TVSquad

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - Book 3, Fire Vol. 2
• Banacek - Season 2
• Barney Miller - Season 2
• ER - Season 8
• The Girls Next Door - Season 3
• Hawaii Five-O - Season 3
• Hustle - Season 4
• The Jeff Corwin Experience - Season 1
• Make Room For Daddy - Season 6
• The Odd Couple - Season 3
• The Simple Life - The Simple Life Goes To Camp
• Swamp Thing - Season 1
• Thunderbirds - 40th Anniversary Megaset
• Torchwood - Season 1

I think most readers are going to be stunned that this guy was still alive in 2007.

Lane was one of the most famous character actors in TV history, appearing on such programs as Petticoat Junction (where he was a regular), I Love Lucy, Dark Shadows, L.A. Law, St. Elsewhere, Little House on the Prairie, The Odd Couple, and...oh, way too many to list here. He was also in the films It's A Wonderful Life, The Road To Singapore, 42nd Street, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and many others. His career spanned over 60 years, his last role as the narrator in the short film The Night Before Christmas in 2006.

Lane passed away quietly on Tuesday in Santa Monica, CA.

What probably started as a one time lark is now turning into a regular event. A while back The Late Show With David Letterman had an Impressionist Week, and now they have another one, which starts tomorrow night. Here's the lineup:

Monday: Rob Magnotti
Tuesday: John Byner
Wednesday: Mike MacRae
Thursday: Joe Piscopo
Friday: Reggie Reg

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

• Are You Afraid of the Dark? - Season 3
• Columbo - Mystery Movie Collection 1989
• The Drew Carey Show - Season 1
• Ed, Edd, 'n Eddy - Season 2
• Flipper - Season 1
• Ironside - Season 1
• Kidnapped - Complete Series
• Morel Orel - Vol. 1
• NCIS - Season 3
• The Odd Couple - Season 1
• Planet Earth - The Complete Collection
• WKRP in Cincinnati - Season 1

Welcome to TV Squad Lists (formerly 'The Five'), a feature where each blogger has a chance to list his or her own rundown of things in television that stand out from the rest, both good and bad.

TV usually gets the writing profession wrong. I've never understood why, since shows and characters are written by writers themselves. Maybe they think they have to dumb it down for the general audience. That's why you have writers like Jessica Fletcher, who just sits down at the typewriter and the words come out fine and she mails it off to her publisher. This happens all the time on television. And have you ever noticed that when you hear the writing that a writer character has done on a show it's almost always terrible? Why is that?

After the jump are six writer characters on TV that were done correctly.

Happy Valentine's Day! I hate February 14th.

But it's a fine day for all you sickening happy lovey-dovey couples to hold hands and skip around your garden and have dirty dirty sex. Below are 5 great TV couples who are probably celebrating the day this way. Well, at least four of them.

1. Rob and Laura Petrie (The Dick Van Dyke Show): Has there ever been a married couple on television that had the chemistry that Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore had? Hell, they both even have three names! You could tell they loved each other and cared for each other, and you could imagine they were intimate, even if they did have those damn separate beds.

Just the other day I was wondering what happened to Richard Stahl. He was so funny in so many character parts, and then he seemed to vanish. He had been battling Parkinson's Disease for the past ten years, and died last Sunday in Los Angeles.

Stahl was in tons of TV shows over the past 40 years, including All in the Famly, Columbo, Laverne and Shirley, Benson, Good Times, Maude, Bonanza, That Girl, Love, American Style, Happy Days, Soap, Barney Miller, The Facts of Life, the original Love Boat TV movie, and was a regular on the 80s sitcom It's A Living. I'll always remember him from several very funny appearances in The Odd Couple. He was also in several movies, including Five Easy Pieces, Billy Jack, and Slaughter House-Five.

(That's him on the right in the photo, being attacked by Son of Blob.)