its bosom. Not so lucky are the aforementioned dreck, In Laws and Hidden Hills, both of which were officially canceled this week. So were A.U.S.A., Just Shoot Me and Mister Sterling, the latter show having everything going for it that The West Wing enjoyed, except for maybe critical praise, a self-destructive megalomaniac running the show, and a slavishly uncritical fan base. Finally, NBC axed Watching Ellie -- the second spring in a row, in fact, in which it has handed Julia-Louis Dreyfus her walking papers. Perhaps Jeff Zucker hopes to make this an annual tradition, like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

And say what you will about Michael Richards and Jason Alexander and their terrible post-Seinfeld shows -- nobody ever had to cancel them twice.

So that covers NBC's returning shows. But it doesn't tackle the central problem facing the Peacock Network -- just where to find that elusive breakout hit now that Chandler Bing and company are living on borrowed time. To that end, NBC is pinning its hopes on six new series -- three comedies, three dramas -- with the hope that at least one will register with viewers come the fall.

I say they bungle it, not because I've seen any of the shows in question, but because NBC's road map to post-Friends success is littered with the same mistakes that have put the network in such a desperate position in the first place. It's all there in the Fortune article -- a step-by-step textbook on how to drive your network into a wall. The rote reliance on thread-worn premises. The compulsion by Zucker and his acolytes to meddle in every stage of the creative process. The childlike trust in focus groups. Then again, every network does all that. Where Zucker and company attain an almost zen-like commitment to failure is their insistence that star power is the answer to all of life's problems. Got a lame, run-of-the-mill premise? Cast yourself a well-known star and even the most banal tripe about single parents and their precocious, smart-mouthed offspring seems fresh and lively. Your scripts read like they were pieced together by a team of writers who never actually met or were told of each other's existence? Have a star utter those jumbled, rambling lines and get ready to watch the ratings soar. Are you staring at a big gaping hole in your schedule where an actual programming should be? Just grab yourself a star, and build the show around them. That trick never fails.

Except that it does. All the time. And usually on NBC.

Hey, I don't want to rain on Jeff Zucker's parade. But if that approach failed to produce monster-TV hits for Nathan Lane, Emeril Lagasse, and Kirstie Alley, what makes Zucker think it's suddenly going to work for John Larroquette, Rob Lowe, and Alicia Silverstone? Pluck and stick-to-itiveness? Lucky rabbit's foot? Assurances from mobsters? No, really, I want to know why. Because Jeff keeps insisting, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that it is so.

"Certain people," Zucker explains to Fortune in talking up the prospects of a Heather Locklear-led sitcom, "are television stars."

Which doesn't explain what Whoopi Goldberg is doing on NBC next fall. I mean, we're talking about a performer who, upon winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, has spent the subsequent remainder of her career half-assing her way from one role to the next. Has anyone in the last decade done a better job of putting in the barest amount of effort necessary for getting paid than our gal Whoopi? Madonna? Oliver Stone? Ted Kennedy? All pale before the mighty coasting powers of Whoopi Goldberg.

And yet, there she is, anchoring NBC's Tuesday night lineup with a self-titled sitcom -- that's Whoopi, by the way, and not Lazy, Self-Satisfied Deadwood Goes Through the Motions, as you might have understandably assumed -- about a grouchy ex-diva turned hotelier who clashes with her uptight, conservative brother and schemes with her faithful Iranian handyman. I'm not sure which part Whoopi plays. The uptight, conservative brother happens to be a dating a white girlfriend, who -- in the immortal worlds of those fly hipsters in the NBC P.R. department -- "talks like a sister and is just too much fun for [Whoopi] to ignore."

Oh, Whoopi -- come back to the center square. Your awesome talents are wasted elsewhere.

Following Whoopi at 8:30 on Tuesdays this fall will be Happy Family starring Larroquette and Christine Baranski. They play an older couple who are looking forward to getting a chance to spend their golden years together -- only their grown idiot screw-up kids keep hanging around the house and mucking things up. It sounds haunting and poignant, which is not often a direction you want to go in with a comedy.

James Caan is a big star -- assuming you've jumped into a time machine and traveled back to 1975 so that you can catch the late showing of "Rollerball" down at the Bijou. Nevertheless, he's headlining Las Vegas, the new Monday night drama that will air at 9 p.m. and bump the otherwise forgettable Third Watch to 10. In Las Vegas, Caan heads the security team at a swanky Vegas casino. Thrill as Caan and his team of impossibly pretty young people catch card-counters and break up crooked keno games and give the bum's rush to patrons abusing the casino's free cocktails policy. And while it's easy to point and make fun, in Las Vegas's defense, I should point it out that it does feature two of the greatest inventions of the western world -- gambling and Nikki Cox, who plays a high-priced escort. Throw in someone reading off baseball scores, and it's like you've hit my own personal trifecta.

Compared to John Larroquette -- whose last popularly received TV show signed off during the first Bush administration -- and James Caan -- now in his fifth decade of entertaining America! -- Alicia Silverstone can at least claim to be a star solidly within the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC so ardently craves. Silverstone stars in Miss Match as a high-powered divorce attorney who develops a lucrative and spiritually rewarding avocation as a romantic matchmaker (Don't you see? She helps people break up and she brings them together! Aren't you just floored by the stark contrast that is her life? No? Um...) Her dad, a fellow divorce attorney who watches Alicia's newfound matchmaking efforts with pained bemusement, is played by Ryan O'Neal. I guess love is never having to say you're sorry, and, hopefully, there'll be nothing so embarrassing about Miss Match that he'll have to.

NBC's final new drama, The Lyon's Den, marks the triumphant return of Rob Lowe to NBC's prime-time lineup after a harrowing six-month absence. Lowe plays the son of a U.S. Senator who lands a job with a powerful Washington D.C. law firm. But this ain't just any law firm. In the words of NBC's marketing spiel -- which may have been subcontracted out to a southeast Asian sweat shop before it was returned to New York and translated back into the original English -- Lowe's new employers "may or may not be hiding some dark secrets." I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the firm is hiding dark secrets. I mean, otherwise, that's not much of a show, is it?

LOWE: Say, Boss, I couldn't help but wonder -- the firm wouldn't be hiding any dark secrets, would it?

SENIOR PARTNER: My heavens, no!

LOWE: Phew! That's a load off my mind. Let's go litigate some cases, huh?

As tantalizing as all of this sounds -- Rob Lowe ferreting out dark secrets, Nikki Cox dressed up all pretty-like, Whoopi Goldberg mailing it in, and I mentioned the Nikki Cox thing, right? -- none of the above shows are likely to replace Friends in the hearts and minds of America. No, if NBC hopes to find itself a new breakout hit, it's likely to be the sixth new show it will introduce this fall -- a blatant carbon-copy of an overseas comedy right on down to the scripts and jokes the producers plan to lift wholesale from the original.

And for once, this isn't a bad thing.

Maybe you've caught an episode or two of the British import Coupling when it airs on BBC America or at your friendly neighborhood PBS station. If not, you're missing a hell of a show -- Coupling is a funny, original take on relationships, with each episode featuring at least one laugh-out-loud-and-scare-the-neighbors kind of moment. Often wrongly dismissed as the British version of Friends, Coupling employs every conceivable narrative trick -- split-screens, flashbacks, "Rashomon"-style replays of the same scene -- to detail the painfully funny interactions of six friends who can't seem to stop dating one another. NBC saw how entertaining the show was, going so far as to buy the rights to Steven Moffat's original scripts. Presumably, after changing the references about "lifts" and "loos" to "elevators" and "toilets," Coupling will be good to go on this side of the pond, giving NBC a prefabricated hit. There's no possible reason why this shouldn't work.

Until you think about it. And then the reasons why it won't work begin to back up like jetliners at La Guardia during inclement weather.

There's the alarming prospect that a lot of Coupling's admittedly racy subject matter could be watered down so as not to shock easily excitable housewives in Des Moines. Then, there's the realization that the last time NBC tried to transplant a fairly well-regarded British series to its airwaves, the result was the pedestrian Cold Feet, which took the pipe long before anyone could compile the numerous ways in which the American knockoff fell short of the British original. And then after scanning the Coupling cast list, you realize that some mad fool has hired Rena Sofer for one of the parts. Not to single out Ms. Sofer for undue criticism before we've even seen a frame of her efforts in Coupling, but a quick review of her curriculum vitae reveals that her most recent television roles include an extended stint on Ed that launched that show's descent into madness, some simply execrable work on the otherwise entertaining but nevertheless canceled The Chronicle and a guest appearance as a murderous hussy on CSI: Miami where she was... well, no worse than anyone or anything else on that terrible, terrible show. In other words, Rena Sofer is Paula Marshall 2.0 -- a relentless show-killing machine for the new millennium whose very presence up until now has been enough to doom every project she's been involved with.

I guess Ted McGinley wasn't available.

Look, if NBC really wanted to guarantee a successful successor to Friends, it would have written out a nice, big check to the BBC and bought up the rights to show the original Coupling over here on prime-time network TV. Or -- if the network feared an uprising from dimwitted viewers put off by the funny English accents -- it could have hired Moffat and the original cast to come up with an alternative version of Coupling -- identical to what's been on for the BBC -- where everybody just speaks American. The point is, you have a great show that's already been written, filmed and released to DVD -- why not take advantage of that? Why remake it and run the risk of screwing things up beyond recognition? Because if the Americanized Coupling fails to attract the soon-to-be dissolved Friends audience, then NBC is royally hosed.

Unless, a year from now, Jeff Zucker is telling us to get ready for Season 11 of Friends in which Monica and Chandler tell the kids down the hall to turn down the raucous music and Phoebe moves to a retirement community outside of Phoenix.

Every now and again, you read something that makes you question the world as you've come to understand it. For me, the words that trigger these nagging self-doubts are: Good Morning, Miami has been renewed.

So another series of Survivor draws to a close, and another pointless reunion show totally fails to satisfy my curiosity. This season, three questions in particular are begging to be asked:

1. What's with winner Jenna and runner-up Matthew holding hands through nearly the whole hour of the reunion show?

2. After seeing what happened to Tina in season two, why in God's name would anyone with breast implants go on Survivor? It should be obvious that, after forty days of starvation, you're going to end up looking like a couple of mating jellyfish; a pair of half-deflated balloons drifting along on an air current, dragging behind a jumbled assemblage of spindly limbs and ribs.

and

3. What the fuck?

By which I mean, how the hell did lazy, self-centered Jenna end up getting six out of seven of the jury's votes, when her competitor, Matthew, appeared to be her superior both in contributions to the camp and in not pissing off his fellow tribesmen? And why the hell didn't Jeff Probst, who promised to ask this question at the beginning of the reunion show, ever get around to doing so?

Based on the episodes that I watched, I thought Matthew was a lock to win the million. Sure, he was a tad creepy; how could you not be a little suspicious of a guy who describes a Saturn Ion as "so cool?" But creepy or not, Matthew spent the majority of his time in camp working for the good of the tribe instead of flashing his boobies. Never once did he cluelessly insult the deaf chick or the old chicks. Nor did he whine about his debilitating beauty, or his raging case of "phlaryngitis," or the tragic destruction of his heirloom sorority sweater.

And yet, in the end the score stood at 6-1 Jenna. And Jeff Probst didn't bother to find out why that happened. Instead, he spent five minutes chatting with a family of inbred Okies who, unless I missed the episode with the Dueling Banjos scene, were not actually on the show. In fact, I believe the patriarch of said family uttered more words, monosyllabic though they were, than Matthew was allowed to speak throughout the whole reunion episode.

As I see it, there are two possibilities for why the vote went the way it did. The first is that all of jury members are completely retarded. Having watched these guys in action for thirteen weeks, I'm almost inclined to believe that. If it were true, though, I would have expected at least some of the voting slips to read, MONKEY or TREE or MLEHGPHLBT.

The other, more likely explanation is that we simps in the audience weren't shown the whole story of those thirty-nine days in the Amazon. Maybe Matthew was secretly cutting off other tribe members' assorted bits at night in order to fashion his own immunity necklace. Perhaps Jenna, in true sorority-girl fashion, was giving lip service to the members of her alliance in more ways than one. (And perhaps the "accidental" fire that burnt her beloved Zeta sweatshirt was actually an attempt to destroy DNA evidence.) But whatever it was, something happened that made everyone either really hate Matthew, or really love Jenna. And I, and I assume the rest of America, somehow missed it completely.

So after enjoying a season of Survivor more than any since the first, I now feel a little ripped off. I understand that the editors have to piece together something approximating entertainment from hours of raw footage that mostly consists of vapid people sitting around scratching themselves. I also realize that some liberties are taken with the footage during the editing process in order to add suspense. But when the final vote seemingly comes from completely out of the blue, I'm left wondering why I bothered watching at all. For all their relevance to the final vote, the first thirteen hours of the season may as well have been a Sanford and Son marathon, except that the junkyard is crammed full of monkeys and Grady spends most of his time chopping firewood.

Oh, and as for Jenna and Matthew's handholding, during my local evening news, a reporter claimed that she asked them about it and they responded that the two are just great friends. But as far as we know, they actually got married out there in the jungle, and the producers decided it wasn't relevant to the outcome of the game.

You know, that was the best Survivor of the six. I know, the trappings of hot TV have dropped away from Survivor, but it's still the king of the reality shows, and this year topped them all. Great villains -- including our winner, the don't-hate-me-because-I'm-beautiful Jenna (uh, no, we hated you because you were a selfish whiner); great characters (the scheming Rob, who was as funny as he was brilliant); and hapless players aplenty (who knew the gym teacher would be smarter than the rocket scientist?) made this a fantastic stew of gamesmanship and comedy. I know it's not fashionable to like Survivor, but what the hell -- even after three years, it's still a kick in the pants.

"Hey," you ask yourself. "What ever happened to TeeVee? One day they just stopped writing."

Well, we've been busy. Busy weeping to ourselves. Busy working on things that we actually get paid for. And you don't have any idea how busy we got as a result of doing that little ABC parody site last month. One day we'll tell that story.

But in the meantime, next week the networks unveil their fall schedules. So expect us back in full force then. As for now, so sleepy... so sleepy...

I think I'm getting tired of television. I'm not turning into one of those Adbusters crackpots who seem to think that television is an alien plot to destroy minds and cripple our civilization; I'm just finding it harder and harder to watch.

There are some shows, like Coupling or The Office, that come very highly recommended. So I cheerfully acquiesce to popular opinion and instruct my TiVo to grab the next available episodes, but when it's time to watch them, it feels like a chore. And once I watch them, although I recognize that they're funny, it's in a sort of detached way. I don't laugh; I just nod and say "that's funny."

And it's not just shows that people recommend to me. She Spies, which I recently claimed to be the funniest, smartest show on television, languishes unwatched on my TiVo hard drive. It's getting to the point where even Simpsons reruns, which practically define "comfort television," seem like a lot of effort.

I don't know what the problem is. Part of it is TiVo's fault. TiVo is a wonderful invention that makes life better in any number of ways, but if you fall behind on your television-watching, you quickly face many, many hours of unwatched television. Television is basically a disposable medium, and it doesn't really mix well with an enormous to-do list. I understand the occasional Television Appointment, where people make it clear that no one's allowed to call them during the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but having to clear up fourteen hours to get caught up on CSI: Miami is an entirely different kettle of fish.

The other thing that's probably causing my apathy is the nonstop hype that is sweeps month. Every other show is a Very Special Powerful Event. There are kidnappings, fires, tornadoes, alien abductions, and always, always, always dramatic voice-over guys warning me not to miss the first five minutes or the last five minutes or something. I guess they're trying to make me afraid to miss the next episode, but the effect is that they're making it all seem so ponderous and important that it's just depressing. Who wants to see a Powerful New Episode of Friends? I want my crime shows to have twisty plots that get resolved in the last ten minutes thanks to dramatic new evidence. I want my sitcoms to have clever jokes. What I do not want is the threat that this is the episode that changes everything and if I miss it, I'll be like the 6% of people who were watching General Hospital instead of the moon landing.

I still watch television. Some of it. But not as much as I used to. Frankly, I'm looking forward to rerun season, when there's less to watch and keep up with.