It’s been a surprisingly heartening week for TV news. First “Sons of Anarchy” beat Jay Leno in the ratings, and now Ashlee Simpson has been fired from “Melrose Place.” Not that that matters, since she’s a terrible actress on a terrible show, but it’s a nice bookend to the extra good news that Sarah Shahi has been given another leading role.

Shahi has landed the lead in USA Network’s pilot “Facing Kate,” lifting the contingency off the project.

The pilot, produced by Universal Cable Prods., centers on Kate (Shahi), a divorced San Francisco woman who leaves her job as a lawyer to become a mediator.

It absolutely infuriates me that everybody reading this post knows who Ashlee Simpson is, yet many of you have likely never heard of Shahi. She’s a former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader who most recently starred in “Life,” and before that she was on “The L Word” and had little roles in everything from “The Sopranos” to Old School. And while she’s not the second coming of Meryl Streep, she’s definitely a way better actress than Ashlee Simpson and — equally if not more important — 800 brazilian times better looking. Seriously, this fame discrepancy makes me want to line up the editors of every gossip magazine in America and punch each one of them in the throat.

Well I’m not gonna let this stand. Below: the absurd amount of sexiness that we deserve to make up for Ashlee Simpson’s fame.

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Here we have posters and a trailer (after the jump) for “Melrose Place 2: I Love the ’90s Strikes Back.”  Do you get it?  “Ménage à Tues”?  There are three people in the picture, and the show is on Tuesday, which is the third day of the week.  I think that’s the point.

“We have an absolute drop-dead gorgeous cast, we have a fun show where everybody is dating everybody else, and we wanted a scandalous kind of soap opera,” said Rick Haskins, head of marketing for the CW. “We tried to capture a heightened reality of the show. We think it captures ‘Melrose’ the way ‘OMFG’ did ‘Gossip Girl.’”

Each image also makes strong use of the show’s iconic apartment complex and swimming pool, trying to turn the show’s setting into a character. [THR]

Oh, the swimming pool is a character all right.  One with better acting skills than Ashlee Simpson.  SONIC BOOM!  I dub thee “roasted.”

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I’m sorry, but Ashlee Simpson NAILED her role as a big-time heroin dealer on an upcoming episode of “CSI:NY” (clip via Videogum).  Just check her and Pete Wentz out, rolling around with a brick of uncut, able to glance at a bag of cash and determine that it’s not $80,000 — this is a first-class thespian who deserves to be on-screen more.

Oh hey, good news: Ashlee Simpson’s gonna be on the new Melrose Place:

Multiple sources confirm that singer-songwriter-sometime actress Ashlee Simpson has become the latest tenant of The CW’s refurbished Melrose Place.  The onetime 7th Heaven star will play small-town girl Violet, a character whose disarming naiveté masks the calculating, shrewd sex kitten within.

Good for her.  She’s worked so hard to get everything she has in life.  The rest of us skate our way through college and various graduate schools trying to find traction in a crappy economy, while poor Ashley has had nothing to rely on except her older sister’s fame, excellent plastic surgery, and a tabloid relationship to get where she is.  Bravo, Ashlee.  You deserve it.