Dear FOX, stop letting monkeys plan your television schedule.

Generally, I like FOX. Well, not their news product, or their tendency to cancel great shows even if their ratings haven't caught up to where they should be. (I did think that Alyssa Rosenberg brought up a good point on her blog when she noted that FOX gives chances to a ton of weird shows that the networks don't want to touch, so they are going to have a higher cancel rate as well. I'm not sure when she said this, so instead, let me just plug her blog in general here.) But in general, I like several of their programs.

I do not like their scheduling habits though. I'm not sure why, but they consider it a good idea to air a couple episodes, then take three weeks off. I imagine that this practice started because, back in the day, FOX aired a lot more live sports in the middle of the week, when they had less live programming. They still don't run a full programming slate, since they aren't active in the 10 p.m. hour, or late night.

Also, this practice was more defensible in the past because it allowed people to catch up on shows if they missed some episodes. For example, if you did miss the wonderful first four episodes of Glee this year, they are being replayed in repeats now. However, you could have just watched them on Hulu or downloaded them from iTunes or... uh... other sources. In this wonderful digital age, you don't really have to wait for shows to be re-broadcast.

With that in mind, FOX, here is what I suggest - Just run shows in order from start to finish. The only exception should be if there is a holiday, in which case, sure, run a repeat or a holiday special. Let me actually see new episodes of Family Guy, The Cleveland Show and Glee in proper order instead of breaking them up with repeats. Thanks!

Note: I included random pictures from Robot Chicken because I like Robot Chicken. Deal with it!

Inexplicable TV Review: The genius of Robot Chicken

Hey, did you realize that Robot Chicken is now in its fifth season? I didn't either really, until I was poking around for information about a specific skit on the Internetz.

I'm talking about "Table Be Round", a song that features a Sir Mix-A-Lot clone Sir Mix-A-Lot rapping about the reasons why King Arthur needed to switch from a conventional, rectangular table to a round table. In many ways, the song is an example of Robot Chicken at its best - A flippant merging of nerdy current junk pop culture (Sir Mix-A-Lot) and something "classic" nerdy pop culture (Sir Arthur).

Robot Chicken is pretty undecipherable unless you know something about 1970s to 2000s pop culture. Heck, they have two extra-long episodes devoted to just Star Wars, which makes the nerd in me rejoice. (My favorite part from those episodes? George Lucas trying to escape from ravenous fans.) Pretty much any significant comic or cartoon character from the 1980s and 1990s - Skeletor, Cobra Commander, the Smurfs, Thundercats, He-Man, Aquaman - has been on the show.

Also wonderful is the fact that Seth Green is the guy behind it all. Between his role as Chris on Family Guy and his heavy involvement in Robot Chicken, I guess he has quite the interest in animation. He obviously remains a popular guy with his former co-stars, since the voice talent they've used on the show is a vertifable who's who of 1990s stars - Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rachel Leigh Cook and even stars with just two names have been on the show frequently. (My favorite from this category? Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper, of course.)

Note: My plan to queue up some Baggage posts ran into some unfortunate problems, so I'm doing this on the fly instead. Sorry! I'm actually typing this during the train ride to New York City, which is a pretty sweet usage of technology, if I do say so myself.