I admit, some of these picks are a little chalk. But come on, whose aren't these days?

AL MVP:

Adrian Gonzalez, Boston Red Sox

Gonzalez is of course the new acquisition of the Red Sox, the team favored by everyone and their mothers to win the AL East. Although the Padres were certainly competitive last year, and came very close to a playoff spot, they still got a fraction of the media coverage the Red Sox will receive. Gonzalez is in the prime of his career and has had back to back outstanding years, finishing fourth and second in the NL in 2009 and 2010 respectively in baseball reference WAR, and his counting statistics should improve dramatically with a much more offensively potent lineup and a much more offensively potent ballpark. I would place Adrian Gonzalez as the co-favorite in the MVP race along with Miguel Cabrera, with Robinson Cano, Evan Longoria and other new Red Sox acquistion Carl Crawford not that far behind.

AL Cy Young:

Felix Hernandez, Seattle Mariners

Yes, this is the first of two back-to-back Cy Young award winners I'll be predicting this year, though I think the AL pick is going out far more on a limb than the NL pick. The one aspect of this pick I do like a lot is that by giving Felix the Cy last year with so few wins, if he wins just one or two more and otherwise puts up similar statistics, it would be hard not to award it to him again. He has more or less gotten better year-to-year each of the past five years (Fangraphs' WAR has him better in '09 than '10, but he had a better FIP, xFIP, and tERA last year and pitched more innings, so I'm not exactly sure why), and he's shown no injury history up to now, at least. No reason not to expect a near duplicate of last season. The other key contenders here I would have to think would be Justin Verlander, CC Sabathia and Jon Lester, with me nearly arbitrarily putting them in reverse order or likelihood of victory.

AL Rookie of the Year

Jeremy Hellickson, Tampa Bay Rays

He's a top three prospect in the majors according to just about everyone (and top prospect to be in the majors to begin the season and not on the DL). Hellickson will get a chance to get lots of innings and lots of wins. As I talk about in the NL ROY section, it's all about playing time. Hellickson, though not supposed to be an eventual ace, is mature and has very good stuff, or so I read. Other horses in the race would be Mariners starter Michael Pineda and Toronto Blue Jays starter Kyle Drabek.

NL MVP:

Albert Pujols, St. Louis Cardinals

The #1 overall seed of award picks, I kind of hate myself for picking Pujols (though of course, based on this year's NCAA Tourney, a #1 overall pick wouldn't be such a great bet). Here's the problem. We know as much as we can possibly know about anyone that Pujols is going to be fantastic. He's getting older, but he's still more or less in his prime years, albeit towards the end of those for a normal player, and the man has led the NL in baseball reference WAR for the past six years. I'd love to take a chance, I really would, but the other players I want to pick are super dark horses, and I just don't have the balls to actually pick them, but rather to mention them one sentence from now and give myself credit in case they crazily go on and win it even though I didn't pick them. After Pujols, the most likely I think are Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki and maybe Prince Fielder (at this point there are about eight names that I think have about even chance - including Hanley Ramirez and even Jason Heyward and Buster Posey - why not?). My super aforementioned dark horses, for the record I'll refer back to if they come out of nowhere, are Rickie Weeks and Matt Kemp.

NL Cy Young:

Roy Halladay, Philadelphia Phillies

Easiest pick I made all day - more than Pujols even, I think, even though there are a score of great pitchers in the NL. Roy Halladay is basically the best pitcher on planet Earth right now, and even though he's older, he has been extremely durable, is on a contending team and has both the old-school finishing games mentality gut-voters love, and the wonderful strikeout to walk ratios that stats-voters love. Maybe his biggest obstacle (besides every pitcher's number one obstacle - getting hurt) is Cliff Lee or Cole Hamels also having an amazing year, and somehow splitting the vote. Amongst the other outstanding NL pitchers I'd pick in order of likelihood to win would be Chris Carpenter, Cliff Lee, Tim Lincecum, Ubaldo Jimenez and Clayton Kershaw as my up and comer.

NL Rookie of the Year:

Freddie Freeman, Atlanta Braves

Rookie of the Year is first and foremost about opportunity (well, that at playing at least okay with that opportunity). Rookie of the Year, from year to year, is like the Tony awards - some years have extraordinary talent, like last year with Jason Heyward and Buster Posey, but other years have Bob Hamelin (or the musical Titanic) and just about anyone can sneak in there. When predicting it's always a smart bet to guess someone you know will get at bats, and the two best bets in that regard would be Freeman and Giants first baseman Brandon Belt.

Predicted Baseball Standings Time:

Let me get the standings out before the season starts and then thoughts and MVP/Cy Young picks can come later.

AL:

AL East:

Red Sox 94-68

Rays 90-72

Yankees 90-72

Orioles 78-84

Blue Jays 77-85

AL Central:

Tigers 87-75

Twins 86-76

White Sox 83-79

Indians 69-93

Royals 67-95

AL West:

Rangers 87-75

Athletics 83-79

Angels 83-79

Mariners 70-92

NL:

NL East:

Phillies 91-71

Braves 88-74

Marlins 83-79

Mets 77-85

Nationals 72-90

NL Central:

Brewers 88-74

Reds 87-75

Cardinals 86-76

Cubs 78-84

Astros 68-94

Pirates 68-94

NL West:

Giants 89-73

Rockies 85-77

Dodgers 83-79

Padres 75-87

Diamondbacks 68-94

Prior years' predictions can be found here and here and here.

I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

9. Veronica Mars

Okay, so here's the last show on the list that absolutely nobody watched (well, there's a second one that most people didn't watch as it aired, but I think far more people have watched it since), though it developed a significant cult and is probably one of my, I don't know, five favorite shows of all time (it's incredibly high ranking on my personal list make up for any commercial drawbacks).

I like doing analysis of television as much as the next person, but sometimes more than exactly what you can put your finger on is the feeling you get when you watch a show, when you talk about a show, after you watch it, and when you think about watching it (I spend a lot of time thinking about TV). For Lost, the feeling as the show moved forward changed from excitement right after an episode to frustration, to not really wanting to see more episodes, to at least, for now, not really wanting to see any episodes again(maaaaybe the Desmond-centric time travel one is an exception). For Veronica Mars, my feelings are the opposite. Recently it was mentioned when I was in the car with my friend who had not seen it, and my other friend and I got really excited, telling him to watch it and then later watching the first couple of episodes with him, which were just as good as they were the first time I saw them (or the second). Just writing about it makes me want to watch.

Veronica is a teenage sleuth in a California high school divided between sons and daughters of the rich and the sons and daughters of those who serve them. She is an exception from either of these two groups in that her dad was the sheriff - poor but with power. This all changed after the biggest murder in town history, when he accused the wrong suspect, a multi-millionaire software developer whose son dated Veronica and whose daughter, the dead victim, was her best friend. After that, he was recalled from office and started up a private detective agency, while Veronica became a target at school, since her dad became so unpopular in the wake of accusing the richest man in town. She was asked to choose her friends, or her dad, and stuck with her dad, making her a social pariah. Oh, and her mom walked out on her and her dad somewhere around this time. Got all that?

The way the show works is that every episode contains a small scale mystery - who stole something from the school, who is terrorizing another student - random classmates will come to Veronica for help sometimes, knowing her reputation as a bit of a crime-solver. She then uses some of her dad's cool P.I. equipment along with her natural guile and solves the cases. There's also a big season-long mystery (in the first season, it's who killed her old best friend portrayed by the now much more famous Amanda Seyfried) which works itself out over time, until becoming the focus of the last couple of episodes.

There are many reasons I love this show. For one, the writing is fantastic. Joss Whedon is one of my television heroes and I think it's undeniable Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas (sadly not the same Thomas lead singer of Matchbox 20) is influenced by him. The dialogue is sharp, witty and banter-y, all around, but I particularly enjoy the conversations between Veronica and her dad. Her dad is a great character - it would be so easy to make a show like this and make her dad a bumbling fool, or at the least a naive father on whom she is always pulling one over, or some strict disciplinarian who you are always rooting for her to disobey. This isn't the case at all however - as a viewer, you love her dad - he's smart, he's good at his job, and while he doesn't always know everything she's up to (he does have a job and other commitments, after all) several times in the course of the show, Veronica thinks she's gotten away with something but he knows about it, or knew about it all along. Another character, Logan, who is pretty despicable in the first couple of episodes of the show, became a favorite by the latter half of the first season. The power to transform a character from hated to loved and not have it feel forced (reminiscent of what Whedon does with Cordelia in Buffy) is impressive.

It's tempting to go far more in depth, but it would be difficult without way more words so another subject for another day. All I'll say is that, while I could say this about a whole bunch of series on the list (and I may again before it's over), if you have not watched this show, WATCH IT NOW.

Another commercial I don't understand.

Okay, so somehow there are two employees, one for Pepsi Max, and one for Coke Zero, presumably blue collar, probably truck drivers (white collar workers would probably not be wearing shirts with patches on them and baseball caps) who both end up sitting near each other at the counter at a diner. The Coke Zero guy, who was already sitting down when the Pepsi Max employee walked in, is drinking a Coke Zero, but sees Pepsi Max guy start drinking a Pepsi Max. The Coke Zero guy stares at the Pepsi Max longingly. They chat, the Pepsi Max guy moves up next to Coke Zero guy, and he confirms Coke Zero guy's question, which is whether Pepsi Max had zero calories (it does). Pepsi Max character offers up the can of Pepsi Max to Coke Zero guy, who takes it, has a long pull, and then confirms, skeptically that the drink has zero calories. He then takes another gulp, which Pepsi Max guy captures on his phone, and when Coke Zero guy asks him why he's taking that, Pepsi Max guy responds that he's putting it on youtube. The camera then takes us outside of the diner, and all of a sudden Pepsi Max guy and Coke Zero guy come crashing through the window, fighting, presumably because Coke Zero guy was concerned that being seen drinking Pepsi Max would get him in trouble with his employer.

The fact that this commercial is terrible comes out simply from a single viewing. But possibly my main problem is that I don't understand the underlying reason for why we should believe this commercial. And, of course, I get that lots of commercials kind of (or entirely) have nothing to do with selling their product - it's a different type of approach, and that's fine. Let's restrict ourselves to commercials that talk about one product being good by demonstration, or one product better than another comparable one. Usually they either show people, who we're at least meant to believe are real people, talking about the product, or they show the two products at work. In the former, in theory, if they're real people, that gives some sort of credit - real people think this product is good. In the latter, two, say, cleaning products are used side by side, presumably the results of one are much better than the other, and if we are to believe this is honest, it could persuade us. In this commercial however, the characters are clearly actors. There's no reason we would believe otherwise, from the way the commercial is filmed, to the dialogue, to the comical fight scene at the end. Soda isn't a product we can see in action - there's no way for us to judge the effect of taste from watching, like we could with a cleaning product. So basically what's happening is a paid actor who is clearly a paid actor acting as a Coke trucker is claiming how great Pepsi max is. Why on earth would anybody believe this? It's not just that the commercial doesn't work to me; the concept doesn't work. I don't get it.

This is a commercial I've seen a lot recently that has drawn my ire.

Basically, the premise is a bunch of people are having a blast at Buffalo Wild Wings at lunch, but sadly, they need to return to work. Not to worry! The waitress signals the bartender, who hits a button, which transmits a message to the weatherman who is now on the TV, talking about what a beautiful day it is. After he gets the message, though, he changes his tune - his producers set up the scene to look as if there is a storm, massive rain, terrible conditions and what not, and he reports that with such weather, it's best to stay inside and have a beer.

This is all well and good enough, except what's going to happen when they go back to work hours later? Their bosses will ask them where they were. Their excuse will be "I was at the restaurant when a weather report came on telling us about a huge storm outside and advising that we remain indoors. Only later did I find out that the storm was a fabrication concocted by the restaurant to keep us there buying drinks and wings." Who is going to believe that? Unless, alternately, that weather broadcast that was altered was also broadcast somehow into televisions everywhere, so the bosses either thought the same thing or at least understand their predicament.

I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

10: Lost

Well, unlike the last post, I have the opposite problem. Rather than having nothing to say, I could write a book about Lost (well, at least a novella) and I need to restrain myself a little and will try to avoid getting too specific, but I will probably make some specific examples of things, so if you haven't seen it (and there might be spoilers of something because you can't talk about the show without it, but they also probably won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't watched, and thus quickly forgotten) just trust me on the general points.

For me, and this may be entirely too harsh, and I understand if you think that - Lost, ultimately, represents disappointment. I reserve my harshest judgments not for the worst shows - there's just not enough to say - they're so obviously not good - the Big Bang Theories, or the relentlessly mediocre Mentalist type shows, or the Ghost Whisperers, or so forth and so on. Rather, I'm toughest and most frustrated with the shows that could be good, that have a lot of really good elements, and yet just screw it all up. Lost, along with Battlestar Galactica are pretty much the textbook examples for me of two shows like this - shows that have all this wonderful potential and do a whole bunch of things really well, just to kind of fritter it away in the end (Heroes would be a sub-standard example of this, but it was almost all potential undelivered - it kind of fell apart after the first half-season).

Sometime early in the airing of the second season, I got swept up in Lost fever, watching the first season in a couple of weeks, and then catching up. I pretty much watched regularly weekly until the fifth season, where I kept falling behind but eventually caught up, until the sixth and final season, which I mostly didn't watch, and read wikipedia summaries, and then just watched the final episode, which I feel bad for, because I knew most likely I was going to dislike it, and I feel like I was biased, but yeah, I did hate it.

I was swept up in my initial Lost viewing, as so many others were - the show had a creative, genuinely interesting and new premise, and created a world of mystery with the story and with the look of the show.

This article is a bit disjointed, but I'm kind of taking a quick chronological (or biographical, I guess) journey through my affair with Lost.

Of course, here's the one thing I never liked straight from almost the beginning, and more and more as the show went on: the flashbacks. They're terrible. Well, first, before I tear them to pieces, let's list the exceptions. First, the flashbacks were okay with me, generally, when they moved the plot, and not the characterization. This refers mostly to flashbacks of other events on the island when someone was away from the group - such as when Claire was taken by the Others, and we see what happened to her. I would also however make an exception if there were flashbacks that yielded really important information to the plot off the island, though I can't think of an example offhand (there are a lot of peripherally relevant things - Hurley winning the lottery with the numbers, Locke's dad coming back later on - but these were mostly unnecessary I felt (subjective analysis, I know) and could have easily been worked around).

Now the problem - they stink. Well, first, the soft problem - personally, I think any benefit of characterization given by the flashbacks was more than made up for by the time they took from on-island activities, and the disjointedness they added to the show, in addition to being a kind of lazy way of avoiding having to create more subtle characterization on the island itself. We want to show that Jack has to be needed? Let's just make up some random off the island story showing that, that's not restrained by what is going on on the island - same thing for whatever else they wanted to show for other characters. The hard way, but the better way, would have been to find situations on the island and craft their personas rather than show this blatant hit-you-over-the-head example off the island and then a subtler example in the same episode on the island so you can say to yourself "oh, I get it - the flashback and the island plot are related!". That's actually not the worst thing about the flashbacks. That's mostly commenting on their laziness and unnecessary-ness. Some of them were, taken in and of themselves, not bad pieces of television, even if I wished they weren't there. But, more and more as the seasons moved forward, a lot of them were just plain bad and served to show the same character flaw again and again. The absolute worst one of all was the flashback in which Jack is on some tropical island, meets a woman, hangs out with her a whole bunch, and then against her wishes insists on getting a tattoo, and then gets asked to leave. This was the worst (I think I remember even reading an interview with Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse where they described this as a low moment for them) - it had absolutely no relevance to anything else in the series and just battered home a point about Jack that if you hadn't gotten from the last eight flashbacks, you're not going to get now, and also, even taken out of context, just as a bit of story-telling it was utterly terrible. There were other bad ones, and to be fair, this is the worst, but you get the point.

The last thing is that by starting this flashback format, they locked themselves in. Even when the flashbacks no longer became helpful (if they were ever helpful), they felt they had to use them in every single episode, instead of just using them when they were needed.

Okay, I think I just spent most of the space I was planning to use writing just about the flashback device, so I'll speed through things rather than have a 4000-word entry.

So let's move quickly through the seasons. First was best - mystery about the island, good characters, for the most part, a lot of different ways they could go. (Cuse and Lindelof say that it should have been obvious they were going the super-duper natural (that's even more super than supernatural) route from always day one with the smoke monster, but I think that's just hindsight talking - they could have gone sci-fi, or they could have kept their limited supernatural in a box, rather than going time travel and so forth). The second season featured some incredibly slow-moving repeated tales of different members of the tail section of the plane (no pun intended, really), and then possibly my favorite episodes of the series (possibly, though not my favorite episode, more on that in a minute), when they had who would turn out to be the super-villain of the show Ben Linus locked in the cage and he tried to convince them of all sorts of things. Of course, this was probably the performance that got Ben Linus promoted to amongst the most important characters of the remainder of the series, a move that was disastrous in my opinion - he became one of these characters (like Syler in heroes, or Baltar in Battlestar Galactica) who lies so often but people keep for some reason believing him over and over again, until it just gets frustrating, tiresome and unbelievable (yeah, he's charismatic, but no one is that charismatic).

All right, skipping forward some more, my favorite character on the show was Desmond, and the best episode was probably his crazy time traveling episode "The Constant" where he has to go back and convince Penny to keep the same phone number so he can call her. Anyway, in terms of how the supernatural elements have anything else to do with the show, yeah, not so much. In terms of just an individual piece of television making though, it's great.

Skipping forward some more (maybe I really should write a series just on Lost), I realized by the last season I really didn't have the desire to watch the show, but I at least tried to keep up with what was going on. The flash-sideways were possibly the worst thing the show ever did even just by themselves, and in addition with the way the Lost creators completely used it as misdirection as what could have been an alternate universe after Juliet blew up the bomb in the '70s (if you're reading this and haven't seen the show, it makes no sense, I know, but for those who have seen the show, it doesn't make that much more sense). Anyway, I'm tired of trying to describe exactly what was bad about things. That whole concept sucked. Just saying.

Yeah, so Lost. It was kind of a big deal. It inspired this Weezer album, after all.

I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

11: Sex and the City

I really shouldn't be the one writing about Sex and the City. I've seen a few episodes, and a decent chunk of the first movie. It's a big show for a certain demographic over the last ten years (women) and was a giant success for HBO, pretty much the co-biggest the commercial success of the decade along with The Sopranos and I would be remiss not to mention it for its combination of commercial appeal, critical success and cultural phenomenal-ness.

The show was big enough to inspire products like Manolo Blahnik shoes and places like Magnolia bakery to become household terms, just from the show itself. It was a big platform for women in the mid-to-late thirties to be, I don't know, real, and party and be professionals and meet guys and have sex and talk about it and not just get married and have kids and just deal with their mother-in-law.

Of course, my friend who was a fan has always said, rather than about the girls, as one would think, for her it was about the dudes. It's a rich collection of actors who have portrayed the guys of Sex and the City, the diverse (well diverse between white guys) likes of Chris Noth as Mr. Big (who as a die-hard Law & Order fan I always have had serious trouble taking seriously as a romantic lead), Ron Livingston, John Corbett, Mikhail Barishnikov (I remember thinking "what the fuck?" when I read that casting call somewhere), James Remar, Kyle McLachlin and the always great Evan Handler.

I don't have any strong feelings about the show (I don't want it much, the ones I've watched are okay, not great but watchable, but more or less, it's not written for me, for what that's worth).

I wish I had more to say, particularly because I'm sure there is a lot to say about this show, it broke all sorts of ground in a way, and a lot of people love it the way I love other show. I don't have any easy way to make fun of it or deliver some random trivia the way I would about some of the other shows on the list. I'm just going to move on and resolve to write more about the new few on the list. Apologies to all. At least I know far more about the plot of the show than I did before writing this.

(I do realize I want to make a quick note - the wikipedia season summaries are clearly written by a fan in an non-objective style of writing - referring to "our resident bad girl samantha," having us all watch with him as "we start the season," and writing on sentence "Life after Big." (also I realize I did want to mention Big as one of the great partially named characters in TV, up there with the Columbos and the McGuyvers and the Kramers - someone should make a list sometime))

I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

12: Everybody Loves Raymond

Yes, I know, this one seems like it's from forever ago, as it ended in 2005, but it didn't really peak, popularity wise, until 2000, and I still submit it's the biggest mainstream comedy of the 2000s (Two and a Half Men may be surpassing it, but give me some leeway).

This is one show I was actually there for the beginning for, and I really mean before the beginning (pre-beginning?). When I went to Las Vegas in, well, I guess it must have been 1996, in August, we, at MGM Grand (I think?) went to a couple of free screenings of upcoming CBS television shows, where we would share our opinions. One of them, as I've implied was Everybody Loves Raymond, and the other was the short-lived Moloney, starring Peter Strauss as a Los Angeles cop/psychiatrist (we were on the vacation with family friends, and my friend was so taken with Moloney that he watched every episode - I wouldn't be surprised if he was the only person in the US to do so). It took place on Long Island, where I grew up, so we immediately took to representing the show and it is the kind of show we all liked enough for us to watch it as family for its first couple of seasons. I've basically seen every episode of the show for the first few seasons, and not a single episode from the last one where I'm sure some weird stuff happens (like did at the weird last few seasons of Home Improvement) and the kids get older (Madylin Sweeten, who played daughter Ally, is weirdly 19 now, her brothers who played her brothers in the show are now 15).

The formula's pretty simple. Professionally successful, but common sense stupid, Raymond is always pissing off his smart housewife who is always doing everything around the house and for the kids (she's the deuteragonist - so says wikipedia - second character to the protagonist - I didn't even know this word existed). Oh, and of course, his overbearing parents, along with is older brother resentful of all the attention he gets (prompting the distinct Brad Garrett low-voice grown "Eeeeverybody loves Raymond" (Why I can't just find a youtube of him saying this, like that, is beyond me)), live across the street.

These weren't the salad days for CBS like they are now. CBS was struggling and NBC ruled the roost (really really hard to believe, I know). Raymond was one of the most important shows (along with Survivor and all the procedurals led by CSI) in changing that. The show was Emmy gold as well, winning the best comedy award twice, and all of its main cast members winning acting Emmys, except for Peter Boyle, who was nominated seven times.

To a lot of people I think, it was the last in a great line of classic old-school family sitcoms. It was generally well-received, and I think whatever critical value it had has been all but lost to its CBS successors, instead moving off to the new generation of sitcoms, without laugh tracks and over-sentimentality, like the NBC Thursday night shows (well, not Outsourced, but the rest) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the one particularly notable exception to this is How I Met Your Mother, which is very much in an old school format, yet has a critical following). But for the most part, there really isn't another Everybody Loves Raymond.