REALITY CHECK: Whales, chefs and John Barrowman

Not all reality TV is bad. Among a glut in any genre, you can find better exponents and you can find pieces of &@#$*. So don't worry, I'm not going to get into Ghost Hunters or Fanarchy. But I will suggest a few other newcomers/returnees you might want to consider this weekend (and beyond):

Whale Wars (second season premiere Friday at 9 p.m. ET, repeating Sunday at 10 p.m. ET, Animal Planet) can be viewed as either A) a docusoap following renegade activists confronting Japanese whalers and others they consider evildoers on the high seas, or B) a psychological portrait of activist ship captain Paul Watson, an endlessly fascinating cyclone of bullying and self-defeating behavior. No matter which way you lean on the issue of what to do about whaling, Whale Wars is magnetic, capturing emotional moments that seem to strip bare its subjects' psyches. Can you use a car crash metaphor at sea? It's hard to look away.

Housecat Housecall (season premiere Saturday at 10:30 a.m. ET, Animal Planet) is a show I haven't actually seen. But it just seems wrong that with all the dog and puppy shows trotted across prime time, cat fanciers have to get up on Saturday morning to watch something about their feline friends.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? (season premiere Sunday at 10-11 p.m. ET, thereafter Sundays 8-10 p.m. ET, BBC America) is another casting competition show, like last season's Any Dream Will Do and NBC's knockoff Grease: You're the One That I Want. This is actually the original, aired the summer of 2006, hosted by cheeky chatter Graham Norton. Torchwood lead (and musical star) John Barrowman joins composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in "judging" wannabes for a London revival of The Sound of Music. But it's the call-in public that ultimately decides who gets to romance Captain von Trapp. Sure, it's one big ad for the resulting stage production, but it's not really a spoiler to tell you the whole thing worked out pretty well in the end. And hey, it's a chance for both women and men to ogle Torchwood's ambisexual hunk a little more often. (Warning: BBC website link above does contain spoilers.)

Top Chef Masters (premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET, Bravo) takes the familiar cooking competition concept to a higher level, inviting established chefs rather than amateurs to test their mettle against one another. The 24 contestants include renowned restaurateurs like Chicago's Rick Bayless (Frontera Grill), Hawaii's Roy Yamaguchi (Roy's), San Francisco's Elizabeth Falkner (Orson), New Orleans' John Besh (Restaurant August), and New York's Wylie Dufresne (wd-50). And what would a cooking competition be without celebrity tasters? Be on the lookout for foodie Gael Greene, actor Neil Patrick Harris, and Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

16 and Pregnant (premieres Thursday at 10 p.m. ET, MTV) just might serve as a little dose of mea culpa for the steaming pile of other reality, um, debris that MTV usually serves up (The Hills, et al). This weekly series leans as heavily on the docu as the soap, following six teenage mothers-to-be as they juggle school, pregnancy, peer pressure, family issues and other anxieties. In other words, their teen years are a lot less glossy than MTV's other "reality" trashcapades.