Have you noticed lately that the new faces cropping up on TV series in starring roles are often actors you've never seen before -- or if you have, it was in a supporting role of a feature or a foreign TV show? Think about it, Lee Pace as the Pie Man on Pushing Daisies, Jonny Lee Miller on Eli Stone, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in New Amsterdam, Michelle Ryan in Bionic Woman, all of these leads are relatively new faces. That's one way to cast series. Another is for big stars to take to TV, if not for the first time, than for a return.

In an interesting article at IGN.com, blogger Travis Fickett points out that there used to be a line of demarcation between the worlds of acting: film actors vs. television actors. But nowadays the stars are going back and forth a lot more fluidly.

%Gallery-18004%

(S03E13) One thing you can say about Medium, they don't fall in to the trap of being a formulaic show. These last few weeks the shows have been all over the map with the structure and format. It's one of the things that makes the show so enjoyable.

I missed the very beginning of the episode because right as the show started my cable box decided that was the perfect time to shut itself off. So I scrambled to get all my junk flipped over to straight cable and came back in the middle of the scene with grown-up Ariel and Marie. It left me a little confused until old Joe and Allison turned up. I haven't decided yet whether Allison is just going to be a really hot 50+ woman or if the makeup to age Patricia Arquette just wasn't very well done. Old Joe looked good though.

(S05E11) The title of this episode led me to expect something much different than what we ended up seeing. The reference to The Life Aquatic made me think that this episode would find the Griffin's on some sort of adventure. No such luck there, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think that idea could have made for a funny episode, but this one worked out ok.

It was something of the opposite of "Peter's Two Dads." Where that one excelled with the structure of the story, this one wasn't as strong. But the collection of cutaways presented with this episode was far superior. Of course, given that I only liked one of them last week, that's a pretty low bar. We'll save those for last though, and get to the meat of the episode. As is often the case, we had a Peter story balanced with a Stewie story.