Your beloved newsman's new talk show had an inauspicious debut. Also today: Entourage ended well, Hugh Grant is heading to the clouds, and new TV projects are in the works.

  • Cable news' silver daddy Anderson Cooper premiered his new talk show yesterday, and in addition to it not being so great, it didn't fare terribly well in the ol' ratings department. Compare Anderson's 1.1 rating to, let's say for no reason at all just totally out of the blue, a show like Ellen's 2.6 rating, and that is not good. Though! Cooper's program was preempted in a lot of major markets by the stupid old U.S. Open tennis match, so maybe that's the only reason why. Once everyone's done whacking people's balls with their sticks, they'll tune into Anderson for his patented brand of casual infotainment seduction. At least I hope so! Who wants to see Anderson Cooper fail? Nobody. [Deadline]
  • On the other end of the ratings spectrum, fratboy day dream Entourage ended its cum-stained run on HBO with a season high of 3.1 million viewers. 3.1 million people who watched Vince disappear with a blonde British deus ex machina on his arm. Who watched Drama make a plan to sweatily date rape some Parisian chicks while Turtle just shook his head and laughed. Who watched Eric return to the Shire with a potential elf bride in tow, a halfling prince to rule all Middle Earth growing in her belly. Then the planes took off and flew into the sunset and Ari called everyone a bitch and the women sat silently smiling and nodding as hot, hip women should do. And somewhere, far away, Lloyd sat in his car overlooking Runyon Canyon, weeping for the past, and weeping for the present, and weeping for the future. [THR]
  • Hugh Grant, the British Bellerophon who singlehandedly took down Rupert Murdoch's Chimera monster, is returning to the world of acting with a prestige indie project. He's joined the big ensemble cast of Cloud Atlas, the movie based on the popular centuries-spanning novel. Grant joins Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Ben Whishaw, and Jim Sturgess. Quite a cast! I'm pretty excited about this, or rather I get pretty excited about this until I remember that this is a co-directed thing between Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. I mean, Tykwer maybe, but the Wachowskis made Speed Racer. And the second two Matrix films. So... Hm. We'll have to wait and see. [EW]
  • Fox has decided to do more business with Jennifer Lopez, choosing to buy fifteen hundred cases of Glow perfume that have been sitting in the belly of a Venezuelan cargo ship for eight years a television spec cooked up by Lopez and Silvio Horta, the man behind Ugly Betty. No word on what the show is about other than "family," but if I had to take a guess I'd say it's about a New York maid who also plans weddings on the side who is chased by a big snake and then becomes a Tejano star only to die in the end. I'm just making this up as I go along! [Deadline]
  • Fox isn't the only network buying shows from celebrities. USA has ordered a comedy pilot starring Nathan Lane as a struggling Broadway actor who returns home to Texas because of a family crisis. So it's a whole homecoming/fish-out-of-water/Glee 'cause it's Nathan Lane kind of thing. That doesn't sound terrible, but the fact that it would be on USA troubles me. Because that means it will be terribly lit and have a very strange sense of humor that doesn't really make sense and no one really gets. Sort of like I can't tell if Psych doesn't know it's been making the same joke for twenty years (that's how long that show's been on, right?) or if it's self-aware. Or like how Monk wasn't actually even a show? It was just a series of ads and then Tony Shalhoub Emmy acceptance speeches? That was crazy. Yeah. USA's weird. [THR]