[Televisionary]

It looks like the Doctor will have to find a new traveling companion... Just as I had finally come to terms with Christopher Eccleston's departure from the British cult series Doctor Who (which recently wrapped its first season Stateside last week), BBC News is reporting that star Billie Piper will also leave the series. Piper, who plays the Doctor's shopgirl-turned-time traveler Rose, will take her last spin in the the Doctor's TARDIS at the conclusion of the second season, in an episode fittingly entitled "Doomsday." "Rose and I have gone on the most incredible journey over the past two years. It has been an amazing adventure, and I can confirm it comes to an end - for now at least - as series two climaxes," said Piper in a statement. "I am truly indebted to Russell [T. Davies] for giving me the chance to play Rose Tyler, and to all the Doctor Who fans old and new who have been so supportive of me in this amazing role. Thank you so much. " ...

I've been suffering through some serious Veronica Mars withdrawal lately. Even though the series only ended about a month ago, I feel as though it's been eons since we've caught up with the gang in Neptune... or what's left of them after the finale 's high body count. Hell, I even miss Jackie . So imagine my surprise when I stumbled onto a bunch of homemade Veronica Mars music videos. The first one captures some of the memorable moments of the Veronica-Logan-Duncan love triangle, all set to the haunting strains of Mono's "Life in Mono." (Despite the video's end credits, it's most definitely a Mono song and not Portishead. I know my Portishead.) So crack open a cursed Lost numbers fortune cookie, sit back, and prepare to get a severe case of the sniffles. But if you're looking for a Veronica Mars fix that's a little less, well, overtly maudlin, here's one of my personal favorites, "The Veronica Mars Rewind Video," set ...

I was really looking forward to BBC America's Hex , another drama import from Blighty. Publicity materials had pegged it as a sort of boarding school-set British Buffy , albeit with an emphasis on witchcraft rather than vampires. I had hoped it would be a summertime guilty pleasure, a fizzy concoction whose ingestion leaves you barely intoxicated. Hex doesn't offer much substance to sink your teeth into and it certainly can't compare to the first five or so years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . And while it's not awful, it just really isn't all that good. The overall conceit has promise: an English boarding school in the middle of nowhere, teenagers with rampant hormones, and a girl with superhuman abilities that set her apart from the popular pack. But I wish that creator Julian Jones had followed Joss Whedon's lead a little more and made the use of witchcraft more of a metaphor for burgeoning sexuality rather than overloading the two-hour pilot with sex, sex, a...

Welcome back to another installment of "Where Pilots Go to Die." Last time, I took a look at the CW's underwater drama Aquaman / Mercy Reef which failed to make it onto the CW's fall schedule. I have a fascination with series that don't go any further than the pilot stage. So imagine my excitement when a copy of CBS's dead pilot Ultra ended up in my greedy little hands. When I first heard of the project a few months ago, I was surprised to learn that CBS was developing a series based on Jonathan and Joshua Luna's superb comic of the same name ("Ultra: Seven Days"). I was even more surprised to discover that other than sharing a title, the two projects had nothing in common whatsoever... The Luna Brothers ' "Ultra: Seven Days" (pictured below) is a smart, edgy, sophisticated comic that's rather like Sex and the City ... with superpowers. It recounts the story of Pearl Penalosa, a sexy Latina superhero with the codename of Ultr...

I've been suffering from some serious Top Chef withdrawal since the Bravo reality series ended a few weeks ago and like a much needed fix, along came FOX's Hell's Kitchen --just in time to fill my quota of culinary guilty pleasure television. While the two shows aren't exactly the same beast (no robotic host in sight here), they both pick aspiring chefs of varying experience and skill to fight it out for the chance to be the Chosen One, the one girl in all the world with the strength to fight the vampires--oops, wrong show. I'm happy to see that in addition to host/chef Gordon Ramsay, the whole gang is back: sous chefs Scott and Mary Ann and French maitre d' Jean Philippe. Let the games begin... I'll say it right now: I like Gordon Ramsay, the former pro-footie (that's soccer to the Yanks in the audience) player turned celebrity chef who just so happens to own a whole fleet of five-star restaurants in London. He's abrasive, vulgar, and domineering,...

Longtime readers of this blog may recall my exuberance and excitement when I finally caved to the pressure of a certain coworker and ordered Battlestar Galactica: The Mini-Series from Netflix about two months ago. I was shocked by how quickly and easily I was sucked into the story of the Galactica and her crew after the near genocide of the human race by their robotic former slaves, the Cylons. The 2003 mini-series, which kickstarted the Battlestar Galactica relaunch (as re-envisioned for the 21st century by exec producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick), was gripping, thrilling, and action-packed. I was instantly hooked and hungry for more BSG , eagerly gobbling up the subsequent discs as they arrived from Netflix. And fortunately, thanks to an Emmy screener box set (which included Seasons 2.0 and 2.5, the latter of which is currently unavailable on DVD), I managed to finally catch up on rest of the series. I was blown away. The mini-series couldn't have prepared me for what wa...

It’s with more than just a little sadness that I bid farewell tonight to the newest incarnation of British cult classic Doctor Who , which airs its first season finale this evening on Sci-Fi. This resurrection of the series quickly made a fan and provided me—probably for the first time—with appointment television on Friday nights. Over the past 13 episodes, Christopher Eccleston--and showrunner Russell T. Davies, who re-envisioned Doctor Who for the 21st century--has lead viewers on a rather surreal series of adventures: exposing a Slithereen conspiracy from within 10 Downing Street, investigating the haunting by an alien ghost child in World War II-era London, battling against the last surviving member of his alien nemeses the Daleks, teaming up with legendary author Charles Dickens in 19th century Cardiff, and managing to avert the end of the world on several occasions. Along the way, he’s been helped--and sometimes hindered--by Rose (Billie Piper) and their latest companion, the bi...