The dog has been returned to the pound, ladies and gentlemen. After it appeared that American Idol would finally rid the judge's table of Randy Jackson, the show's longest-serving arbiter of all things "hot" and "dawgish" will likely be sitting alongside new faces Mariah Carey, Keith Urban and Nicki Minaj when the series returns in January. Jackson was restored to his former title when a deal to fill his seat with Enrique Iglesias fell through. Maybe Enrique saw how poorly his significant other Anna Kournikova fared during her stint on The Biggest Loser and decided to leave reality television to the semi-professionals.

Looks like Katie Couric is well on the way to becoming the next Oprah... or at the very least, the next Ellen. Couric's new daytime talk show Katie premiered to a 2.8 household rating on Monday, a number that eclipsed all of the other new afternoon chat fests that have hit the airwaves, including Steve Harvey (which hit a 1.5 when it premiered last week), The Jeff Probst Show (1.0) and The Ricki Lake Show (0.8). Of course, that big number for Katie may have something to do with Couric having booked a big name like Jessica Simpson for her first show. Let's see how she fares with the flesh-eating bacteria victim on today's episode.

In more ratings news, the return of NBC's The Voice got the fall TV season started in typically noisy fashion. The Season 3 premiere nabbed 12 million viewers, which was a 39% drop from last season's kick-off, but still a big number for a struggling network. If Community drew that many eyeballs each week, Dan Harmon would still have a job.

There's an ER reunion in the works for the upcoming season of The Good Wife. Julianna Margulies's old comrade-in-scrubs Maura Tierney scored a recurring role on the series as the well-off woman that Peter hopes will fund his ascent to the governor's office. We'd be more interested if County General's ace pediatrician Dr. Doug Ross was swinging through Chicago again, but we understand that his off-screen alter ego is a tad busy these days.

CBS finally does viewers a solid by announcing plans to shift the start times of their popular Sunday night shows (for Eastern and Central time zones) by a half-hour on dates when there are back-to-back NFL games scheduled. That cuts down on the likelihood of non-pigskin fans (and there are some of those out there) sitting down to watch the latest Amazing Race episode only to discover that the DVR recorded 45 minutes of 60 Minutes instead.

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