Dave on Demand: Ellen will do nothing but elevate 'Idol'

According to the polls I've seen, most people disapprove of the changing of the guardess at

American Idol

.

The primary knock against new judge Ellen DeGeneres is that she lacks a musical background.

Get real. Do you have to be a Juilliard graduate to bellow, "You could sing the phone book, dog"?

Allow me to remind you that the musical resume of the woman DeGeneres is replacing, Paula Abdul, consists of a couple of music videos in the '80s in which she was upstaged by a cartoon cat. The clips, as you may recall, were distorted vertically so that Abdul wouldn't look so stumpy. (Couldn't they have just drawn the cat shorter?)

Ellen is an upgrade over Paula in every conceivable manner.

First of all, she's almost always lucid. Big plus. And she's fantastically funny. Imagine the field day she would have had with Sanjaya.

Even though DeGeneres' dancing style looks like it hasn't progressed much since junior high, it's still better than Abdul's slap-happy Evita pose.

Why stop at Paula? At this point, American Idol could benefit from wholesale substitutions. Let's start with that Napoleon-complexed announcer Ryan Seacrest.

Wouldn't the ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris be a marked improvement? As for Seacrest, give him a job reading the lottery results.

Enough already. The networks must really be desperate. They're running promos to stir up interest in their new shows at a frantic pace.

The most annoyingly inescapable is NBC's hard sell of The Jay Leno Show. For the last few weeks, it seems like every NBC show in prime time has been adorned with a banner proclaiming Leno's starting date. It sits there at the bottom of the screen throughout the program like police tape at a crime scene.

That's not a reminder; it's a billboard.

Cover me. The young season may not always be a feast for the eyes - but it is for the ears.

The opening montage in the season debut of Sons of Anarchy was set to a cover of The Who's "Slip Kid" by the band Anvil.

Two nights later, the premiere of The Vampire Diaries featured Placebo delivering a winsome version of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" on its soundtrack.

Who needs the original versions when the knockoffs are this good?

Safe at home. I stumbled across a game on the MLB Network this week. The channel has assembled a baseball announcing dream team.

I'm not a big fan of Bob Costas hosting the Olympics (or covering most other sports for that matter), but he has always been a superb baseball play-by-play man. And color man Jim Kaat, a former pitcher, may be getting up there in years, but he's still a national treasure, providing a trove of insights and lore.

CoKa is simply the best tandem in the baseball booth. Eat your heart out, Joe Buck.

No, seriously, start gnawing.

Warning sign. The remake of Melrose Place lost me right out of the gate.

In the opening scene, David (Shaun Shipos) burst into the kitchen of a glitzy nightclub to importune his pal, the chef, "Auggie, come back to the penthouse with me. She seems seriously trashed."

Really? You're basing that purely on the text message you just got from Sydney (Laura Leighton)? Because every word in it was spelled correctly. Even the extensive punctuation was flawless.

I can't manage that sober.