The team of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin cleaned their runningmates' clocks last night, according to preliminary results from Nielsen. The debate—fueled by tremendous curiosity about Palin and held on the most watched night of TV of the week—drew an overall 45.0 rating, compared with 31.6 for the McCain-Obama debate Friday. (The rating number is based on the percentage of households with TVs that tuned in.)

If the number holds, it would be the highest debate rating since 1992—which had three candidates, including a whacked-out billionaire—and will beat 1984's veep debate between Bush the Elder and Geraldine Ferraro.

Apropos of this morning's Clone Wars post...

I received a screener DVD collection of season one of The Smurfs yesterday and promptly hid it. For most people, that would be a natural reaction to traumatic childhood memories of Gargamel. For me, it's that I don't want my children to find it, and thereby know of The Smurfs' existence.

It's an occupational hazard of TV criticism: I get deluged with products, some of which I watch with my kids as lab rats, some of which I share with them gladly (Looney Tunes, Yo Gabba Gabba!, etc.), and some of which I take pains to keep from them, lest they love it and I must suffer the consequences. I don't particularly fear my kids' getting exposed to dirty or superviolent pop culture, at least not yet—they tend to shy away from scary stuff, anyway. I just don't want them exposed to popular culture that sucks. (They already discovered the old Scooby-Doo series, which made for several unpleasant months.)

I'm guessing this is a common experience of parents out there. You don't necessarily want to forbid your kids a TV show just because it offends your aesthetic sensibilities. On the other hand, Dora's voice is so damn annoying. (And what about that pushy Boots? "Say 'Map'! Say 'Map'!" Say this!)

So I put it to the parents out there: Are there any children's shows/products you wish your kids had never discovered? And to the childless: what kids' shows would you share with your hypothetical future kids, and what ones would you ban from your home? Trust me: it is never too soon to start planning.

Take a look at the lawman: Jason O'Mara and Gretchen Mol in Life on Mars. / ABC

On time.com today, I've got a roundup review of this fall's bevy of imported/remade series from overseas showing up on American TV. (A shorter version should be in next week's print TIME.) I also look a little bit at the general trickiness of adapting shows for the States:

That brings us to the major challenge of Americanizing many of these shows, which is not so much cultural as structural. Like our restaurant portions and children, we make our TV bigger in the States. Where an overseas series may run a dozen or so episodes in its entire life, an American show will air 22 or more a season. So plots must be stretched out and subplots multiplied. This is not automatically bad; the American version of The Office fleshed out a stronger supporting cast, made its central character more multifaceted and found its own voice. Other adaptations find that once they run out of source material, they've got nothing.

Short version: Hold out some hope for Life on Mars and The Ex List. Stay far, far away from Eleventh Hour and, especially, Kath and Kim.

A brief review in the print TIME this week on Cartoon Network's Clone Wars series, which debuts tonight. The gist: If you judge it against the original trilogy, it's awful, like this summer's movie was. If you judge it as intended—basically, as a moving action toy—it's visually impressive, though the characters are inexcusably wooden (even characters like Yoda, once the most personable green guy in the Star Wars universe). Also, if you have kids, and they are anything like mine, they will love the living midichlorians out of it.

It's always a critically tricky business reviewing a show that's essentially for kids. Shouldn't you simply rate it on the basis of how well kids will like it? I don't think so.

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So the debate between Sarah Palin and That Other Guy is over. (You can still find our the debate liveblog here, if you missed it.) Both candidates cleared the almost-impossible-to-miss bars set for them, Joe Biden not melting into a puddle of gaffes, Palin not turning into a version of her SNL parody. She was confident and assertive (if not very specific or interested in answering the questions posed), he was controlled and disciplined (if, especially for the first half of the debate, he seemed fairly shut down as a result). He cried, she winked; they both attacked the top of the ticket more than each other.

I'm always leery of attempts by pundits afterward to declare who won the debate. Partly because it always devolves into cliches. ("There was no knockout blow," someone declares after every debate ever held. When is the last time you heard someone say "This was a knockout blow. This election is over"?)

But mainly because—well, what does winning a debate mean? Does it mean seeming to dominate your opponent, being in command? Does it mean being more likeable? Does it mean making more of your audience want to vote for you? Beating expectations? These don't all go hand in hand, and when a network polls its viewers—"Who won tonight's debate?"—different respondents will take the question to mean different things.

In other judged competitions—ice skating, American Idol—judging may be subjective, but at least there are agreed-on criteria (e.g., Who sang better?). But in a debate "winning" can mean anything from being the best speaker to being the most improved. It's entirely possible to think that one candidate won the debate, as a performance, yet decide you want to vote for the other one.

Thus last night, in the insta-polls, we got all sorts of definitions of who won. The CNN and CBS snap polls gave it to Biden, Fox News' to Palin. But on the other hand, on CNN, while a slight majority said that Biden performed better, an overwhelming majority said that Palin did better than they expected. If that was her political goal here, then did she win? Or is it pointless to say who "won" until Nov. 4?

So, ahem: Who won the debate? And why?