A Contest of Roles

I've been a fan of Games World of Puzzles magazine, in all of its incarnations and iterations, since the seventh grade, or so.  Unlike many other puzzle magazines, it has articles, as well as reviews of various types of tabletop and electronic games, although not as many in its current form as it used to.  Another feature it has is a contest.  Almost every issue over the years had at least one.  I enter them about a little less than half the time, usually only when it is a puzzle type I like or if the subject seems particularly interesting.  In the December issue, the contest was all about connections between actors and the television shows they appeared in, at least for one arc of one season.  Let me show you an example I created to explain thing a little better.

  ┏━━━━━━3,4,2,6━━━━━━┓     Orange represents television shows.  Yellow represents actors, of either
4,6                                5,5    gender.  Digits represent the number of characters in the words of a
  ┗━━━━━━5,3,4━━━━━━━┛      show's title or an actor's names.  Lines connect actors to the shows they 
                                               appeared on.  
The original puzzle featured show that date back to the 1970's.  However, my example has more recent shows.  In fact, one was one the air on Monday, November 6 (hint, hint).  Answers appear at the main bottom of the page. [By the way, it was a lot harder than it looks to come up with this example.  There are not that many current shows that feature two actors who starred together on a different show, and both are still working on it.  I could have used a few other shows and actors that would have been easier to identify, but I really couldn't find any with two actors still working there at the same time.  That is why I included the hint.]   The actual puzzle included dozens of shows and actors, almost all of them treated this exact same way.  Four shows and three actors were only represented by question marks.  The object of the contest was to determine these seven entries by their connections to the others. If I had a computer, I probably would have solved this puzzle in four to five hours.  Instead, it has taken me weeks to search IMDB (a few minutes at a time), entertainment magazines, a world almanac, and my own television viewing habits to finally come up with what I think are the correct answers just minutes before I typed this post.  I think I even came up with an alternative answer to one of the contest entries.  All of this is good, because I just got the January issue in this past weekend.  It took me under twenty minutes to solve that puzzle using only my solving skills and my general interest in the puzzle's ultimate subject matter. I would have hated having to enter the new contest before I has even finished with the previous one.

 Keep scrolling for the answers.




Answers, clockwise from the top The King of Queens, Kevin James, Kevin Can Wait, Leah Remini.