You take the good, forget the bad and there you have The Facts of Life. OK, let's face facts, some shows just do not age well. Some of my favorite '80s shows look horribly dated now with the bad hair, tacky clothes, lame plotlines, laugh tracks and the cornball jokes. Clearly, I'm not alone in this thinking. That's why they've invented minisodes of shows like The Facts of Life, which allows me to indulge in a little bit of nostalgia, without becoming all depressed about how much I really loved the show and faithfully watched each and every week hoping that I'd learn how to become more of a Blair and less of a Natalie (which never happened...thankfully). The best blast from the past I've found, is this four minute condensed episode of George Clooney's first appearance as the handyman who just returned from building hot tubs in Kuwait (see what I mean about lame plotlines?) But four minutes of George with wispy hair and that impish grin was enough to brighten my day...though now I'm stuck with the Facts theme song in my head.



Talk with other Facts of Life fans.

Tags: facts of life, george clooney

Welcome to the Big Damn News. Sadly, there are no Firefly morsels to be had today, although we do have news on who will be joining that show's Morena Baccarin and Party of Five's Scott Wolf in the new V TV series. Plus: we find out when Anthony Head's new series will debut, when Mischa Barton will work again and why we can't wait to see next week's Dollhouse.

Tags: Anthony Head, Conan O'Brien, Dollhouse, Firefly, George Clooney, George Lucas, Merlin, Mischa Barton, Neve Campbell, Party of Five, Patton Oswalt, Star Wars, The Philanthropist, TWoP News

Happy Thursday, everybody! Gosh, remember when Thursday was Must See TV night on NBC? Yeah... it was a while ago. But guess what, nostalgia-cravers? George Clooney's (supposedly) back on ER tonight, so from the hours of 10-11PM you can pretend it's 1997 again and the world had never heard of such things as Survivor or American Idol or Celebrity Circus! Man, what did anyone watch before the year 2000?

Tags: Ashley Jensen, Dancing with the Stars, ER, George Clooney, Jason Dohring, Jericho, john stamos, Minka Kelly, Skeet Ulrich, True Blood

Law & Order returns for its nineteenth season tonight, with a typically timely episode that will feature a stock broker being kicked to holy hell in broad daylight. I got a chance to listen in on a conference call with L&O genius Dick Wolf and my favorite District Attorney Jack McCoy ... er, Sam Waterston, and ask some probing questions about Law & Order making you fat and who Jack McCoy would be were he a Shakespearean character. Good questions, yes, but they stumped both of our otherwise very chatty interview subjects. I tell you, this call went on for hours, so I selected only the highlights, which included Dick Wolf talking ish on everything from the current TV season to Kevin Kline. Do not mess with Dick Wolf, people. Chunk-chunk.

Tags: Brad Pitt, Dick Wolf, George Clooney, Kevin Kline, Law & Order, Sam Waterston

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:

Tags: er, Eriq La Salle, George Clooney, john stamos, maura tierney, Noah Wyle, Parminder Nagra