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The fourth-season debut of Ghost Hunters on the SciFi Channel, scored record ratings for a regular-season broadcast, notching a 1.9 Neilsen, making the broadcast tops among all cable channels last Wednesday night. Boasting a more scientific, “attempt to disprove it all” approach than other paranormal investigation shows, Ghost Hunters focuses on the adventures of Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson’s “The Atlantic Paranormal Society,” known popularly as TAPS, as they investigate a variety of reported hauntings, trying to measure alleged paranormal activity at such sites.

Only broadcast nets scored biggest numbers in that time period, which makes Ghost Hunters the current darling of cable netlets owned by parent corporation GE under the NBC-Universal banner. If the ratings hold, expect Ghost Hunters to remain on SciFi for some time to come. You don’t need a Jaeger LeCoultre to tell you that right now, on SciFi, it’s Ghost Hunters time.

Two of the most central characters to the TV show Smallville - Kristin Kruek’s Lana Lang and Michael Rosenbaum’s Lex Luthor - won’t be returning next year, the show’s eighth season, according to TV Guide’s online edition. While they are negotiating how many episodes they will actually appear in, in season eight, neither will be weekly regulars after this strike-shortened season comes to an end.

Since TV Guide’s Michael Ausseillo is generally more reliable than life insurance quotes, the question now remains whether the show can maintain its popularity without two of the show’s “core four” returning.

The “core four” for Smallville have been Clark, Lana, Lex and Chloe for the past seven seasons; that list used to include a fifth, Pete Ross played by Sam Jones III, who exited after the third season. While the show can theorhetically survive without Kruek’s Lana - who, after all, is not Superman’s bride in the comics, and the show already has her replacement, Erica Durance’s Lois Lane, in place for the past several seasons - but replacing Rosenbaum’s Luthor could be the real problem.

From the debut episode, the emotional core of the show has been the almost brother-like friendship between Clark and Lex, and the devolution of that friendship into a bitter enmity that sets them up as future rivals. There is no established replacement who can play the foil to Clark at the same level that Rosenbaum’s Luthor is able to, setting up the potential for the show to become, once more, a “villain of the week” melodrama, much as it was in the first season.

Of course, the show has survived multiple exits; John Schneider’s Johnathon Kent was written out via a character death in season five, while Annette O’Toole’s Martha Kent has been largely absent throughout the current season, the show’s seventh. Yet with only Chloe Steel and Clark Kent surviving from the first season to next fall’s eighth season, it appear more likely than ever that next season could be the show’s final bow.

You might need Panoptx to read the fine print here, but despite winning the weekend box office war in overwhelming fashion this week, 10,000 B.C., which took in an estimated three-day total of $35 million, is being considered a disappointment. That’s because studios were shooting for at least $40 million if not more.

To be honest, my wife and I considered going to 10,000 B.C. this weekend, but ultimately chose to go to Jumper instead, which we hadn’t seen yet, seemed potentially less violent, had a PG-13 rating, and turned out to be a lot of fun and certainly sequel-worthy. However, Jumper slipped all the way down to eighth place this week, raking in only $3.5 million in it’s fourth week of release. The film’s made $75 million to date, but had a lofty, $85 million budget.

Due to it’s hard R rating, Semi-Pro dropped swiftly to fourth place in its second week, adding only $5.9 million to its total, bad news for Will Ferrell. College Road Trip took second place with $14 million while Vantage Point held steady at third in its third week of release. Juno slipped to 13th in its 14th week of release and has an impressive $137.9 million in total box office to date. The Bank Job was a flop, debuting at fifth place, while Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day did an impressive per-screen average in limited release.

OK, this could just be the grape juice talking, but the word on the street is that actress Alicia Silverstone could become the mother everyone’s been waiting to meet on the CBS sitcom, “How I Met Your Mother.” In fact, I’d almost be willing to wager a month’s worth of sleepnig on a foam mattress on it, and I’m an air mattress addict!

Here’s the clues so far: Silverstone is indeed signed to a “multi-episode arc” when production resumes on the CBS sitcom in a few weeks. The post-strike episodes have a chance of being the last ones to air, because CBS has not yet renewed the show - even though it’s renewed several others so far. Plus, the producers have promised we’ll meet “mother” this season; if the show is indeed canceled for some strange reason, this would also give producers a chance to wrap the storyline up in a tidy way.

So, all that seems to point to Silverstone being the mother in question. And here I was hoping, given the presence in the regular cast of Buffy alumn Allyson Hannigan, that “mother” would turn out to be Sarah Michelle Geller. Oh well.