I have mixed feelings about the Virtuality TV-movie (or pilot, according to Ron Moore) that aired on Friday night. On the one hand, it had an interesting take on what is and isn't real, all set in the world of deep space. I thought that had a great deal of potential. On the other hand, there was too much going on with the multiple virtual worlds, the crisis on earth, the computer virus, the reality show, the interpersonal relationships, the doctor's illness and the mission. All of these wild ideas, with too little attention focused on any of them to really make it all one cohesive story. The whole movie came across as kind of muddled and while I did think it got better in the second hour, the first sluggish hour almost caused me to turn off my TV.

If it's Tuesday, this must be TWoP News! There's a lot of moving and shaking going on this week, as shows change timeslots (or defiantly don't), shows get canceled (or surprisingly don't), and showrunners leave shows (that don't even have names yet). Also, someone is injuring our nation's celebrities, and it may be Michael Flatley. Let's begin!

The Law & Order franchise is not what it once was. The original series (plain old L&O) has gone through cast shake-up after shake-up, and just had one of its weakest seasons. Special Victims Unit is full of superstar talent -- America's sweethearts Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni, plus their cranky back-ups Ice-T and Richard Belzer -- but each episode of that show finds a way to ignore their special victims mandate. Only Criminal Intent, exiled to the USA Network, has continued to do what it does so well with the same two leads it's always had. It's the best show in the franchise, and it's only going to get better with this season's changes. If you didn't watch Sunday night's Season 8 premiere, here are our reasons for you to tune in for Episode 2.

The traditional television season is about to come to an end, so how does a network not know if they want to renew a TV show or not? Either the ratings are good, or they aren't. Either a show has potential, or it doesn't. Shit or get off the pot. Because tonight I'm going to watch the season finale of Life, and neither I nor the show's cast and crew know whether it's going to come back in the fall. Isn't that messed-up? How can anyone be expected to tell a story under those conditions? You're risking the possibility of either an unsatisfying series finale, thereby affecting DVD sales, or a lackluster season finale, thereby affecting next season's numbers. Rrrrraaaagge! ...Anyway, I sat in on a conference call with Life star Damian Lewis and show creator Rand Ravich and listened to them try to explain tonight's finale without spoiling it, and generally try to laugh away their worries. Man, I love Damian Lewis. If this show gets cancelled, someone better snatch him up before he starts doing plays again.

Leave it to ER to surprise me in the end. I had my box of tissues handy, expecting a tearjerker of an episode as everyone said goodbye and surely someone died or the ER had to close for lack of funding. Instead, this show went out exactly as it came in, with a finale that mirrored the pilot in many ways and was more befitting of the series than the sobfest I was prepared for. Since the show went through so very many cast changes and highs and lows, it was appropriate to have the closing scene filled with the majority of the current staff in the ambulance bay, awaiting an onslaught of patients, and to have one aspiring med student staring in awe and confusion. It really just ended on the note of, "no matter what happens, no matter who lives, dies or quits, this ER will continue to do what it does, which is to save lives." To have that hopeful med student be Mark Greene's now-grown-up daughter Rachel, and to have Dr. Carter, who stood in those exact shoes 15 years prior, be the one to ask her if she was coming in (mimicking Dr. Greene's words to him from all those years ago) was just icing on the cake. And having new intern Julia (Alexis Bledel) stuck in many of the same situations that Carter faced on his first day made so much sense. Everything came truly full circle. And that's the sort of ending I wanted.

Tracy Morgan joked that he was in more sketches during this past weekend's guest hosting gig than he was in during his entire tenure on SNL. That may be true, but his recurring characters, which were dusted off and brought back just for the occasion, made for some of the brightest spots this week. His Brian Fellows and Astronaut Jones sketches were two of the few things that really made me laugh during the episode. Maybe it is just that both sketches have catchy theme songs. I'm a sucker for theme music. But I think the fact that they had little to do with any of the rest of the cast probably isn't a coincidence. Though Tracy on Big Love was a funny idea ... for a minute... had it not gone on so long. SNL's writing staff really needs to learn to edit down their stuff of late.... but that's another rant for another day. Some of their funniest things are just quick hit jokes. Like Astronaut Jones having a brief conversation with an alien species (in the form of Andy Samberg) made even that tired punchline more amusing because they didn't drag it out forever.

This season, Supernatural's hell-raising, demon-blooded and/or soul-torturing Brothers Winchester have been given a holy quest by the angel Castiel. (Yeah, I know, it seems kinda weird to us, too.) That quest? To stop the demon Lilith (Dean's killer) from opening the 66 seals binding the fallen angel Lucifer. (There are actually 600, but only 66 need to get popped.) While we've seen two of them -- the Rise of the Witnesses and the Summoning of Samhain -- apparently at least 34 have been opened off-screen, leading us to wonder what the heck they were and where the Winchesters were when it happened. Well, it turns out they actually tried to stop a bunch of them between episodes, with mixed results. We made some calls around the Hunter hotline and found out what went down recently with six of the seals.

What constitutes news, you might ask? An awesome celeb hosting an awards show we've never watched? That's news. Two fallen 1980s movie stars being cast in TV shows? That's news. A TV show set in the 1970s getting dropped like a bad habit? That's news. A 1990s TV star being cast in a remake of a 1980s TV show, due to appear on TV in 2010? That's a math problem, but it's also news. All those decades and more on today's... TwoP News! (Cue American Idol theme music.)

I've been complaining for several seasons now that ER needs to stop. For a while it got all kinds of crazy and downbeat, with too much focus on Abby and Kovac and the depressing blow after blow to their relationship. Then they killed off, or wrote off, pretty much every character I was remotely interested in. However, this season has been pretty great overall, and I'm not even really mad at all that they added in a couple extra episodes to the end. In fact, I think the show is pretty much back in top form (since I've been watching it from the get-go) and this season has been more consistently entertaining than Grey's Anatomy or House (don't even get me started on Private Practice) have been this year -- shocking words that I never would have imagined myself typing last summer when I was dreading this final send-off. Here's why I'm on board:

It's Wednesday, or hump day as those always peppy radio DJ's used to be obsessed with calling it (Do they still? I never listen to morning "drive-time" shows any more). And "hump day" is a stupid term for it anyway, but what the hell, this abbreviated week is already half over and now it is time to start cementing your weekend plans. Which, if you are me, involve digging through my closet looking for my old mix tapes, because the first news item has me feeling a little retro nostalgic.