January's very busy mid-season rolls on, bringing a lot of premieres and returns. In this week's Talking TV with Ryan and Ryan podcast, Ryan McGee and I mention in passing many of mid-January's new programs, but we discuss a few of the recent arrivals in depth.

The four shows we talked about at length make for an oddball quartet: 'Parks and Recreation,' 'American Idol,' 'Fairly Legal' and 'Being Human.' We did have brief discussions of a few other shows in the first portion of the podcast. But see if you can tell from the photo on this post which show we liked best.

The running times for this week's podcast are below.

Here are the time codes for this week's podcast:

0 - 8:32: Mentions of premiere or return dates for 'Harry's Law' (premiered Jan. 17 on NBC; Joel Keller's review is here), the American version of 'Skins' (premiered Jan. 17 on MTV), 'White Collar' (returns Tuesday on USA), 'Hot in Cleveland' and 'Retired at 35' (returns/premieres Wednesday on TV Land), 'Perfect Couples' (re-premieres on Thursday on NBC), 'Royal Pains' and 'Fairly Legal' (returns/premieres Thursday on USA), 'Fringe' (returns on Fox Friday). We talk about a few of these shows for a couple minutes here and there in these first eight minutes.

8:33: - 12:55: The Friday premiere of the prequel series 'Spartacus: Gods of the Arena' on Friday on Starz, and the recent casting of a new actor who will replace Andy Whitfield in the second full series of 'Spartacus,' which will be shot later this year.

12:56 - 17:58: The debut of the American version of 'Being Human' on Syfy on Jan. 17 (my review of the show is here).

17:59 - 22:43: The debut of 'Fairly Legal' on USA on Thursday.

22:44 - 39:25: A bit of chatter about NBC's new 3-hour comedy block, which arrives on Wednesday, and a much longer discussions of the charms of 'Parks and Recreation,' which kicks off its third season on Thursday (be sure to check out all of our 'Parks and Rec' coverage).

39:26 - end: The return of 'American Idol' and whether it will be the good kind of train wreck or the bad kind of train wreck. (My story on the 'Idol' panel at TCA press tour is here.)

As always, you can grab the podcast on iTunes, or you can listen to or grab the MP3 file from this site.

The podcast is also available here, as are full archives of every 'Talking TV' podcast. The 'Talking TV' archives are also now available on iTunes as well.

Thanks for listening!


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