TVSquad

Like many people, I was miffed that Journeyman wasn't picked up for another season. But maybe we'll get our fix of Kevin McKidd at Seattle Grace next year.

Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the Scottish actor, who blew (some of) us away as the time-traveling journalist Dan Vasser on Journeyman, is in talks to join the cast of Grey's Anatomy. The rumor is that McKidd would play a doctor who scrubs in at the hospital after a stint in Iraq.

Invasion aired for one season from 2005-2006. Check out Jonathan Toomey's great reviewcaps here.

Along with Surface, Invasion was one of my favorite new shows that season, with each episode getting better and better. By the series finale, I was hooked. I'm still miffed that ABC didn't give it more time to flesh out the story and characters.

Incorporating a sci-fi-alien mystery, a government conspiracy, and plenty of family drama, Invasion had a built-in audience because it aired directly after another sci-fi mystery, Lost. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to keep the series on the air.

This is one of my favorite comedies of the past ten years, and I no idea that it actually starred not one but two cast members from Lost. More on that after the jump.

Married to the Kellys was a sitcom that ran on Friday nights on ABC during the 2003-04 season, part of their TGIF comedy lineup. But I think this show stood out as something for adults more than kids. It starred Breckin Meyer as a New York City writer who publishes his first novel and decides to keep his promise to his wife and move (he thought she meant move from the Village to the Upper West Side, not "America"). Now, this is where the usual big city guy vs. Kansas jokes come into play, but that's just half of the show.

This must be Short-Lived Sitcom week. Yesterday I told you about Married People, and today it's Day By Day.

This was a short-lived show on NBC (ran for 33 episodes in 1988-89). It was about Brian and Kate Harper, a professional couple (Doug Sheehan from Knot's Landing played stockbroker Brian, and Linda Kelsey from Lou Grant played lawyer Kate) who decided to open an in-home day care center. Their teen son Ross was played by C.B. Barnes, who played Greg in the Brady Bunch movies and starred in the Starman TV series and Malcolm and Eddie.

But I'd like to talk to you about the two other females in the cast. Two that went on to much bigger things later in their careers.

My roommates and I were obsessed with this show when it was on in 1990. We were all living in the same condo, all of them in college and me...not. We'd spend our time playing tennis, eating subs and Chinese, and watching Star Trek: TNG, MacGyver, reruns of Spenser: For Hire, and this show.

Married People was a short-lived sitcom on ABC. It was about the lives of several married couples who all lived in the same building in New York City. The star of the show was Jay Thomas, who was married to Bess Armstrong (they were the "middle" couple). The "older" couple (also the landlords in the building) was played by Ray Aranha and Barbara Montgomery, and the "younger" couple was played by Chris Young (from Max Headroom) and Megan Gallivan. Several episodes were directed by veteran director Asaad Kelada.

This is a post about a TV show I've never even seen.

Coronet Blue was a short-lived TV show that ran on CBS in 1967. It was actually filmed in 1965 and CBS canceled it, deciding to burn off the episodes during the summer. The show actually did better than expected, but by that time the people involved in the show had moved on to other things. The show's star, Frank Converse, went on to N.Y.P.D. (hey, if you mix that show title with this one you get...NYPD Blue!).

Don't you just hate it when you get hooked on a show and it's yanked unceremoniously off the air, leaving you hanging into infinity? Yeah, me, too. Such was the case with Surface, an alien-sea-monster-inspired drama that aired on NBC during the 2005-2006 season.

The series starred the soulful Lake Bell as Laura Daughtery, a marine biologist who encounters a strange creature on the ocean floor. She writes up her report, only to have it confiscated by the government in the name of national security.

Meanwhile, nerdy teen Miles (Carter Jenkins, whom I predict has a huge career ahead of him, though not if he keeps signing on for shows like the short-lived Viva Laughlin) stumbles across a strange egg on the beach and takes it home. Imagine his surprise when out hatches a weird amphibious creature that emits an even weirder electrical current.

When the Billy Bob Thornton movie The Astronaut Farmer came out, a lot of us were amazed how the plot sounded similar to Salvage 1, a TV movie and later short-lived series on ABC that starred Andy Griffith as the owner of a scrap and salvage company who builds a spaceship and goes to the moon. I don't think this show has been seen that much since the late 70s, but TVShowsOnDVD is hearing from a source that Sony is going to release the show (the pilot movie and all the episodes, including 4 never shown on ABC) some time in 2008.

But that's not the only DVD news that TV fans are going to be interested in...

Fans of ABC's canceled-too-soon series The Nine will be happy to know that the six unaired episodes of the series will see the light of the small screen this summer.

The series, starring actors such as Tim Daly, Chi McBride, John, Billingsley, and Kim Raver, will return to ABC in its old 10 p.m. ET on Wednesdays timeslot starting August 1.

I will never forget being in high school and hearing the news that a new network would soon be premiering. It was only going to be on a couple nights a week, but instead of airing reruns and crappy local shows, it would air all new programs; it was unprecedented.

That network was called FOX, and while many of the programs were of no interest to me, I was really impressed at how they followed through with their promises. Specifically, cutting edge programming and big budgets. I watched Al & Peg Bundy say things that my parents didn't want me to hear. I watched George C. Scott in the only sitcom he ever starred in. Most importantly, I was witness to the phenomenon that became The Simpsons.

I thought of this show a few weeks ago when I started to see the commercials for Billy Bob Thornton's new movie, The Astronaut Farmer, about a guy who builds his own rocket in his barn so he can blast into space.

Salvage 1 was a short-lived show that starred Andy Griffith as a salvager who sells scrap that he finds and goes on various adventures with his cohorts (rescuing people, battling fires, getting involved with crooks, that sort of thing). The series co-starred Joel Higgins (Silver Spoons), Trish Stewart (whatever happened to her?), and Richard Jaeckel (Spenser: For Hire), and it was based on a TV movie of the same name in which Griffith built a rocket on his own and blasted off into space.

I can't tell you how much I loved this movie when I was a teen. If you had asked me in the late 70s what the best movie of all time was, I probably would have said this one. Sadly, the show died after only a season and a half. It couldn't quite match the charm of the pilot, but was pretty darn entertaining.

Last month, I started taking a course in basic video techniques. The first day of class, the professor gave us a large packet on all the number one no-no's of amateur filmmaking. The next evening, I happened upon a few episodes of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and suddenly, I saw everything in that twenty-four page packet spring to life before my very eyes. The hilariously cheesy effects, poor acting, and continuity so awful that it would have made even Ed Wood weep... Somehow, within six short episodes, this show had done every television "don't".

Ever wonder what happened to River during all that time she was locked up in Alliance hands? Well, now you can see what happened if you watch the lost tapes from her "sessions." This almost amounts to torture for Firefly fans, because while we get some tantalizing background hints about River, it just makes Browncoats (like me) wish that this series would return.

Can't someone pony up the cash and get this great show back on the air, make a direct to DVD movie, or even a video podcast? I'd even settle for a traveling minstrel & puppet show at this point. Check out the never released grainy black & white footage after the jump. It features River (Summer Glau) and Joss Whedon himself playing her counselor.

(NOTE: The video below is currently shorter than it should be. We're working to get it fixed. Keep checking back.)
(UPDATE: Fixed now. Enjoy!)

Technically, this show may not have been short-lived enough. Small Wonder ran for four seasons - from '85 to '89 - in syndication. Whenever I am baffled by the popularity of tween vehicles like The Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, I just think of the inexplicably high ratings little robot Vicki got in her first year and the solid following that held on until the show's demise.

The show's conceit involved a robotics firm engineer designing an AI cast-off from Annie to come live with his family. The robot was a "Voice Input Child Indenticant." VICI. Vicki. You get it. The Lawson family had quite a time trying to keep the monotoned Vicki's origins a secret from those pesky Brindles next door. They couldn't possibly destroy the adorable bundle of bolts that Dad had so lovingly (and sorta creepily if you think about it) put together and kept at home long past her beta-testing date.

Remember the days when alternative music and indie movies were actually alternative and independent? When I was in high school in the late 80s and early 90s, you got beat up for liking Hal Hartley movies, listening to bands from Athens and thinking Crispin Glover was the best part of Back to the Future. Members of Generation X that had taken a liking to punk rock or arty movies had to wait until college to find like-minded folks. This may, of course, be my romanticizing memory at work, but if your glory days were anything like mine, than The Adventures of Pete & Pete was your show.

The Nickelodeon show started out as a series of shorts and developed into a show which ran for three seasons between 1993 and 1996. The show's eccentric cast of characters included two brothers named Pete, their mom, the metal plate inside mom's head, dad, the eldest Pete's best friend Ellen, Artie the strongest man in the world and little Pete's tattoo Petunia. The show followed the kids' adventures in the suburban town of Wellsville.