A classic staple of the sitcom, aside from the clip show (hmm, they covered that one a few weeks ago, right?) and the Big Wedding (that one, too) is the Baby Episode. Staples, yes, but also synonymous with jumping the shark.

Fortunately, The Office writers seem aware of this and made the wedding episode, Niagra, one the season’s strongest. On the other hand, the clip show, The Banker, was one of the weakest.

The Delivery, The Office’s Baby Episode falls somewhere in between. In this hour-long installment, Jim and Pam, on the verge of joy-bundling, are determined to hold off on getting to the hospital until the very last minute since their health insurance covers only two nights’ stay. As Pam begins contracting, Michael calls a conference to get her mind off the little fella inside her clawing to get out. Andy performs the evolution of dance (sans music, as it’d just throw him off), Erin recites Kentucky Derby winners, and Michael usefully suggests doing the opposite of 10 Things to Induce Labor.

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Dear 24:

When we first met in 2001, you were perfect for me. You were exciting, and dangerous, and knew how to show a lady a good time. But lately, the relationship has lost its luster. I know that this is the natural progression of any relationship, you can’t possibly keep up that same level of intrigue for all these years. After the seven year itch, I settled into a comfort with your familiarity.  I looked forward to spending time with you every Monday night.

But you just had to go and ruin things with all these other women. Rene and Dana ring a bell? Heck, I’ve even got a bone to pick with Chloe this season. I can’t deal with all these other women, and here is why I quit you, mid-episode last Monday, for good. Spoilers abound, so proceed with caution.

Sad/Bad/Mad Rene.  Actually I really like Rene, and I adore Annie Wersching in the role, but there are so many inconsistencies with her character this season, and her spunk has been  replaced with this misguided  self–loathing. Quite frankly, making Rene’s character into such a drag has really been a drag on the show.

I also can’t quite figure out the chronology of Rene’s storyline, which is really not helping the credibility of her story arc. Readers, perhaps you can enlighten me here. Weren’t we told that six years ago Rene went undercover with the Russian gang?  Wouldn’t that make it pre-season 7, in which she was still in uptight prissy mode?  Since President Allison Taylor is still in office, I am assuming this season did not skip forward 10 years because of Presidential term limits.

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I get wary when The Office tends to fall back on material that’s been endlessly mined before—guest stars, Michael being an idiot, the threat of a new manager coming to make sweeping changes, romances that ultimately go nowhere—on the one hand, a lot of that stuff made The Office great (and granted you can’t go for six seasons without repeating some things), on the other, most of the rehashes this season fell splatastically flat.

But not tonight.

Call me a pessimist, but I never expected a lackluster season like this to deliver an episode so consistently laugh-out-loud funny as “Manager and Salesman”—it’s among the series’ best and may be in the running for highest number of laughs.

The CEO from Sabre (Kathy Bates in the show’s best cameo since David Koechner [and whatever happened to him?]) drops by to check in on the Dunder-Mifflin branch but mainly to make some changes, namely consolidating Michael and Jim’s jobs into one and setting the two in competition for the manager position…until they discover there’s no cap on sales commissions, leading to a similar power struggle over the salesman position.

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As we do often here at The Flickcast, we’ve got lots of video highlight and preview for some of your favorite shows this week including Chuck, Heroes, Law and Order and Conan O’Brian on The Tonight Show. This time around the highlights of Chuck include a clip from last night’s episode with guest stars Brandon Routh and Angie Harmon.

And get ready for next week’s episode with Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kristin Kreuk in the preview clip. With Heroes, there’s a recap showcasing Slyar’s plan to regain his power with the help of Claire. Then, look ahead to next Monday’s episode as Noah tries to take down the Sullivan Brothers Carnival.

On The Tonight Show, Conan continued to explore his job options. He shared some of his offers with the audience and then they took a vote on the best one. Conan also had a gift for his supporters at the “I’m With Coco” rally. What a nice guy.

Check out all the videos after the jump.

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This week, both Mercy and Law and Order: SVU featured some pretty awesome guest stars including Michael Imperioli’s appearance on Mercy and Lost’s Naveen Andrews and Studio 60′s Sarah Paulson on Law and Order: SVU. Courtesy of your friends at NBC, we’ve got clips from both shows to help you figure out what you missed or if you saw the episodes, help you relive the magic.

In the videos, you’ll learn more about Imperioli’s appearance on Mercy with a preview clip and an interview with the actor. For Law & Order: SVU, we’ve got clips of both Naveen Andrews and Sarah Paulson at work showing scenes from the episode. As we like all of these actors, and you should also, there’s no reason not watch both of these shows for all the action, drams and suspense.

You can watch the clips and recaps after the break or head on over to NBC’s website and enjoy full episodes of both of these shows.

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It should come as no surprise that we love Chuck here at The Flickcast. We cover it quite extensively and bring you as much info about the show as we can. We are also still hanging in there for Heroes, even though the show sorta seems to be heading down the wrong path. Although, Greg Grunberg assures us that the show is not being canceled, so its got that going for it.

This week Chuck settled into its Monday slot and Heroes was all new as well. If you missed the episodes, we’ve got some video for you to help you keep up with what’s going on with your favorite reluctant spy and your used to be favorite people with special abilities.

If you saw the episodes already, well, just watch these recaps and previews for next week anyway. We would appreciate it and I’m sure NBC would as well — especially if it gets you excited to watch Chuck and Heroes next week. Check out all the video goodness after the jump. You can also watch full episodes at NBC’s website.

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We’ve been following NBC’s freshmen drama Mercy a bit here at the site and so far, it seems to be doing pretty well and has not been canceled — at least so far. With an interesting premise and a cast that includes relative newcomer Taylor Shilling and Buffy alum Michelle Trachtenberg, the show continues to be one of the surprises of the season and will hopefully last until season two.

In contrast to Mercy, Law & Order: SVU is not a freshmen show and is still going strong after several seasons. Both shows returned to the air this week after the holiday break. In case you missed the premiere of these shows, or even if you saw them and still want to relive the magic, we’ve got lots of video for you today — courtesy of our pals at NBC.

In addition to the recaps, we’ve also got previews of upcoming episodes of both shows featuring guest appearances by The Soprano’s Michael Imperioli, Lost’s Naveen Andrews and Studio 60’s Sarah Paulson.

Check out all the clips and interviews from both shows after the break.

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This is the last episode of ABC’s FlashForward we will see until March. Yeah, until MARCH. Can’t say I’m happy about that. Well, at least this episode went out on a bang.

We open on the mystery woman (Shoreh Aghdashloo), who informed Demetri Noh (John Cho) that he will be assassinated. She’s sitting at her desk, her own Mosaic chart laid out on the glass spread like a spider-web with a picture of  Cho with the number value: A561984. She is watching the classic A Christmas Carol.

A plane lands in Hong Kong, on it Benford (Joseph Fiennes) and Cho get off, discussing their plan to track down Aghdashloo.  They twice ignore calls from Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) only to be met by someone with “Kid N Play” hair, who calls himself Marshall Vogel from the Hong Kong FBI office. Vogel tells the Dynamic Duo to get out.

Fiennes picks up his phone walking away to only get into an argument with Vance about going to Hong Kong. He gets into this argument so that if anyone goes down for disobeying orders it’s him [Fiennes] because Noh needs to keep his gun on him if he’s going to live past March 15.

Vance breaks one of his televisions only to have another one where a press conference is on at National Linear Project [NLAP] as it’s called, where a stooge announces Simcoe (Jack Davenport) who will address the crowd on the experiments he and Monaghan were doing on the day of the black out.  It gets hairy quick when this happens.

In this sequence, Davenport claims responsibility for the blackout and literally raises hell, saying their experiment was to reproduce the energies created by the Big Bang and may have contributed to the cause of the blackout. Total bedlam occurs when he says this: shots are fired, dogs and casts living together, mass hysteria!

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Whoops, somehow my DVR didn’t record last week’s episode and I missed it. But Agent Al Gough (Lee Thompson Young) kills himself to stop his particular future from happening. His future being he kills a single mother in an accident and he also wants to prove that you can change things by choosing to do so.

Regardless, this week’s episode has Simon (Dominic Monaghan) and Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) play a poker game, and whatever-his-name is Benford’s Sponsor finds his formerly dead daughter still alive.

While on vacation for their anniversary the Benfords (Joseph Fiennes and the wax model known as Sonya Walger) are playing around in some house on the beach, before Fiennes gets a call asking him to come in. The reason being is someone caught some video footage of a mugging and the people doing the mugging had a triple star tattoo that Fiennes recognizes as one of the guys trying to kill him on April 29.

Investigating, it looks like the people in the mugging take a case from the muggee before shooting this victim. The witness, who took the video, is now being hunted by the muggers who kill her roommate. Nothing really comes of this besides some more of the usual questions “is this going to come true/isn’t this/are we powerless to stop it?” It’s starting to get annoying.

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This week we meet Dominic Monaghan’s character of Simon, but we do not get anything more than a  tease on how he and Simco killed 20 million people in their experiment with the blackout. So that mystery is extended, but at least we know who is responsible and how they got it. Also, Mark (Joseph Fiennes) meets the man who will replace him in the bed of his wife (Sonya Walger), and she finds out that Mark was drinking in his flash forward. All this and more in another innocuous episode of Flash Forward.

We open on a train ride coming from somewhere and going to Los Angeles. Here we have Monaghan’s character seducing a woman by explaining quantum physics, achieving something in three minutes the Big Bang Theory has been trying to do for however long that show has been on.

Following the last episode, Agent Janis Hawk survives her gun fight, but in having been wounded in her pelvis will never be allowed to bear children. So, this raises the question of how she will be pregnant come April 29, 2010.

The over coming thread throughout this episode is now that we know the future: will it actually happen? It seems like this episode seems to suggest no, not exactly. With Janis now not being able to give birth, and Simco’s super weird kid trailing the Benford’s super weird kid to their house, causing Simco and Olivia to finally realize their flash forwards was kind of ridiculous but creepy-cool. Creepy cool in a way that The Shining is creepy cool and those two kids are straight up creepy, with their chant over that doll of the Benford’s kid.

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