When Ben Lively caught his girlfriend cheating on him with some random bro, he didn't get mad — he got friendly. With the other bro.

Consider the state of the pitiful American Man: beset on all sides by Spanx and fancy shampoo, tricked into doing crunches and grooming eyebrows, bereft of any healthy masculine role models. Gone is the American Man; in his place, the American Bro. And he is desperate to commune with his own kind.

Amidst all the sexual debauchery, curse words, movie making, and strip clubs even the boys of Entourage can find some time in their busy day for a little "Bromance." Wait, this doesn't go against Barney Stinson's "Bro-Code" is it?

Just what is Politico getting at with this 2,300 word piece on the incredibly close relationship between John Edwards and aide Andrew Young? Hmm? With all this talk of Young's "intensely emotional" "passion" for the dirtbag former candidate?

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America released its new social statement! Now the church "acknowledges the validity of same-sex relationships that are 'chaste, monogamous and lifelong.'" That's great news for... Hall and Oates.

• Channels like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon will no longer be available to Time Warner Cable customers beginning at midnight, unless Viacom and Time Warner settle a dispute over fees. [Bloomberg]
• The Village Voice has laid off Nat Hentoff and Lynn Yaeger. [NYT]
• Ratings for MTV's The City and Bromance were disappointing. [THR]
• Pepsi is parting ways with its longtime pitchman David Beckham. [AdAge]
• Hustler publisher Larry Flynt is feuding with his nephews over their plans to launch an adult media company of their own. [NYP]
• Nick Denton's Gawker Media has sold off a site and is selling another. [NYT]
• It's not all bad news these days for journalists, clearly. [THR]

Hahahahaha. Nobody watched Monday night's premiere of The City, MTV's poop crap dump of a new reality show (and a spin-off of The Hills). Nobody!

MTV recently announced that the network would emphasize shows featuring "affirmation and accomplishment." This is why it launched new programs yesterday featuring testosterone-ridden douchenozzles and a girl who doesn't work. So how did they fare?

The City wasn't the only dreadful reality show to premiere last night. There was also Bromance, the Brody Jenner show in which he searches for the platonic man love of his life.

Last night, MTV started its new "Brody Jenner finds a friend" series Bromance in the way many had anticipated: with a loving homage to the naked, hooded dehumanization perfected at Abu Ghraib.

Click to viewBoomp3.com After years and years of development, production finally began on Bros, Matthew Perry’s long gestating Friends spin off, in West Hollywood on Wednesday afternoon. In Bros, Perry’s popular “Chandler” character serves as the den bro to a couple of young plucky bros looking to make it Hollywood (one’s a chef and the other, you guessed it, a writer!). Perry felt that Bros really spoke to an untapped audience —men— while retaining the charm of the original series. Perry said, “It still has the heart and charm of Friends, but it’s edgy like Californication and moody like Mad Men. It’s a real modern and charming bromance between a group of bros who’d die for each other.” Perry did not rule out any guest appearances from his old Friends co-stars, but would like the series to focus on one certain thing: namely, bro-ing down. [Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

There's no use denying that we have had more than a passing interest in reality dating shows for just about as long as we can remember. From watching to Roger Lodge wink his way through Blind Date to finding ourselves hooked into all of the Flavor of Love franchises to our guiltiest moment where we watched a marathon of Shipmates, we had thought we'd seen it all from the genre. But today’s news that King of Television Ryan Seacrest has enlisted Hills boy toy/master nobody Brody Jenner to star in Bromance has officially ruined our ever-weakening belief in these shows doing anything other than harm to our souls. The premise, the challenges, and the overall stench of this upcoming MTV series sounds like, quite possibly, the worst idea in the history of ideas:

Hey dudes! Are you totally moving to LA, hoping to pull hot chicks and drive a fancy car and maybe have some sort of pretend job, just like boy-about-town and occasional Hills idiot Brody Jenner? Well you're in luck! The socialite son of athlete (and current Kardashian wrangler) Bruce Jenner will be starring in his own reality show, an inevitable piece of muck unfortunately titled Bromance. Shudder. Interestingly, American Idol host Ryan Seacrest's production company is behind the MTV debacle, which will feature "'"regular guys' who come to Hollywood and compete in a series of challenges from skydiving to dealing with the paparazzi — in the hopes of ultimately being chosen by Jenner to become part of his entourage." Plus hot-tub eliminations! More details after the jump.

We thought we went over this a few years ago with that New York Times "Man Date" article. But now the Seattle Times has taken it a step further with a trend piece dissecting the bromance - close friendships between hetero dudes.