During Michael C. Hall's walk to receive his Golden Globe, the camera panned to Bill Paxton. Rumors on the internet claim he appears to be saying "I knew he was going to beat me. I got beaten by cancer." Yikes.
While we weren't loving last night's uneven season finale of Weeds, we were loving Nancy Botwin's parenting skills—or lack thereof. Who wants to be raised by a boring stroller-pusher when you can have someone to bring the crazy?
Pop-culture physicists have spent the last several years chasing the elusive TMZ Principle, which dictates that scraping through the bottom of the gossip barrel will in fact bring you right back to its newsy surface. While a recent dispatch about Emeril Lagasse's 'shroom-possessing brother-in-law was an admirable if failed attempt to prove the theory, Harvey Levin's tireless moles may have found the D-list breakthough we were waiting for:
The crazy Big Love Juniper Creek Mormon Polygamy Creepytown USA saga continues, and Meredith Vieira wants answers, dammit. Click through for video.
· Critic-proof director/producer Brian Robbins takes on Jailhouse Rock, a film based on the real-life story of an American Idol-like signing competition (the "Inmate Idle Singing Con-Test") that took place in an Arizona jail, for Disney. While it's probably too soon to think about casting, it's hard not to imagine Robbins throwing some orange jumpsuits on his Wild Hogs dream team and letting them loose on renditions of "Summer Lovin'" and "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights." Projected opening weekend gross: $42 million. [Variety]
· Ben Stiller, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Hudson, Paulie Walnuts, Bobby Baccala, Alicia Keys,and Sheryl Crow are among those who've signed up for Elmo's Christmas Countdown, a one-hour Muppets holiday special in which the famous will help the ticklish star count down the days to Jesus's birth. [THR]
· HBO renews Big Love for a third, 12-episode season, which should be completed well in advance of a possible strike. In other HBO news, John from Cincinnati still makes no fucking sense. [Variety]
· Fox wins another uneventful, creatively barren, rerun-heavy summer Monday night behind Hell's Kitchen and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? [THR]
· ABC greenlights Here Come the Newlyweds, a reality competition series in which six newly married couples fight to the death (or at least to the divorce) over a steadily increasing cash prize. [Variety]
While driving around the east side of our fine city, we'd often find ourselves musing that the sleepy, upper-middle-class environs would make an excellent stand-in for suburban Utah. The Citizen Robot blog notes that this fake billboard has gone up in Glassell Park, indicating that location scouts for Big Love obviously agree with our amateur hunch. And while it's great to see a TV production staying in town (even if it's because Utah probably isn't that welcoming of a show that wants to harp on the whole polygamy thing), we fear that some local day laborers visiting the neighborhood might not subscribe to the premium channel and could become confused by the prop, circling the neighborhood endlessly looking to stake out a good spot in the parking lot of the nonexistent home superstore in an attempt to pick up some work.
