So in the few hours a week I have to watch television, I’m not going to be satisfied by "Dog Eat Dog" or the 37th incarnation of "Survivor" or even the cynical evening news. Up until a few weeks ago, there was a very convenient window of time where I could watch two of my favorite shows of all time, "MacGyver" and "Quantum Leap," the former carried by WGN and the latter by The Sci-Fi Channel. I grew up with both of them, and watching these shows was a way of holding on to some kind of hero. I was never a GI Joe fan.

For those of you who never watched either show, here’s a brief synopsis. "MacGyver" starred Richard Dean Anderson ("Stargate SG-1"), the king of the mullet, as "Angus MacGyver," a man whose occupation is unclear but whose spirit is crystal. Everywhere he goes he tries to lend a helping hand, and could-either mythically or realistically, I’m not sure if I saw the episode in question-make a bomb out of a potato and his trusty pocketknife. The first few seasons, Anderson didn’t act very well and his character was too smooth, but that changed real quick. MacGyver was a righteous dude.

"Quantum Leap" starred Scott Bakula ("American Beauty," "Lord of Illusions," "Enterprise") as "Sam Beckett," a doctor who travels through time to right the ills of the past. "His only guide on this journey is Al," played by Dean Stockwell ("Tucker: The Man and His Dream," "Air Force One"), who shows up in the form of a hologram "that only Sam can see and hear." The two make the clouds rain, stop lynchings in a racist southern America, re-unite two comedians in love, save one girl three times over, and almost save Sam’s own father from dying of cancer, among other things. Plenty of shows have imitated, and perhaps "Quantum Leap" took after "The Fugitive" in some ways, but there will never be another "Quantum Leap."

Both shows went off the air in the early 1990s, and are sorely missed. And until recently, that wasn’t such a problem because both were in syndication on cable.

So one day I’m on Yahoo! TV to see what the next episodes will be like. I went to the station listings, and they were both bereft of both shows. To be perfectly accurate, "QL" left before "MacGyver" did, but both shows had gone on hiatus as far as airings are concerned. But this is the longest I’ve been without my boys.

Sure, I can go find someone who has Showtime and I can watch Anderson as that bizarre military guy in another world, and I can watch Bakula on UPN every Wednesday night at 8 p.m. in the very entertaining series "Enterprise." But what I miss are the characters, the way they interacted with other people, the values they represented, the way they got themselves out of situations like no one could, and of course, the cheesy ‘80s haircuts.

I guess this is a good thing in some ways: I can use these two hours to work on more of the school projects that make me want to graduate even sooner than December…no, no, it’s really not a good thing at all. The pedantic crap the major networks and now cable is trying to pass off as TV only manifests itself as the death of good drama on the tube.

At least bring back Alex Trebek with the moustache.