Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is already the top-rated new series on television, and one of this season’s few bona fide hits. Now, the show is about to become even more watchable as Garbage’s Shirley Manson makes her first venture into non-music video acting and joins Terminator‘s cast as a regular, probably starting this fall.

Oddly enough, given her past experience in “The World is Not Enough,” Shirley will not be playing a robot. Instead, she plays Catherine Weaver, the CEO of a cutting-edge high-tech company and presumably as near-human as most CEOs. (Although, considering that this series is set in the Terminator timeline, the activities of a cutting-edge high-tech company are likely to mean good news for robots and bad news for humans.) Fans of the sexy love-robot fantasy will have to continue to settle for Summer Glau in that role. Actually, when scientists finally get their priorities straight and start producing love robots for socially challenged individuals, either the Summer Glau model or the Shirley Manson model will be perfectly acceptable. Or so my socially challenged friends tell me.