The '90s are here yet again.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. After last week's lighter-than-air confection, Pan Am crashed back down to earth this week with an episode that offered too much angst and not enough charm. Clearly written at the behest of Christina Ricci's agents, who must have felt that their movie star client wasn't being given enough to do to justify her move to television, "The Genuine Article" put Maggie front and center and basically revealed her to be a lying, manipulative... well, in keeping with the more innocent spirit of the era, we'll just say "rhymes-with-witch." The B and C-storylines both involved romance, specifically the boring affair flowering between pilot Dean and kept woman Ginny and Kate's passion-free dalliance with Yugoslavian diplomat Niko Lonza (Goran Visnjic), whom the CIA is eager to flip to their side. And in our weekly "Where's Collette?" watch, the Clipper Majestic's forgotten stewardess' big scene involved her giving basic lessons in French to a drunken Ginny and then accompanying her to the powder room. Sigh. Maybe she should start thinking about a transfer to a different flight crew where her skills will be more appreciated. As for the things the show taught us about the '60s this week...

Let's get this out of the way: Richard De Longpre (voiced by French Stewart) looks, talks and acts distractingly like Community's Dean Pelton. I had to re-watch the first few minutes of the Allen Gregory pilot a several times because instead of paying attention to anything in the opening party scene, I kept thinking about how awesome it would be if this was just Community: The Animated Series (which got me thinking about Sabrina: The Animated Series). But then I heard Jonah Hill's voice coming out of a sharply dressed seven-year-old, and I had to quash those dreams and pay attention to the task at hand.

Shows with similar thematic elements that debut around the same time isn't exactly something new -- just think of 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Ghost Whisperer and Medium, Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia or even this season's Mad Men wannabes Pan Am and Playboy Club. Now Grimm is appearing less than a week after Once Upon a Time and on the surface, they have one major commonality: both take classic fairytale characters and storylines and attempt to bring them into the present day. But the similarities primarily end there. Will viewers look past the promos and magazine blurbs to realize that the programs are absolutely nothing alike? Or will they be forcibly lumped together forever? And more importantly, will either last more than a season or two?

These men were working our last nerve this week.

He's baaaaack.

Last night marked the return of Beavis and Butt-head to MTV, and the un-dynamic duo are up to the same stuff they had become famous for: snarking on pop culture, trying to pick up chicks and sitting on their couch in their rock-band t-shirts. Only the pop culture targets have changed, though their social commentary seems to have gotten slightly more insightful than "this sucks" in their long absence from TV. Still, you can always count on Beavis to be massively enthralled by fire and for bands to find ways to incorporate flames into their videos.

To be clear, this list has nothing to do with characters we miss. When we write "Want Back From the Dead," we mean "Want Back For Full-Out Zombie Vengeance." Our choices have little to do with how much we liked (or loathed) these now-dead characters, and everything to do with how awesome it would be to see them return to their shows and eat the human flesh of their former cast mates during a monstrous apocalypse. Spoilers abound, so beware!

Coming on the heels of a stellar outing like "Remedial Chaos Theory," it was perhaps inevitable that the next new episode of Community was going to feel slightly disappointing. And sure enough, last night's Halloween-themed "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" was a more uneven affair than its brilliantly conceived and executed predecessor.

Well, I guess I should have seen a low point coming. Sure, "Meet N Greet" was dressed up as a Halloween episode, but all of the post-weight loss sumo wrestler costumes in the world weren't going to cover this oddly written episode that served way more as a transition point than an actual story. This is what I get for treating "mah" self so hard for the past two weeks. (Also: Has anyone else figured out a way to replace the "yo" properly?) Here's why the episode didn't work for me, accompanied by some completely made-up costumes that better reflect the Pawnee ensemble based on their performances last night: