ER Checks Out Tonight

(NEWSER) - Set your TiVo to stunned: George Clooney will make a return appearance on ER tonight, Entertainment Tonight reports. Clooney, who left the show in 1999, will star with his onetime on-screen love interest, Julianna Margulies. “I want their story to be very fulfilling in the end,” the episode’s writer said. Also appearing: Noah Wyle, who will run into Eriq La Salle while awaiting his kidney transplant. Oh, ER… More»

A few good jokes, but show's aim seems off

(NEWSER) - The Goode Family, an animated series about an eco-obsessed, passionately politically correct family that airs tonight on ABC, is fairly funny, but leaves reviewers scratching their heads:

• It “feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s,” writes Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times. "Who really thinks of wind power—an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show—as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?"

Generation Y's 'woe is us' attitude blindingly reflected in NBC's sci-fi drama

(NEWSER) - Beginning their third season tonight, the scrappy band of young world-savers of NBC’s Heroes is just in time, Alessandra Stanley writes in the New York Times. The dangers they have to face, from a sinister conglomerate started by their parents to deadly viruses, make a convenient parallel to the complaints of Generation Y, who feel that they've been burned by boomer indulgences and misdeeeds. “Heroes gives its fans cathartic validation,” Stanley writes. “You inherited a screwed-up world, and it’s not your fault.” More»

Another show about nothing could be in the works at NBC

(NEWSER) - A new Jerry Seinfeld series is in the works at NBC, says Page Six. The comedian, 53, is in talks with his former network about a show that’s being pitched as “just like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but with Jerry, instead of Larry.” Once again, Seinfeld will play himself in New York in “an exaggerated reality,” writes the Page Six staff. More»

Quarter of schedule devoted to comedy

(NEWSER) - NBC is looking to comedy to help it climb the ratings ladder: Nearly 25% of the network's fare next season will consist of sitcoms, up from just 14% last fall. Execs are aiming to recapture the highly-educated young adults that helped propel Seinfeld and Friends, the Los Angeles Times reports. And "audiences have been very receptive to comedy and light fantasy drama the past couple of seasons," says chairman Bob Greenblatt. More»