I'm hoping that everyone who TiVoed last Monday's episode of House has already watched it, since the next sentence definitely contains a spoiler. The suicide of Dr. Kutner broadsided viewers, although in retrospect it wasn't so surprising. Actor Kal Penn had been fairly underused during the two years he was on the show, and he recently revealed that he'd accepted the position of "liaison connecting the Obama administration with arts and entertainment groups, as well as with the... READ ON

Gee, Ms. Kovalchik, that's a lovely TV-Holic column you have this week"¦ Whenever someone needs to describe the idyllic American life in one capsulated phrase, they usually utter Leave It to Beaver. On one hand, those black-and-white reruns do make the Cleaver family seem as if they existed in some pristine alternate universe, where everyone dressed for dinner and Mom always had cookies and milk at the ready. But on the other, many of the situations were very real and still resonate today.... READ ON

If British TV shows are so darned great, why do U.S. producers insist upon remaking them instead of showing the originals? There are plenty of reasons! For one thing, the shows make reference to political situations, local celebrities and places that are unknown to most Americans, so a lot of the jokes would fall flat. And then there's that pesky pronunciation thing "“ Left Ponders may not realize it, but they speak with a slight accent that some folks on the this side of the Atlantic find... READ ON

The branches of the TV-land family tree can get very tangled. We've previously discussed backdoor pilots; another common offspring is the spin-off, where certain characters on an established series are deemed popular enough to support their own show. And then there is the crossover, where characters from one show appear on another show. Sometimes the crossover intersects with the spin-off (as will be seen tonight when Dr. Addison Montgomery returns to Seattle Grace Hospital in the conclusion of a... READ ON