Meanwhile, I've been watching a bit of TV lately. "Charmed" is going well in season 8; when it got to the end of season 7, I got the same feeling that I did towards the end of "Buffy" season 5, i.e. "Wow, I guess they're cancelling this series", but they've surprised me. I'm particularly impressed by Holly Marie Combs (who plays "Piper") - she's clearly the best actor in the show, and can do a lot with just one line or a simple gesture, particularly when it comes to the comedy.
Meanwhile, "Enterprise" season 4 is also going well; I don't think it's really a spoiler if I say that I've got to the first episode in the Mirror Universe. Changing the credits for that story was a nice touch, and I do wonder how many more people would have watched the series if it had all been like that (i.e. "let's blow stuff up!").
I've seen the first few episodes of "The IT Crowd" on Channel 4. The first one wasn't very good - it made me smile in a couple of places, and the tech stuff is pretty accurate, but it didn't meet my "laughter" rule for comedy. Also, Channel 4 lose points by putting a trailer for that program in its own ad break, and for pronouncing the title as "it crowd" (to rhyme with "bit crowd") rather than "eye-tee crowd". However, I'd already recorded the second episode, so I figured that I might as well watch that too, and it was an improvement (i.e. it did make me laugh). Since that's 2 episodes out of 6, and they're only half an hour long each (minus adverts), I figured that I might as well stick with the rest of them, and episode 3 was better again. These episodes are available on their website, although it has a bit of a bad layout, and in fact they preview each episode on the web a week before it's shown on TV (so I'm downloading episode 4 now). This page (behind the link "WATCH EPISODE FOUR ONLINE NOW!") gives you episodes 1 and 2, while this page (behind every other video-ish link from the main page) actually gives you episode 4. I assume that episode 3 should be around there somewhere, so maybe it will turn up later.
As for American TV, Peter David recently posted a blog entry on the Superbowl adverts. Obviously I didn't see them on TV, but it turns out that they're available on the internet. This page has most of them, but you can also go directly to the source for others.
On a vaguely related note, the "Nova" comic idea that I've had on the back-burner for quite a while has suddenly morphed into a "Turbo" story instead, which caught me slightly by surprise. I can still do the original story (or at least, this doesn't preclude it), but this new story ("Flying lesson") has more or less turned up in my head fully-formed. So, echoing something that