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Seeing as how all of the good shows are finally coming out of winter hiatus, I figured it’d be a good time to review the new shows in an attempt to find the next Battlestar Galactica or Scrubs. And thanks to RSS & torrents, the third best combination ever invented by man right behind rum & coke and beer & baseball, you can quickly download anything you haven’t watched so far and quickly catch up.

The Good: Jericho - Present day America. Major cities suddenly nuked by an unknown enemy. And a small town full of seemingly half genius, half dumbass citizens. Yeah, it’s a somewhat weak premise, and it’s a “family” show despite the nuclear holocaust, and some of the plot holes are so glaring, you have to wear sunglasses while watching. But if you can get past all that, it’s actually not a bad hour of television. We’ve all dreamed about what we’d do if the end of the world happened in out life time and so it’s fun in the sense that every step of the way, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, “Man, I never would have thought to do that!” It won’t be winning any awards any time soon, but it’s not being canceled and people are tuning in, which says enough.

The Bad: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - I wanted this show to be good. I still do. The premise of a behind-the-scenes-of-SNL type comedy/drama from the creator of The West Wing sounded great. But if Aaron Sorkin doesn’t get off his high horse soon and immediately stop writing condescending episodes in between bad plot lines, myself and the other 28 viewers left will ultimately flip the channel. So why do I still keep coming back for more? Because of the actors. Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry have some of the best chemistry between each other, almost to the level of Scrubs’ Zach Braff and Donald Faison. It’s fun watching Perry finally be able to play the serious & witty role, and play it quite well I might add. It’s lucky (and rare) that despite his work on Friends, he managed to not get typecast as the goofy, sidekick guy only to watch his career go down the tube years later.

The Ugly: Daybreak - What do you get when you mix Groundhog Day, 24, and a sack full of shit together? Daybreak. ABC couldn’t have pimped this show any more than they did and it still flopped pitifully. The only thing missing from making this the ultimate crapfest were the writers of LOST - oh wait, that’s right, this aired in the same time spot as LOST did. No wonder.

The Great: Heroes - I’ll be completely honest here. I hated this show at first. Had I written this post back in October, Heroes would have enjoyed the spot above all to itself. But thankfully, I watched more than just the first two episodes and soon fell in love with the whole show. We all grew up with X-Men comics and cartoons. But even outside of X-Men, we all have a favorite superhero and the one thing they each have in common is the fact that they have some sort of cool super power! But for most of us, we fell in love with a character who had already mastered their powers and who was using them against the forces of evil in the world. Never has there been a story where we actually get to follow these heroes transforming right before our eyes - until now. Few of the characters in Heroes have even come close to harnessing their powers, much less mastering them. We’re able to watch as they struggle to fit their newfound changes into their normal life. At the same time, we get to watch as a few of them discover that the dark side might be a more lucrative path. Will the good guys band together? Will they learn to mesh their powers together in order to stop the impending nuclear blast? Chances are they will, but it’s still fun as hell to watch.

So go fire up your favorite downloading program and catch a few episodes of these days, minus the craptacular one mentioned above. Hopefully you won’t be too disappointed.