Channel Surfing: HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, HOMELAND, THE GOOD WIFE & More!

Just when FX thought that AMERICAN HORROR STORY had helped them corner the market on truly terrifying television came last night’s HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER guest appearance by Katie Holmes. Yet rather than ad insult to injury by joining what pretty much amounts to the entirety of the internet — which for those keeping track all but reached a consensus at precisely 8:28PM eastern standard time that last night’s performance by Holmes made Britney Spears look talented — we thought we’d focus on the positive that was Neil Patrick Harris and Cobie Smulders. Which is to say, Robin and Barney’s “B” story that had everybody’s favorite Canadian export chiding the Legen.. wait for it… dary one upon discovering that he was one-fourth Canadian was everything the much-anticipated return of Holmes’ Slutty Pumpkin wan’t: Funny, romantic and worth our time.

Since we here at theTVaddict.com pride ourselves on providing Networks and Studios with unsolicited advice on how they might wish to consider promoting their current crop of new and returning shows, we thought we’d take a moment to fill Showtime in on a little something we discovered whilst jumping on the HOMELAND bandwagon. Simply put, thanks to a winning mix of political intrigue, secretive CIA operatives and terrorists threats at every turn, it finally occurred to us what exactly has us so hooked on the Howard Gordon produced series: It’s 24 2.0! Cooler still, since the pay-cabler only requires thirteen episodes in comparison to the twenty-four that the Kiefer Sutherland starrer required as a result of the show’s central conceit, HOMELAND is able to perfectly dole out all the spine-tingling chills and didn’t-see-that-coming thrills without having to rely on filler that may-or-may-not involve a character getting stuck in a cougar trap!

This just in: The CLEVELAND SHOW has really grown on us. To the point that Sunday’s antics that saw the genuinely loveable Cleveland and Rollo Brown spend the night in a haunted house while Donna and Cleveland Jr watched was far and away the funniest thing to come out of Fox’s Animation Domination lineup. Of course, not helping things was the immense disappointment that was the series premiere of ALLEN GREGORY (Stewie Griffin he ain’t), a truly bizarre FAMILY GUY that for some reason or other decided to dedicated an episode on the unfortunate fact that Quagmire’s sister Brenda was trapped in an abusive relationship, and to paraphrase a line from ‘Comic Book Guy,’ what may have been THE SIMPSONS’ worst “Treehouse of Horrors” ever.

While it will probably won’t come as much of a surprise that our love affair with THE GOOD WIFE continues following yet another stellar episode on Sunday in which the ridiculously watchable Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) discovered that his ex-wife (Perfectly played by Parker Posey) had slept with an actual relative of Bin Laden (Seriously folks, you have to see this!), we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our one teensy little problem with the episode. Aside from setting viewers up for what will surely be a very interesting relationship between Alicia and firm newbie Caitlin (Anna Camp), the case of the week that had Alicia investigating an unfortunate death on a ‘Booze Cruise’ did little except reinforce the unmistakable fact that we’re getting old! No really, are we the only TV Addict who had never heard of a “Stoplight Party?”