If the cancellation of Skins is any indication, America just isn't ready to see boffing kids. Also today: Julie Taymor wants her money dammit, good/bad news about your favorite future sitcom, William Shatner's got a new gig, and so does Damon Lindelof.

  • Hot off the presses comes the news that MTV has canceled its much-reviled American version of the hit British teens-fucking show Skins. I hate to dance gleefully in the ashes of other people's misfortunes (wait, no I don't, it's sort of my job, sigh), but: hahahaha. Sorry. I... really... do genuinely feel bad... for those smug little bastards. >:) I was walking down University Place the other day and I saw the lead boy and he caught me noticing him and he looked all like "Oh, yeah, I"m famous." Well, sigh, NOT ANYMORE. Ahem. But yeah, MTV said: "Skins is a global television phenomenon that, unfortunately, didn't connect with a US audience as much as we had hoped." It didn't connect largely because it was terribly done, probably. That is just a theory! Who knows. Ah well. Now it's dead and gone, dead and gone, and there's nothing to be done about it. [EW]
  • With the rebooted version of the Broadway musical fucktacular Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark scheduled to finally officially open next week, the mess and turmoil of director Julie Taymor's time with the show is mostly forgotten. Except by Ms. Taymor, and her union, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. On behalf of Ms. Taymor, who was fired from the production earlier this spring, the union has filed an arbitration claim saying that Taymor is owed some $300,000 in royalties. Hm. That seems fair! While Taymor certainly created a heaping pile of shrieking, bone-shattering crap, the show has been selling like gangbusters, so she's owed some of that. I mean, Michael Bay gets paid to do Transformers, and oddly Transformers has killed far more Broadway dancers than Spider-Man. Give that lady her money, shadowy cabal of dozens of producers! [THR]
  • Danny Glover hasn't been doing a lot of acting these days, leading most of us to presume he has finally become too old for this shit. But, as it turns out, Danny Glover is not too old for this shit! Not too old for this shit by half! He's just signed on to costar opposite Kiefer Sutherland in the new Fox show Touch, a show about a dad (Sutherland) figuring out how to deal with his freaky genius son (Glover). Haha, no. Don't you wish TV was that weird? Don't you wish Fox was like "You know what? Yes, we are going to cast Danny Glover as a weird little genius kid whose dad is Kiefer Sutherland. We are going to do that and you are going to like it." I don't think we'd ever get too old for that particular shit. But maybe the television networks think we are too young for that shit? They just don't think we're ready I guess. [TV Line]
  • Did you reach the end of this most recent television season and think to yourself, "That was good and all, but the one thing it needed more of was comedies about white people in relationships?" I mean, with the exception of Perfect Couples, Better With You, Happy Endings, and Mad Love, there were just not nearly enough shows about young white people dating and kissing each other. Well that's probably because NBC never found a slot to air Friends With Benefits, a half-hour comedy about white people dating and kissing each other. But now, at long last, we will get to enjoy the fruits of the Sitcom-O-Tron 3000's labor. NBC is dumping the episodes it filmed a while back in a Saturday night slot from 8-9pm. They'll air back-to-back until there are no more and that will be that. So it's not much, but it's something. And then luckily in the fall we get a bunch of sitcoms about wacky white women looking for love, most of which feature Whitney Cummings in some capacity. Well done, Sitcom-O-Tron 3000! You get a raise! You will now be fed THREE buckets of metal bolts a day! (On a serious note, the bummer about Friends With Benefits getting dumped is that it featured Ryan Hansen, from Veronica Mars and Party Down, and he is great and deserves more work.) [THR]
  • While watching all the big roll-out for his friend J.J. Abrams' mysterious monster movie Super 8, Lost master Damon Lindelof just got jealouser and jealouser! He wanted a mysterious monster movie of his own! It just wasn't fair! Well, Hollywood is nothing if not fair and kind, so it listened to poor little Lindelof's complaints and decided to give him a mysterious monster movie all his own. He's just signed a reportedly seven-figure deal to write a "secret" sci-fi film (OK, so it technically might not involve monsters) that has the mysterious working title of 1952. So it's a mysterious historical throwback, like Abrams' movie, and like Spielberg's 1941, its title is a year. Aw. Just like Lindelof wanted. That's nice. Hollywood is a nice place. [Deadline]
  • Fresh off the cancellation of Shit My Dad Says That He Didn't Actually Say Because No One Talks Like That, William Shatner is headed to the Hamptons. He's not going there to relax! He's going there to work. He'll be doing a guest arc on USA's de-Jew-ing television series Royal Pains. He'll play the the father of a cop played by an actress named Maggie Lawson. Which is weird because the last name of the show's two brothers is Lawson, and my last name is Lawson. And yet I've never watched this show! My whole family is apparently in it. Or it's about my family. I don't even know. Does this mean William Shatner is my dad? Is he going to start saying shit now? I don't like any of this. HAHAHAHA. PSYCH. I mean, he's going to be on Psych, not Royal Pains. I just can't keep those USA shows straight. Mostly because they are all exactly the same. Sorry, everyone! Sorry Psych! Sorry Royal Pains! And sorry, Bones, for some reason. [THR]
  • Rachel McAdams is adorable and I want to be friends with her. That said, go Bruins. [EW]