Anyone who watched The Class tonight may have noticed something: Lucy Punch, who played snooty reporter Holly Ellenbogen, was missing from the opening credits. Her bio has disappeared from the show's page on CBS's web site; she's even disappeared from the site's cast photo (right).

This isn't unexpected, since the producers said that a) they were going to concentrate on the romantic storylines on the show and b) it was obvious to everyone that her storyline, which included her gay-but-not-gay husband, wasn't working. She was being shown on the program less and less, usually reporting something that set up some plotline in an episode. But to unceremoniously dump her like that, wiping her off the screen like she was never there, seems pretty cold to me.

Producers over Warner Bros. sent us a press release announcing a pretty cool/unprecedented web extra from the comedy,The Class. Next week, they're going to do two live webcasts of rehearsals.

The first webcast is The Table Read on Monday, January 15th at 11 am (Pacific). You'll get to peek in as the cast gives a first reading (literally around a table) of that week's script. The next live webcast is the following Wednesday a 1 pm (Pacific) when the cast will do a run-thru of the script with all the changes made since Monday. This is an event that usually doesn't have an audience, so it will be pretty cool to see. Of course, it sort-of ruins the episode for you since you know what is going to happen. I suppose it will be interesting to see the final product when it airs.

Check it out at www.CBS.com.

CBS put their regular programming on hold last night so they could show the 33rd Annual People's Choice Awards. Hosted by Queen Latifah, the show gives awards based on public internet voting. As that is the case, these awards track with the Nielsen ratings more than most. Case in point, the award for Television Comedy went to Two And A Half Men. Top rated for a couple years now, but it can't seem to get any press unless Charlie Sheen is divorcing someone or hiring a hooker.

Most of the other television awards followed similar lines. The award for Best Drama went to Grey's Anatomy. Best Actor was Patrick Dempsey (Grey's Anatomy). Best Actress went to Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives). Best Competition/Reality show was, of course, American Idol. Best Animated Show was The Simpsons. The only real surprise came in the new categories. Best New Drama was Heroes, which isn't a surprise, but Best New Comedy, The Class? I didn't see that one coming. The television awards were rounded out with Ellen Degeneres winning Best Talk Show Host.

Movies and Music winners after the jump.

I'm going to dispense with traditional "Best" and "Worst" lists and just use the tried-and-true journalistic method of "made-up categories." Why? Well, firstly, everyone's sick of seeing "Best" and "Worst" lists by this point, considering every newspaper and magazine did one over Christmas week. Secondly, to be honest, the list would end up looking like everyone else's. How much of a limb am I going out on, for instance, to say that The Office was one of the best comedies this year? Exactly!

So, let's start with the Good Stuff, and then do the Bad Stuff:

One of the problems I've had, and continue to have, with The Class since it premiered this past fall was that the show had just too many characters and too many stories. Sure, the storylines with Lina and Richie were sweet and had the most dramatic impact, and the stories with Kat and Ethan were often very funny. But the Duncan and Nicole storyline seemed right out of the Friends playbook and the Kyle/Holly/GayButNotGay Husband story? Ugh... the less said about it, the better.

But it looks like the show's creators, David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, are getting the message. According to this AP article, they have decided to create more epsiodes where the group is together, rather than the disparate storylines that dominated the first ten or so episodes of the season. They admit that, while having a soapy, separate-thread structure for the show was a novel concept for a sitcom, it just wasn't working. And the actors wanted to do more scenes together, too, so it seems like going back to a traditional format is working better for everyone.

Despite mediocre ratings and equally mediocre reviews (including mine), CBS has been happy enough with The Class to order more episodes of the "half-hour comic-sudser," as Variety so adroitly called it.

But the show is not getting the entire "back nine" just yet. According to that Variety article, CBS is hoping the mid-season show Rules of Engagement, starring David Spade and Patrick Warburton, will work well in the Monday comedy block where The Class currently resides.

Another article, on USAToday.com, says that newer episodes of the show will concentrate on fewer characers.

Because it stinks.

That's what I'd like to say in my post about why I'm not reviewing The Class anymore, but since I get paid to actually render more thoughtful (and longer) opinions than that, I'll give you folks a little more insight.

I had faith in this show when it first started; after all, the comedic pedigree behind it -- James Burrows, David Crane, Jeffrey Klarik -- was stellar. And, while the pilot was a bit of a jumbled mess, the next two episodes had some laugh-out-loud moments. But after that, it crashed and burned, and really hasn't made me laugh since.

(S01E07) Maybe the writers of The Class are getting the hint and following what seems to be a pretty obvious suggestion: take out storylines! Let the characters breathe! Get rid of the high-strung socialite and the husband she doesn't realize is gay! This episode managed to do all of that; we don't see Holly and Kyle (and Holly's Paul Lynde sound-alike husband) at all, and Duncan and Nicole get some time to interact without Yonk in the way, and take Lina and Richie along for the ride. And, of course, Kat and Ethan do their goofy stuff, this time in a bar (notice most of the episodes have been named for the Kat/Ethan story of the week? I just figured that out tonight... I'm slow, I guess).

So, now that things are a bit smoother and less cluttered, there'd be more room for the funny right? Well, that's what you might think, but you'd be wrong.

And then there was one. Now that CBS has picked up Jericho and Shark for full seasons, and canceled Smith, they are left with just one more new show to make a decision on. The Class hasn't made the decision easy. They had a slow start that led to the shuffling of timeslots in the Monday comedy block. While the show has performed better since it started following How I Met Your Mother, it's not quite good enough to get picked up, yet. CBS has ordered four more scripts for the show which gives it a little more time to impress.

I'd like to see the show get a full season. After a pilot that I didn't think was very good at all, the show has really turned a corner. The Duncan/Nicole part of the story is a little dull at times, but the rest of the pairings are working out well. Lizzy Caplan (Kat) is fantastic, while Sean Maguire (Kyle) and Cristian de la Fuente (Aaron) have had some of the funniest scenes in the show. I've even been pulled in to the strange Richie's wife plot. My guess is that the show will eventually make it to a full season.

(S01E06) For a fleeting second, I thought The Class was just going to concentrate on two stories this week. For the first act, it looked like all we'd see was Richie, Duncan and Yonk in Atlantic City and Holly's adventures at the petting zoo. Yes, one of the storylines would be a Holly storyline, but I was glad that the writers decided to smarten up and rotate out one storyline per week, leaving more room for silly things like effective jokes and character development.

But then I saw Lina in an FDR costume and Kat being Kat, and I just went, "oh crap."

(S01E05) This review is not going to be pretty, boys and girls, because I'm starting to lose my patience with The Class. There's too many stories and not enough laughs. Right now, the only storyline that has any redeeming qualities, the constant efforts of Kat to bring Ethan out of his nice guy shell, really is just being used as a goofy side-story to all of the other, more emotional stories. But the problem is, those stories are becoming less entertaining by the week, and the "complications" that the writers are throwing in are just distractions.

(S01E04) This show is really shaping up to be a soap opera, isn't it? I mean, even the structure is the same: we spend a few minutes with one group, then we switch to another group. After a couple of more minutes we switch to another, and so on. It gets to the point where we see scenes during each of the four storylines during each act of the show. I'm not really sure this really works here, though; in this episode, we only get glimpses of each story, but not much else. Things don't move along as quickly as they should, and when you really want to follow one storyline -- like anything involving Richie -- an annoying storyline comes up and kills the momentum -- like anything involving Holly.

Beginning next week, CBS is swapping time slots for How I Met Your Mother and The Class. Instead of airing at 8 pm on Mondays, The Class will move to 8:30 and vice versa for Mother. The reason behind the swap is a bit of a no-brainer. How I Met Your Mother has 20% higher ratings than The Class, so CBS is going to use it as a lead-in and hope to keep its viewers for the new show.

In other CBS comedy news, the network has ordered a full season of The New Adventures of Old Christine. Initially, CBS committed to half a season but things are looking good for the Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy so they've picking up the whole season.

*Wait! There's more! Cynopsis also reports that ABC has put Knights of Prosperity is on hold indefinitely. It was supposed to premiere on October 17th, now there's no air date. Knights is about a group of blue collar workers who decide to rob Mick Jagger. It can't be good when your show is bumped before it even airs. Yowza.

(S01E03) I saw a rough-cut version of this episode about a week ago; it was so rough that the video time stamp was sitting not only in the corner of the screen, but in the corner of the TV picture Kyle and Aaron were watching. But no matter; the jokes were the same. It's sort of ironic that, in this episode, the storyline that had the least amount of plot -- Kyle and Aaron watching Holly do one of those "poor schmuck reporter in a hurricane" reports -- had the most laughs. I mean, who didn't laugh when Holly got knocked cold by a stop sign?

Anyway, the rest of the episode shows that The Class is going in a funny direction. It also shows that it's willing to take some time and figure out which stories work and which don't.

I tend to have very little patience with new television programs. I usually give them two or three episodes and then I tune out. I did that for Desperate Housewives during season one and I still don't regret canceling my Season Pass to that show. And now, this fall, I am doing it once again. I get all giddy over new shows that I think have a great premise, and then I get bored quickly. Apparently I can't handle more than 5 seconds of bad television. Here are The Five: New shows that are already getting old: