Simon Cowell, an American Idol judge, considers Greensboro one of his two favorite audition cities for the current round of American Idol.

"I liked Denver and Greensboro this year, because we had a sense of naivete," Cowell said, echoing comments made earlier by Randy Jackson, a fellow judge.

"It felt fresh, like season one," Cowell said. "You go to L.A. and New York all the time, and you get people who turn up and audition for Idol. But if they don’t get through, they’ll audition for Cats two hours later.

"You go into these smaller places, and it was like, ’We’ve really, really got to get through this and do well.’"

The Greensboro auditions will be featured in Tuesday’s installment of Idol. More than 35 million viewers tuned in this past Tuesday for the show’s fifth-season debut, which featured auditions from Chicago.

• The Fox network is pulling the plug on Malcolm in the Middle, a sitcom starring Raleigh native Frankie Muniz, at the end of this season.

The series debuted in 2000 to critical acclaim and good ratings, but has dwindled in recent years.

The series finale will be shown on May 14, after 151 episodes.

Fox is also ending That ’70s Show, which suffered this season from the departures of stars Topher Grace and Ashton Kutcher. The series finale, on May 18, will be the 200th episode. Fox is negotiating with Grace and Kutcher to appear in the finale.

• Keith Marder, the director of network communications for the WB Network, is well-known in the television industry for his sly wit. His opening remarks to the semiannual Television Critics Association gatherings are, essentially, stand-up routines.

On Monday, he proved that not even his own network - which has suffered ratings declines for two years in a row - is safe from his jokes.

"Technology continues to change our industry," he told a roomful of TV critics. "Thanks to innovations, you can now watch television on your iPod, your PC, your cell phone. Good luck. We can’t even get people to watch television on television sets."

• CBS, the highest-rated network, is experimenting with different formats for TV shows. On Tuesday, the network will begin The Courier, a "microseries" that tells a story in one-minute installments during commercial breaks of prime-time shows.

The first part of The Courier will air at the first commercial break of Tuesday’s CSI: Miami. Subsequent episodes will be shown over the next eight days, leading to a final episode during the Feb. 1 installment of Criminal Minds.

CBS is also developing summer programming in the style of the popular telenovelas seen on Latin American TV. Those are limited-run soap operas that are designed to tell a single story and then come to an end. Five such shows are in development, and CBS will pick the best to air this summer.

And CBS has bought the rights to the popular British series Game Show Marathon to turn into an American series. The series has celebrity contestants taking part in re-creations of classic game shows, with the format changing each week. Among the game shows under consideration for the series are The Price is Right, Match Game and Beat the Clock.

• After a successful guest turn earlier this season, James Marsters - best known as Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel - will be returning to Smallville later this season. He will reprise his role as Dr. Milton Fine, a college professor who is secretly the alien villain Brainiac.

• After nine seasons on The X-Files, Gillian Anderson was happy to leave television behind for a career on the London stage and in movies.

But she’s back this Sunday in Masterpiece Theatre’s eight-hour adaptation of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The original story was serialized, and the Masterpiece Theatre production is similarly broken down into episodes that will air from Sunday to Feb. 26