While there are many already-canned shows from the 2011-2012 TV season that we won't miss, Best Friends Forever is decidedly not one of them. The NBC series only seemed to improve from the fairly strong pilot and I think it wrongly got clumped together with the season's gender-obsessed failures like Are You There, Chelsea? and Man Up!, just because it featured two adult female friends and a slightly overwhelmed dude. In reality, BFF was a fun and promising series that deserved a bit more room to breathe. NBC will be burning the last few episodes off next month, so before the network officially puts a pin in it, here's what I'll miss about the show.

It's the 25th anniversary of the Fox broadcasting network, a fact they are celebrating this weekend with a big retrospective special. But what are the odds that it will acknowledge one of the biggest mistakes in Fox history: the cancellation of Firefly after eleven episodes (which aired in the wrong order, to boot)? And while the Serenity movie and all of the related books and comics have since helped soften the blow, we still can't help but point out all of the sci-fi/supernatural series that Fox programmers chose to keep on longer than Mal and his crew. Sure some of them were worthy of the support -- but not most of them...

A reported 10 million viewers tuned into the premiere of Fox's new paranormal procedural Alcatraz, which finds a San Francisco homicide detective (Sarah Jones) teaming up with an Alcatraz expert (Jorge Garcia) and an FBI agent (Sam Neill) to investigate the bizarre reappearance of a group of prisoners who disappeared from The Rock some 50 years ago under mysterious circumstances. It's a great hook for a show... as anyone who watched The 4400 during its four season run in the mid-aughties knows.

Sometimes you watch a promo for an upcoming series and think it's been created just for you. That's how I felt in the fall of 1991 when I saw a teaser for NBC's Eerie, Indiana, a family-friendly, comedy-laced horror show about an ordinary kid Marshall Teller (Omri Katz), who moves with his family from New Jersey to a distinctly unordinary small town -- Eerie, Indiana, population 16,661. Like Marshall, I had recently been uprooted as well, leaving downtown Toronto for suburban Virginia. And while the community my 13-year-old self had moved to wasn't home to a still-alive Elvis Presley or an orthodontist who designed retainers that allowed their wearers to read the canine mind, it still seemed pretty strange and alien to me. When Marshall described Eerie as "the center of weirdness for the entire planet" in the show's great credits sequence, he basically summed up how I felt about my new home.

Speaking as a kid who grew up without cable in the '90s, PBS is underrated. Obviously, everyone loves Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. And the Internet (and cosplayers) will never let anyone forget about The Magic School Bus, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, The Big Comfy Couch or Bill Nye the Science Guy. You can't bring up classic '90s PBS without talking about Wishbone or Lamb Chop's Play-Along, nor should you. Still-thriving Arthur remains underpraised, despite being the longest-running children's animated series in the U.S. (and the second longest-running American animated series behind The Simpsons)... and I have more than once on TWoP snuck in the fact that I am basically committed to watching Marc Brown's aardvark-helmed series through to its bitter end. But, in my humble opinion, the two most overlooked series of all time are The Puzzle Place -- a show that I was up until recently convinced only existed in my head, because to this day I cannot find a fellow fan in the flesh (even its forum hasn't been touched in years) -- and the one I'm writing about today in the spirit of Halloween: Ghostwriter.

The last time Off the Map's Caroline Dhavernas had a midseason show, things didn't go exactly as planned. In fact, it only lasted four episodes on air. Poor Wonderfalls failed because of lousy marketing, a lack of faith by Fox, an out-of-sequence schedule and poor ratings because it was up against a slightly similarly themed Joan of Arcadia. And that's a shame because the show was quirky, charming, bizarre and well-acted. I'm hazarding a guess that Dhavernas's new series, which is from ABC showrunner extraordinaire Shonda Rhimes, and is a medical drama set in the jungle, will last a lot longer, probably years longer, given its more mainstream sensibility. Not that I didn't see the appeal of a bored retail store clerk being given orders by inanimate objects in a Niagara Falls gift shop -- I did -- but apparently that show's devotees were few and far between.

By now, pretty much anyone who's a fan of Judd Apatow knows the rotating cast of actors he chooses for films and that some of them started out on one of his first TV series, Freaks & Geeks. The alumni of that show include Freaks James Franco, Jason Segel, & Seth Rogen as well as the Geeks who have had some success themselves (John Francis Daley on Bones, Samm Levine on Inglourious Basterds, Martin Starr on Party Down). But, there were many other up-and-coming (as well as one more renowned) actors who had equally as entertaining, albeit smaller roles on the show that was cancelled after just one season. IFC has recently begun airing old episodes of the series, which inspired us to look back at these later-turned celebrity cameos.

Joss Whedon's short-lived sci-fi series Firefly has been off the air for seven years, and its feature-film follow-up, Serenity, has been out for four, but the pain of the show's passing still smarts. While Serenity provided much-needed closure, it only made us love/miss Firefly all the more, so when we saw that a behind-the-scenes book of photos, props, artwork and original stories was coming out, we made sure to get ahold of it. Firefly: Still Flying comes out on May 25 from Titan Books, but we've already read it cover to cover. And you know what? We learned some stuff we didn't know about one of our favorite shows ever. Prepare for information upload!

At this year's Academy Awards, the Iraq War action-drama The Hurt Locker swept most categories, winning six out of nine nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Unfortunately, it didn't win Best Actor, the category in which Jeremy Renner was nominated for his portrayal of an utterly fearless, possibly traumatized bomb technician. His performance was at the center of much of the praise of the film, and while it wasn't enough to beat Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, it remains a key element of the film's success. Now, if only that movie had come out before Renner's cop dramedy The Unusuals aired, the show might have had a chance, but the series was cancelled after only ten episodes, and the last one aired nine days before The Hurt Locker came out in theaters.

Televised sporting events are already a pretty big deal for most people, but when you factor in the event status of the Olympics or the Super Bowl or the World Series, they become juggernauts. So why is it that fictional TV shows about sports are so much less popular? The high school football drama Friday Night Lights is one of the best shows on TV, but ratings are only so-so, and it was moved from NBC to DirecTV in 2008 (it will return to NBC in April). Luckily, other sports shows are still plugging along: My Boys, about a female sportswriter, will get a fourth season this summer on TBS, and fantasy-football comedy The League will get a second on FX. And, encouragingly, new shows are still getting made: Spike recently launched college football comedy Blue Mountain State and is prepping Players, about the owners of a sports bar. But historically, sports shows tend to hover in a sparingly viewed grey zone between regular TV shows and actual sports. Here are some of the best shows about sports that have ever aired, and don't be surprised if you haven't heard of some them.