TVSquad

Studio 60!

I'm kidding. Readers just love it when I mention that show.

I'm talking about the shows created by The TV Show Pitch Generator. Just click on the "Pitch It" button and it will randomly create a new show for you. Most of them are better than the stuff that's been announced for this fall. It's too bad they don't have an option where you can actually create the cast/plot yourself, but it's pretty fun. My favorites are after the jump.

Medium has become the Yes, Dear of "psychic who sees ghost genre and helps people," a show that not too many seem to talk about but gets pretty good ratings and gets renewed every year. See also: JAG.

NBC has given the Patricia Arquette show a fourth season, a week before the official fall 2007 lineup is announced at the network's upfront presentation. NBC President Kevin Reilly praised the show as only a network executive can (and while you read the praise, replace the title Medium with any show that NBC has canceled in the past 6 months).

Ghost Whisper, or as I call it, Can I Sit Through a Show I Hate For No Other Reason Than to Ogle Jennifer Love Hewitt?, now has a spin-off of sorts, an online-only series launching today on CBS' innertube broadband site. The new web series, Ghost Whisperer: The Other Side, focuses on Zach, an earthbound spirit who tries to come to terms with his death with the help of other spirits. Zach will be played by Mark Hapka, and the series will also feature Robin Hines, rapper DNA and Graham McTavish as the ghosts who try to help Zach communicate with the world of the living.

Zach will also appear in the second season finale of Ghost Whisperer. The first webisode is available to watch now, and a new episode will debut every Friday.

Check out a trailer for the new online series after the jump.

Bob already mentioned this new detective drama to y'all back in October, but we didn't know exactly when the show would air. Now we know Raines, starring Jeff Goldblum, will debut on NBC in March. The series will air on Fridays at 9 pm, booting Las Vegas out of that timeslot.

I'm a bit tired of all this supernatural nonsense like Medium and Ghost Whisperer, but Raines does have a slight twist, in that Goldblum's detective only imagines the ghosts he's seeing, and they help him solve the murder cases. Huh, a human who confabs with imaginary creatures only he can see? Isn't that essentially Calvin and Hobbes? And wouldn't that be cool if Calvin actually grew up to become a homicide detective and Hobbes helped him solve all his cases? And wouldn't it be even cooler if I could learn to stay on topic instead of digressing into talking about comic strips that have absolutely nothing to do with the show I'm writing about? Yes, in a perfect world that would be grand.

Former Thief star Malik Yoba will return to TV on the new Jeff Goldblum drama for NBC, Raines. He'll play the former partner of Goldblum's detective character.

Oh, what's this one about? It's about a guy who solves crimes by...speaking to the dead! What an original concept!

Seriously, what's up with that? Medium isn't enough? And Ghost Whisperer? And doesn't the guy on The Dead Zone see people who are dead? Heck, even the blonde on Cold Case sees a "ghost" of the victim at the end of every episode.

I don't remember Columbo or Banacek or Barnaby Jones having to talk to the dead to solve crimes.

Actually, that's not entirely true. If you read the account from Digital Spy of Jennifer Love Hewitt's chat with talk show host Megan Mullally, she talks about lights moving slightly and some lights exploding, and how it sometimes scares actors playing guest roles on her CBS series Ghost Whisperer. She further states that the people who work on the show think such occurrences are "awesome" and that maybe there really are ghosts on the set. That doesn't sound to me like she's claiming anything about the set being haunted, it sounds more like people jokingly blaming any weird occurrence on ghosts the same way everyone else does. You know, the wind will blow a door open and you'll tell your kid it was a ghost just to give him a fun scare? Yeah, like that. You can't really blame them though, since saying something like, "These lights may have been exposed to moisture which caused them to explode!" isn't quite as exciting as imaging some wandering spirit who for some reason spends all their free time walking around making light bulbs blow up. if that's the afterlife, I gotta say it doesn't sound that interesting. I can make glass explode now, and I'm not even dead.

You know, just the other day I was looking over the network schedules, and I thought to myself, "you know what we need more of on TV? Shows where a woman can see dead people and investigate crimes." My wish has been granted!

CBS has given the OK for a supernatural pilot from Glenn Gordon Caron, the guy who gave us Moonlighting and the short-lived, much missed Now and Again. The show is called The Meant To Bes, about a woman who dies but must return to Earth to help people before she can get into heaven.

Maybe that's the twist. She sees live people!

Sometimes I think to myself there must be more to this world than what my eyes see, a spirit world which mingles clandestinely with us lowly terrestrial beings. But how do we get in contact with the "other side," and more importantly, how can we use this knowledge to instill absolute terror in young children? This is why I watch psychic Sylvia Browne on Montel every Wednesday. If you missed yesterday's show, here's some highlights:

The first guests were a mother and a daughter who was probably in her late twenties. The daughter's sister, who was her twin, had passed away at a party without explanation. Using her conduit to the spirit world, Sylvia asked about a set of earrings. Yes, the mother said, she did sometimes buy things in sets of two for the girls, and sometimes she bought earrings. As much as I wish I had the kind of grip on the spirit world Sylvia has, I could only come to the same conclusion by noticing that the daughter was wearing gigantic earrings, that twins always receive gifts, usually similar, because they share the same birthday, and that every mother in the history of mankind has at one time or another bought earrings for her daughter(s).