Q: There used to be a show called "Early Edition." Is there any chance of anything of that sort being brought back?

A: "Early Edition" aired on CBS from 1996 to 2000. It starred Kyle Chandler — later beloved for "Friday Night Lights" — as a man who received the next day's edition of a newspaper. With the advance information, he tried to prevent the bad things reported in the paper from happening. While we have had plenty of shows where people try to change history, including the current dramas "Timeless" and "Legends of Tomorrow," I don't know of any plans for one using the premise of "Early Edition."

Can the canned laughter

Q: Why do TV shows use canned laughter? It just makes the shows less funny.

A: It has also been around for close to 70 years. To be sure, some comedies do without. Others record the reactions of a studio audience (sometimes "sweetened" electronically). But some simply add the laughs because producers wanted "some sort of audience reaction to make the viewing experience more communal," as could be had in a theater, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong recently wrote for BBC.com. Charley Douglass, the sound engineer credited with the first use of prerecorded laughs, "hated that the studio audiences on the U.S. TV channels' shows laughed at the wrong moments, didn't laugh at the right moments, or laughed too loudly or for too long." So an electronic companion was born.

Many producers, writers and actors have thought their work generated laughs just fine without help. As TV veteran Al Franken once said, an inserted laugh is "like putting a bookmark for the audience saying, 'That was a joke.' " "M*A*S*H" did regular battle over laugh tracks, and its DVDs have offered each episode with and without laughs. Indeed, comedies with dramatic elements have often appeared without added laughter.

'Notorious' is probably done

Q: What is the status of "Notorious"?

A: The ABC series took a break after the Nov. 17 episode. There is another episode scheduled for Dec. 8, but the network has called that the "season finale." What had been planned as a 13-episode initial run was cut back to 10 episodes after disappointing ratings. So that Dec. 8 episode may be the last we see of the drama.

Not her daddy

Q: Is Michaela Conlin, who plays Angela on "Bones," related to the Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, who plays her father?

A: Gibbons is not Conlin's real-life father. But people have wondered about that because the show plays with whether that's supposed to be Gibbons as Angela's father, and whether Gibbons is Conlin's father.

On the show, Gibbons' character is not named on the show, but is clearly meant to be a rock star. Series creator Hart Hanson said in 2010 that Gibbons is "playing himself, but he's playing a different version of himself. I'm sure that Michaela's father would like me to say that Billy Gibbons is not her father."

E-mail brenfels@gmail.com.