How I Met Your Mother (CBS) — Katie Holmes guest stars as the show’s infamous “Slutty Pumpkin.” I’m sure it will be just as disappointing as every role since Joey on “Dawson’s Creek.” Also, to my knowledge, this concludes my coverage of Halloween episodes in the daily listings. Let’s have one more corgi in costume for the road, shall we?

Ghost Hunters (Syfy) — Per tradition, the team goes to a supposedly haunted place for a live special. This year they’ll be at Pennsylvania’s Pennhurst Asylum for a six-hour special. It’s the perfect show for people who loved the low-fi dullness of Paranormal Activity but wished the movie was longer with fewer scares and commercials.

Dancing with the Stars (ABC) — How the hell is Nancy Grace still on this show? Screw you, America.

Rock Center with Brian Williams (NBC) — Series premiere. I think Brian Williams is great. However, because I’m not 60 years old yet, I don’t think I’m going to watch a newsmagazine.

Hawaii Five-O (CBS) — Nightmare on Elm Street‘s Robert Englund guest stars as, in Yahoo‘s words, a “creepy old drifter.” Is there another kind of drifter I don’t know about? I mean, if there were sexy young drifters, I wouldn’t make so many jokes about killing drifters.

Night of the Living Dead (TCM) — I admit it: I’ve never seen George Romero’s 1968 horror classic. I suppose I should DVR this so I can have some street cred the next time I talk about “The Walking Dead.”

LATE NIGHT GUESTS: Conan kicks off four nights in New York with his “Late Night” successor Jimmy Fallon on the couch, plus comic Reggie Watts. Elsewhere: Jesse Eisenberg on Letterman; Justin Bieber and World Series hero David Freese on Leno; Paul Reubens on Kimmel; Zooey Deschanel and Neil Gaiman on Ferguson; Heidi Klum on Fallon; and Mindy Kaling on “The Daily Show.”

The embattled miniseries “The Kennedys” will air on ReelzChannel (for reelz) next month, and the upstart cable channel has released a new trailer that doesn’t give the series any new meaning to me (video below). I guess there’s a little more Jackie Kennedy (Katie Holmes) and RFK (Barry Pepper) in this trailer than in the first one, but my impression is essentially the same: “Yep, those are people dressed as the Kennedys.”

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Earlier this week, Starz and FX both passed on picking up “The Kennedys,” the eight-part miniseries that History dropped from its schedule because it “wasn’t the right fit.” (*cough* POLITICAL PRESSURE *cough cough*)

Not to be outdone, Showtime has also passed on the series:

Showtime was considered The Kennedy‘s best shot for an airing on a traditional network in the U.S. because of 24 co-creator [Joel] Surnow’s long-standing relationship with Showtime’s new programming chief David Nevins.

Reached for comment, the CEO of History Channel said, “Anyone? Anyone? C’mon, you can have it for ten bucks. Okay, five. Did I mention it has Katie Holmes?” And all the other programming executives cleared their throats and tried not to make eye contact.

The History Channel is making its first foray into scripted television with “The Kennedys,” an eight-part miniseries starring Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes that may or may not be a right-wing hatchet job. The cast also features Barry Pepper as RFK, Tom Wilkinson as Joe Kennedy, and Lobster Dog as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (citation needed).

“And uh, as you can see below, there-uh is now a postah. It uh, er uh, looks like a serious postah. But are these not serious times? Does the condition of television today not demand that our-uh postahs be moah serious? My fellow Americans, ask not what your bloggah can Photoshop for you; ask what you can Photoshop for your bloggah.”

The History Channel (I have a problem calling it just “History”) has cast the main roles in its controversial 8-part scripted miniseries about the Kennedy administration, with Greg Kinnear and Katie Holmes set to star as the assassinated president and his glamorous Guinevere. It’s the first time the two have worked together since Katie’s brilliant work (NSFW) in The Gift. Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan, 61*) will play Robert F. Kennedy, and Tom Wilkinson will portray HMIC (head mick in charge) Joe Kennedy.

The basic cable network caused a storm back in December when it announced its first stab at a scripted miniseries, mostly because the Kennedy project hails from Joel Surnow — an outspoken conservative who hobnobs with Rush Limbaugh, blah, blah, blah… The miniseries’s screenwriter, Stephen Kronish, says he’s a liberal Democrat.

When the project came to light, a variety of historians who’d read an early version of the script reacted with varying degrees of knicker-knottedness, and a petition was making the rounds for people to sign, vowing not to watch the “right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’ ” The critics said the script contained factual errors — and, of course, that scene in which the president tells his brother Bobby that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women “every couple of days I get migraines.” [WaPo's Lisa de Moraes]

All things considered, I think this sounds okay. That’s a pretty solid cast for a basic cable miniseries, and who cares about anyone’s politics or whether the script is perfectly factual. At least it’s SOME kind of portrayal of historical events, which is all I really want from the HISTORY Channel. It’s a nice change of pace from “Ice Road Truckers.”