TVSquad

(S03E12) "Dancing Phalanges!" -- Bones playing with Baby Andy

Before I begin I wanted to thank Jen for handling last week's review while I was taking care of some personal matters. Unfortunately I left her with an episode that was postponed for nearly a year, causing her to ask where all of the neat stuff I was reporting on was located. Well, she got me back good as this week's episode of Bones was postponed not one, not two, but FIVE times.

Aaron Brown is ready to return to television. After a two-year hiatus the 59-year-old journalist and ex-CNN anchor will be joining the PBS series Wide Angle as an anchor, producer and part-time field reporter.

Brown left CNN in November of 2005 after a network shake-up that gave his coveted 10:00 PM time slot to up-and-comer Anderson Cooper. He remained off of television due to contractual regulations and instead filled his time with teaching at Arizona State University as its first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism. According to an interview with the Associated Press, Brown said he decided to work at Wide Angle instead of another cable news channel in order to "work in an environment where people just think about making good TV and good journalism." He added that cable news networks could be pushed into focusing on sensational, tabloid-like stories.

Wide Angle will begin its seventh season on PBS starting on July 1st. Topics that will be covered this season will be the crisis in the Sudan and the changing role of the military in Japan. Brown hopes to do some field work in Venezuela or the Middle East for future Angle stories.

Television ads aren't fun anymore. There's a sameness to them: the fast edits, the young bodies, the deep-voiced announcers who all sound alike. And, with the advent of TiVo and the DVR, most of them are just a blur to us as we fast-forward from the end of one scene to the beginning of another. You would have to go all the way back to the days just around the advent of the personal VCR to find entertaining commercials that featured characters and slogans that would stick in your brain.

Rebbecca Brown just went back to the '70s. By culling the parents' garage known as the Internet, Brown was able to put together 10 memorable ads from the decade of Watergate, leisure suits and the 8-track cassette. If you were around during that decade you will remember most, if not all, of the ads that Brown picked.

(S19E17) "Sorry, Lise. I can't be a vegetarian. I love the taste of death." -- Bart Simpson

Another Bart-centric episode, which means another decent installment of The Simpsons. It's unfortunate that these types of episodes couldn't have been dispersed more evenly throughout the season. This would have made for a less Homer-centric run of shows during the first half of the year -- something that many fans (or maybe just me) were expressing concern about.

While Amy Poehler has had steady work both on and off the stage of Saturday Night Live over the last few years it looks like she may be moving up to "big time" status along with former SNL cast mate Tina Fey. And, it might all begin this weekend. Not only is she starring with Fey in the movie Baby Mama, which is being released today (and is expected to be the box office champ, despite mixed reviews), Poehler also has a new cartoon premiering on Nickelodeon.

The Mighty B, which premieres Saturday at 10:30 AM, features Amy as the voice of Bessie Higgenbottom. Bessie is world's most ambitious Honeybee scout in the known universe. She wears her uniform all of the time, leads her troop with a military-like zeal, and has the most badges than any other Honeybee in history. But, she wants to earn all of the Honeybee badges, and she's determined to earn them. Sometimes she imagines herself as the superheroine The Mighty B, to help her through the tasks that will earn her another badge.

(S14E16) Before I begin this week's review of ER, I want to speak for a moment about the ambulance bay at County General. The place should be considered an Extreme Danger Zone and permanently closed. Over the last fourteen seasons it has been the location of car accidents, tank accidents, explosions, falling helicopters, and now a gas fire. The gas fire was courtesy of a patient who came in from an ambulance drenched in gasoline and was started by a careless smoker. By the way, smoking should be banned from the ambulance bay as well.

If you review some of the ER records you'll find that a good portion of the patients were actually injured in the ambulance bay itself. That doesn't bode well for the hospital. So, I say close it down, make it a nice little park area, and have the patients brought in through an underground parking garage. At least no helicopters will crush them should they fall off the roof of the hospital.

With that out of the way, let's get going with this week's review.

As AOL Television continues their look at the 50 Best TV Comedies -- Ever with numbers 20-11, we here at TV Squad are also looking at television comedy, but with a slightly skewed difference. Last week, we took a look at the Saturday Night Live cast members from 1975-1985 that made it to the big time. This week, we focus on the SNL casts from 1986 to 2006.

Aside from the first season of Lorne Michaels' return to the show he created and the 1994-95 season, this period was a very successful one for SNL, introducing a slew of characters and sketches that fans of the show still talk about today. It also produced a good number of Not Ready for Prime-Time Players who went on to bigger things in television and the movies (and some theater as well). Sometimes those bigger things were movies or television shows based on characters developed on SNL.

Gallery: SNL: 1985-2006

Unless you've been hiding under an ozone-filled nuclear waste facility hidden in an Arctic glacier that has recently begun to melt, you know that today is Earth Day. Now, while other Earth Days have been important, this year's is down-right significant thanks to media reports letting us know that global warming is finally here. This is pretty serious, especially to those of us with young children. We certainly want to do anything in our power to stop global warming so all of the planet's resources aren't used up and we need to travel to another planet in a spaceship flown by Joey Tribbiani.

With that in mind, the environmentally-friendly folks at TV Squad (we write all of our articles on recycled toilet paper) have decided to point out those television characters who don't give the environment the credit it deserves. Some are actually trying to harm it on purpose (I'm leering in your direction, Rush Limbaugh), while others don't know that they are doing anything at all. Here are but a few of the most wanted.

Gallery: Environmentally Unfriendly TV Characters

A few weeks ago, while doing some research on stand-up comedians who became sitcom stars, I ended up Googling a whole bunch of names to get some additional pre-television history on them. One of these was Home Improvement's Tim Allen. While looking up Tim's information I came upon a listing for his personal website. It was a weird listing though -- something like Tim Allen -- T'Avatar. Well, since I know Tim's not a Romulan, I thought this was just an abbreviation of something. Needless to say I clicked in.

Turns out, T'Avatar was short for Tim Allen's Avatar, which appears in an opening video to his website. Folks, this Avatar freaks the living piss out of me.

In an announcement that most who remember the older versions of Password would consider a no-brainer, it has been revealed that Betty White will be returning as a guest panelist on CBS' new Million Dollar Password series. And, really, if she wasn't even being considered would it even be Password?

White, who is 86-years-young, was a staple of the original version of Password when it started back in 1961 as well as the revived 70s and 80s versions of the show. Much of that connection came from her marriage to original Password host Allen Ludden. White and Ludden were married in 1963 and remained together until his death from stomach cancer in 1981.

Saturday mornings in 1967 were super. And I mean that literally. All eleven shows that premiered during this time featured one form of superhero or another. Be it heroes from the comic books, heroes of the jungle, prehistoric heroes, or alien animal heroes that shot hot lava balls from their horns. It was the heyday for these cartoons, and one that would be short-lived, thanks to outside sources who wished to limit the violence on the Saturday morning schedule. But, more on that in a later post.

Hanna-Barbera led the pack in animated fare with an amazing SIX hours of programming; three of those hours comprised of original material. Filmation was on their heels (and would gain even more next year) with 90-minutes of new shows. Broken down by network, both CBS and ABC, who had finally woken up and gotten into the Saturday morning game, offered four new shows each. NBC wasn't far behind with three new offerings.

Needless to say, the 1967-68 season was an exciting one for a child. So, if you were a child back then, and are interested in remembering what you watched, then grab you box of Quisp & Quake cereal and let's begin the journey.

(S14E15) So, Neela.

We all know her. She's cute. She's smart. She has that lovely English accent. She draws every single man and woman into her universe with her mutant ability to make people fall in love with her (Professor X, I hope you're aware of this). We just haven't seen much of her this season. Well, except for the season premiere, but even then she was unconscious for most of the episode. Perhaps the producers decided to give Ms. Rasgotra a break this season after the whole Dubenko/Gates/Ray love triangle took up a good portion of last season. That was corrected this episode as we finally had an episode that put some focus on the good doctor after a 24-hour shift.

Why focus on her after such a long session? To show her screwing up, of course.

As AOL Television continues their look at the 50 Best TV Comedies -- Ever with numbers 30-21, we here at TV Squad are also looking at television comedy, but with a slightly skewed difference. Last week, we took a look at the numerous stand-up comedians who became sitcom stars. In this installment we look at one particular TV comedy that made stars out of a number of actors and actresses.

I'm talking about NBC's Saturday Night Live. Since its premiere in 1975, the late-night sketch show has given us a slew of actors and actresses who have made the move onto both the big and small screen. Sometimes the move was towards more comedy, sometimes it was a switch to more serious roles, other times it was a little bit of both. And, while many of those who made it are still in the public eye these days, some of the greatest of those who came from Studio 8H had their careers snuffed out way too early.

The amount of those who rose to the top varied from cast to cast. Some casts, like the very first one, produced a whole slew of talent who went on to bigger and better things. Others, like the first casts from 1980-85 and the mid-1990s, produced very little in the way of big stars.

Gallery: SNL: 1975-1985

I'm going to be honest with you because you all have been honest with me. Sometimes a bit too honest. Sometimes honest to the point of being creepy and making me change my phone number. But, honest nonetheless.

Anyway, I may be a bit jaded in my opinions of the summer schedule that FOX released last week. I mean, they take two of the most popular dramas on their schedule -- Bones and House -- and just bounce them around the schedule so much just so they can accommodate five thousand hours of American Idol. Frankly, it pisses me off a bit.

That's why I need your help to determine if I am way off in thinking that their summer programming schedule is a heaping pile of poo. Take a look at the schedule after the jump and then we'll talk.

Here we go again. We have barely healed from the wounds that the Writers Guild of America strike opened up late last year, now it's the Screen Actors Guild's turn to make us nervous about the television we watch.

Yesterday, SAG representatives began negotiations with the Hollywood studios by swapping contract proposals between the two parties. This is the first time in nearly three decades that the Guild is negotiating solo with the studios since the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) has rejected combined talks. AFTRA is upset with the Guild over concerns that it is attempting to poach its members. The Guild is denying this accusation with the statement that it normally broils its members over a low flame with some butter sauce.