Hollywood's so weird. They keep rebooting things, even though they usually don't turn out well. The latest in the trend is The Rockford Files, which House creator David Shore will be rebooting for NBC. Shore is cool, and The Rockford Files was cool, but I really doubt this will be the next Battlestar. It might be a procedural, the second most durable genre on television (next to cheap cheap fun fun reality), but you just know too many chefs in the NBC executives' office kitchen are just going to ruin it and its awesome theme song, I don't care if Ben Silverman is gone. Call it a hunch. That I would bet my life savings on.

If you usually avoid going to the ABC Family channel to avoid getting subjected to pregnant teens, teen gymnasts, teen sororities and other teen-related things, you were missing out. Nestled in between Greek and Make it or Break It was a true gem of a show called The Middleman. Following a twentysomething artist's initiation as the sidekick to the Middleman, a clean-cut, tie-wearing secret agent-slash-superhero, the show ran for 12 episodes of monkeys, luchadores, surreal humor, bizarre villains and astounding wordplay. Initially released as a comic book by Lost and Charmed writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the entire series was recently released on DVD, and will be followed up by a graphic novel telling the final chapter in the saga. We talked to him about his experiences making the show, his next project Day One and what it's like for dreams to come true.

When I saw that there was a G-Force movie coming out, I got all kinds of excited. After all, I grew up watching G-Force -- it was one of my favorite Japanese cartoons, along with Voltron and Macron 1. Then I saw a picture from the movie... and it was of gerbils in spy gear. This was not the G-Force of my childhood. This was something very, very different.

Today in the annals of glorious syndicated camp, we remember VIP, the show about a crack security team with Pamela Anderson for a figurehead. The acting was terrible, and the scripts were even worse -- it was heaven! Pammy basically played herself with a gun, and the show was full of frequent self-aware jabs at her celebrity persona, because she actually used to be pretty awesome back in the day. I know, I know, it's hard to remember that far back. But it happened! And it was great television.

Here at TWoP, we bitch a lot about Smallville and Heroes, with their dull characters and their hackneyed and/or convoluted plotlines, but maybe we should stop being so surprised that they're terrible. Because while superhero comedies are usually hysterical (if short-lived -- see The Tick and The Middleman), superhero dramas are often the worst things on television. We looked back on over a decade of terrible super-powered TV, and found that most of the time, we really didn't need a hero.

Every time my job required me to watch Grey's Anatomy last season, I was consoled by only one thing: the presence of Kevin McKidd, whom I loved so much on all 13 of episodes of Journeyman. The show was like Quantum Leap 2.0, with McKidd Desmond-ing around in time, righting wrongs and saving lives with Moon Bloodgood, who was fresh off of the also short-lived Daybreak (or "Groundhog Taye," as we call it in my house.) The show was engrossing and effective light sci fi, but I really loved it because it was just so exquisitely sappy in the most perfect way, just like Leap was.

When I noticed that all 13 episodes of Kitchen Confidential had become available on Hulu, I immediately thought two things: 1) there goes the rest of my work day, and 2) I want to write about about that for Brilliant But Cancelled, but surely someone already has! But apparently no one has? Super weird. Anyway, if you didn't watch the show back in 2005 when Fox did that really great thing they do where they premiere a show, then take it off the air for a ridiculous amount of time, then expect viewers to miraculously find it again, then cancel it when they shockingly don't, I highly recommend falling in love with it now. Because it was truly a fantastic show.

Our current TV-crazed society seems to be obsessed with reality series about plus-sized families, from Jon & Kate Plus 8 to Raising Sextuplets to 18 Kids & Counting. However, shows about the complexities of coping with large families are nothing new. In fact, people have always gravitated towards these types of series... even if most of them weren't very good. But while there have been heaps of twin shows (and even identical cousins), the giant families seem to hold some especially magical allure for certain viers. And now that there are reality shows, they don't need to pay kid actors any more. They can just scar actual children for life by sticking cameras in their faces and filming their every move. Anyway, we hold these classic (and not so) scripted series responsible for this disturbing TV trend.