· The second night of American Idol is only slightly less huge than the first, pulling in 36.9 million viewers between 8-10 p.m. This thing's ready to burn out any second now, we can feel it. [Variety]
· Actor Matt Dillon is assimilated by the CAA agent-Borg, voluntarily entering their blood-draining embrace after being dazzled by their shiny new Century City headquarters. [THR]
· CBS picks up the 15th and 16th editions of Survivor, which will both air in the 07-08 season. Publicity-attracting concepts for the planned installments haven't yet been announced, but insiders expect a new, human sacrifice element to be added to the tribal council segment during one of the upcoming cycles. [Variety]
· Kyra Sedgwick signs a new deal with TNT that will keep her on The Closer through its seventh season, grant her a producer title, and pay her a reported $250,000-300,000 per episode. For a basic cable show? Really? [THR]
· In news as surprising as American Idol's ratings, Apple sold a lot of iPods over the holidays, solidifying the music player as the leading gift for those who couldn't be bothered to think of something original to give their loved ones. [Variety]

• Next week is layoff week at Time Inc. Also, every week thereafter. [WWD]
  

• Nobody watched "I'm From Rolling Stone." [WWD]
  

Having defeated a raft of lawsuits aimed at removing scenes that various "victims" of Kazakhstan's leading documentarian found to portray their racism/misogyny/dinner parties in an unflattering light, the Borat DVD is scheduled to be released on DVD March 6th without any changes to the original theatrical version. [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, 'Sex and the City'-related Pilot Pick-up Edition: ABC picks up Cashmere Mafia ("the next generation of Sex and the City. ") and Brett Ratner's Women's Murder Club ("CSI meets Sex and the City"), while NBC goes straight to the source, greenlighting SATC author Candace Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle. [THR]
It's been approximately five minutes since we've mentioned Donald Trump, so: The Donald and producer Mark Burnett are being sued for age discrimination by a rejected Apprentice applicant, who claims the show favors the young and hot over the old and litigious. [Variety]
Fox wiped out all Monday night competition with its BCS championship game between Florida and Ohio State, but NBC's Deal or No Deal and CBS comedy block still perform respectably. Once again, Studio 60 continued its hiatus and thus had no momentum-killing effect on NBC's Nielsen fortunes. [THR]
· Scooby Doo creator Iwao Takamoto dies at 81. The cause of death is officially "heart failure," but we suspect foul play by a disgruntled local farmer wearing a rubber mask. [Variety]

Var's Peter Bart attempts to explain the paradox of CBS Corp CEO Les Moonves: He's part ruthless Old Hollywood, power-crazed mogul, part new media and corporate player. We can't think of a candidate who's better qualified to one day enslave us all. [Variety]
MTV Films picks up the Bob Odenkirk/Rainn Wilson comedy Kanan Rhodes: Unkillable Servant of Justice, about "a man who serves subpoenas with the suaveness, intensity and conviction of James Bond." Odenkirk explains that the project languished for seven years "because we couldn't find anyone who could pull it off. Until we got Rainn in our brain! A lot of actors would come off as dicks, but when he does it, it's sweet and kind of sad." We'd never really been able to put our finger on it, but Wilson really does have that sweet/sad/dicky thing going on. [THR]
After a two-and-a-half month lockout while 20th Century Fox TV and series creator Seth McFarlane worked on a new deal, Family Guy's writers have finally been allowed to get back to the important work of brainstorming non-sequitur gags to randomly insert into the show's sixth season stories. [Variety]
· CSI's Marg Helgenberger's husband announces that he'll seek a second two-year term as head of SAG. [THR]
In other SAG news, the Guild awaits Monday's arrival of new national executive director Doug Allen, the former NFL linebacker they hope will soon lead them to a collective bargaining championship over the studios. [Variety]

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry will be the first to host the traveling "The CSI Experience" exhibit, an interactive experience in which children will learn about forensic science by imitating their favorite moments from the TV franchise, like passing a blacklight over a defiled corpse for evidence of sexual battery. [Variety]
ABC greenlights a pilot for a TV version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which will pick up six months after the events of the film and center on the show's married assassins settling in a new 'burb and backsliding into their bickering, fighting-or-fucking ways. No word on casting, but the network and studio hope to find two leads willing to become romantically involved during the pilot shoot and publicly break up their marriages right before the upfronts. [THR]
Cheeky Var topper Peter Bart encourages our hobbled Governator to liberate his previous Caleeforneeyah from the tyranny of American statehood. [Variety]
Time-stopping, "breakout" Heroes star Masi Oka is in talks to play a supporting role in the true-story inspired blackjack card-counting drama, 21. [THR]
CBS locks up Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! through 2012, confident that TV viewers will never tire of watching Alex Trebek chide contestants who make the unforgivable mistake of forgetting to phrase their answers in the form of a question, or of waiting for Vanna White to finally snap and take out everyone on the Wheel set in a hail of gunfire. [Variety]

Paramount/Dreamworks' "roadshow" opening of Dreamgirls was a big success, but will it translate to strong numbers as the film expands to 800 screens, when the studios will need to attract audiences outside of the Gays who jumped at the chance to pay $25 a ticket for a preview during the limited run? [Variety]
Who will star in CBS's untitled legal drama pilot as a quirky, sassy public defender who, despite her quirk and sass, has been hardened by her efforts to make it in a man's world? If you guessed the quirky-n-sassy-yet-hardened Janeane Garofalo, give yourself five dollars. [THR]
Awards Screeners Shocker! The DGA does-repeat, DOES! We know!—allow screeners to be sent out to its members! In a reversal of an apparently nonexistent ban on FYC DVDs, the Guild clarifies its policy on the matter (details too boring to repeat here), leading to much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair from awards campaigners angry they weren't informed earlier. [Variety]
...And DreamWorks is the first studio to exploit the DGA's new/old policy on screeners for the purpose of pimping Dreamgirls' Bill Condon. See above re: teeth-gnashing and hair-tearing. [THR]
Either it's just a weird typo, or the Reporter was so taken aback that NCIS was the most watched show of the week in primetime that it took eleven question marks to express its disbelief. [THR]

Today, the studly Brian Montopoli, who blogs over at CBS News's cute Public Eye, shared his thoughts about the manufactured Tara Conner drama. His contention? That Donald Trump has masterfully manipulated the media, during a traditionally fallow stretch, into giving the whole "Miss USA is a drunk" story about 674% more airtime than it really deserves. We heartily concur — and we applaud Trump's efforts on our behalf during this difficult time. Seriously, we don't know what we'd be writing about if Trump weren't there, dishing out quotes like "It's a story that has happened many times before, to many women and to many men that came to the Big Apple." But Brian saves the best of his chiding post, Vanessa Williams-style, for last:

Chingchonggate may finally be blowing over, but even casual watchers of The View know Rosie O'Donnell's tenure at the yapfest won't be long. Case in point: O'Donnell's rambling diatribe on the alien, rich-lady ways of Barbara Walters (pay special attention to Walters' patented DeathStare), whose penchant for throwing dinner parties not featuring a communal macaroni salad bowl led O'Donnell to practically rally the audience to rise up against her boss and join a people's revolution. Now, a press release from Extra gets Rosie to address rumors that she wants to take over from retiring Bob Barker to host The Price is Right:

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Back to the Jungle, Again Edition: Warner Bros. and producer Jerry Weintraub are developing a "new take" on Tarzan; only the potential involvement of director Guillermo del Toro gives us hope the project might evolve into something other than an excuse to put Ashton Kutcher in a loincloth. [Variety]
Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, dies at the age of 83. [THR]
Director RJ Cutler will follow around Vogue's Anna Wintour as she prepares the magazine's fifty-pound fall fashion issue, hoping to capture documentary footage of the assistant-abusing atrocities fictionalized in The Devil Wears Prada. [Variety]
· CBS wins a "quiet" Thursday night in the ratings behind CSI and Survivor; Meanwhile, The OC continues to tank. How long until they stunt-kill Chino or Seth? [THR]
Scott Rudin and Miramax are adapting Pulitzer-winning play Doubt for film. Playwright John Patrick Shanley will write and direct the movie version, planning on using a liberal amount of NY location shooting to avoid that not-so-fresh, "this still feels like a play" feeling that afflicts so many stage-to-screen adaptations. [Variety]

We love this whole notion that all "old media" has to do is throw a couple blogs up there on the interweb, and voila, instant new-media relevance! Yesterday we took a look at "Couric & Co.," which totally reads like a community newspaper column, and today we were alerted to CBS News's new "humor" blog Showbuzz—quotations marks sadly intentional—which totally reads like a community college's humor magazine. (Not that we have anything against community newspapers or colleges, but CBS is supposed to be, you know, professional?) Take this dispatch from an entry entitled "Kids These Days":

Prince will headline the Super Bowl halftime show; broadcaster CBS has pledged to take every precaution necessary to ensure that the rocker will not try and top Janet Jackson's infamous nipple-display by having one of his background singers yank off his codpiece, revealing that his penis is barely covered by purple junk-armor. [Variety]
Columbia Pictures acquires the rights to 1930's pulp hero The Shadow for Sam Raimi to produce, hoping that by the time a film is eventually released, people will have completely forgotten about the disastrous 1994 version starring Alec Baldwin. [THR]
Steven Spielberg is actively developing two drama series at Fox via his DreamWorks TV label, including one set in the world of fashion written by Ed Burns and wife Christy Turlington. Given Turlington's experience in that industry, it's unclear how the duo will split up the scripting and "just sitting there and looking pretty" duties. [Variety]
· CAA, obviously still disoriented from the recent, baffling defections of Kate Hudson and Hugh Grant, agrees to take on Christian Slater as a client. [THR]
· Unlike other Europeans, Spaniards haven't fallen in love with Sacha Baron Cohen, rejecting both Borat and Da Ali G show. [Variety]

Paramount employees on the studio's Melrose lot are still nursing whatever hangovers they managed on three drink tickets' worth of hooch at last night's holiday party, while any of their marginalized, uninvited CBS Corp neighbors who may have misguidedly attempted to infiltrate the event are quietly wondering whether the genital stun-gunning they received for being caught without a proper bracelet will have repercussions for their future reproductive plans. We've received some reports from last night's festivities, including one from a brave and resourceful CBSer who used Jedi Mind Trick-levels of deception to bypass the gatekeepers, score his free drinks, and take in the opulent, Christmassy delights (which, unfortunately, didn't included the Bono appearance rumored yesterday) that Brad Grey never wanted him to enjoy:

We thought that all of the intramural tension between stranded CBS Corp employees rendered nothing more than unwanted tenants by the Great Viacom/CBS Schism of 2006 and their Paramount landlords would have worked itself out by now, but this report from a member of the Melrose lot's untouchable caste indicates that the holiday season, normally a time for people to put aside their differences over some spiked eggnog and mistletoe-enabled makeout sessions, seems to be providing a fresh opportunity for CBS staffer persecution:

Two people have been arrested for stealing an Academy member's awards screeners and illegally posting them online. The DA has yet to file charges, but is expected to ultimately deny the MPAA's request that the pirates be summarily stabbed in the kidneys and left to bleed to death on the sidewalk in front of the Kodak Theatre. [Variety]
ABC shuffles its Wednesday schedule, sacrificing new comedies Knights of Prosperity and In Case of Emergency to the Nielsen gods by putting them up against the return of American Idol, hoping that better-loved hit Lost might be spared their wrath in its new 10 pm timeslot. [THR]
George Clooney's production company tries to help re-ignite Hollywood's stalled love affair with legal thriller typist John Grisham, buying the movie rights to produce the book The Innocent Man: Murder and Justice in a Small Town for Warner Independent. [Variety]
The IATSE/WGA feud over reality jobs heats up, as IATSE president Thomas Short accuses the WGA of "irresponsibility and incompetence" for delaying producer talks. Only nine more months left of bickering over accusations of Guild posturing and de facto studio work stoppages! Enjoy them while they last. [THR]
The week in ratings: NBC takes the weekly 18-49 demo victory, The CW posts its strongest numbers yet, ABC has the week's most watched show, CBS remains the overall most watched network, and Fox is just happy they're not being beaten by Telemundo. [Variety]

With anchor Rene Syler sashaying off The Early Show, it appears CBS may not bother to replace her, instead focusing on the remaining four nonpersonae on the program. That means more face time for Harry Smith, Hannah Storm, and Dave Price, not to mention Les Moonves spouse Julie Chen. Unless, of course, the CBS denials of further personnel shifts are horse pucky, as TVNewser hears. Regardless, the show's current forgettable set and graphics will be replaced with an all new and even more forgettable set and graphics, sure to draw legions of new viewers among mental patients and the superficially distracted. No change in the show's third-place ratings doldrums is expected, now or ever.

Disney announces that it lay off 160 employees from their feature animation unit (Pixar workers are safe) in the next couple of weeks, generously offering newly superfluous employees an opportunity to spend much more time with their families during the holidays. [Variety]
Comedy Central orders six episodes of the Amp'd Mobile-originated animated comedy series Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States, a move that will surely send basic cable copycats scrambling to misguidedly snatch up the rights to whatever wallpapers and ringtones they find on their children's cellphones. [THR]
Foreign audiences once again prove they're not interested in seeing any film (not even the one with the rats going down the toilet!) but Casino Royale, which takes the international box office crown with $44.7 million, raising its worldwide total to $312.4 million. [Variety]
CBS extends David Letterman's contract through 2010, ensuring that Letterman will remain on the air longer than Jay Leno, who will be replaced on the The Tonight Show by Conan O'Brien in 2009 unless he discovers a way to quietly dispose of his youthful usurper. [THR/AP]
· Kevin Spacey finds a leading man for his MIT card-counting pet project 21, relative unknown Jim Sturgess. Spacey will produce, and may opt to play the lead's mentor himself. Please, no "Spacey mentors up-and-coming actor" jokes. You're far too classy for that. [Variety]

Production has already begun on CBS's latest foray into the "marginal celebrities performing activities for which they're hilariously ill-suited" genre of reality TV, Armed and Famous, in which Erik "Hey, I Once Played A Motorcycle Cop!" Estrada, LaToya Jackson, Jack Osborne, and Wee Man will train to become gun-toting members of the Muncie, Indiana police force. We expect that reports of Muncie's first parking ticket-related fatal shooting will soon surface. [Variety]
House pulls in its best ratings since its season premiere, crushing the debut of ABC's new comedy, Big Day, which stars that guy from all those short-lived sitcoms whose name we can never remember. [THR]
Universal casts Martin Lawrence in the Malcolm Lee comedy The Better Man, a project that strips him of the acting crutch represented by the latex fat suits he's recently relied on to portray the titular character in Big Momma's House 2 and John Travolta in Wild Hogs. [Variety]
According to a USC study, parents think their kids are online too much, robbing them of the vital life experiences provided by the rainbow parties their internet usage is causing them to miss out on. [THR]
The Real World's ratings are off 53 percent from last season, indicating that basic cable audiences might finally be tired of watching drunk assholes scream at each other while living rent-free in lavishly decorated apartments. Even if these discouraging results makes MTV give up on the series, we hope they continue on with Real World/Road Rules Challenge, as drunk assholes screaming at each other while bungie jumping off hot air balloons floating over active volcanos still has some entertainment value. [Variety]

In case the raw number of $66.2 million that Casino Royale took in at the international box office isn't enough to impress you, that amount was more than double the combined totals of its four closest competitors. We're cowed by the drawing power of Blonde Bond, at least when he's not having his spy-junk stomped by dancing penguins. [Variety]
Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith set up two TV comedy projects, one at The CW about single moms "making lunch and making love" within the same apartment complex, and one at ABC about what happens when a pair of mothers-in-law move in with "an upper-class black man from a conservative family and his Jewish wife from a liberal lower-middle-class family" who are trying to raise twins (what, no talking dog?), a project apparently created when an overly ambitious writer set her Random Sitcom Premise Generator to its highest wackiness setting. [THR]
· New Line's The Nativity Story premiered Sunday at the Vatican without the Pope in attendance, with rumors that he opted out of the event because the movie's unwed, pregnant, teenage star did not conceive through appropriately immaculate means. [Variety]
Carson Daly is supplementing his TV hosting duties with a producing career in online content, hoping to realize his longtime dream of becoming the "Ryan Seacrest of the Internet." [THR]
Fox, CBS, and NBC continue to fight FCC over new indecency regulations, while ABC and The CW haven't yet been fined enough to join the fray. [Variety]

The trades eulogize "iconoclastic, prolific, periodically brilliant director" Robert Altman, "one of cinema's great democratic spirits." [Variety, THR]
NBC is developing a TV version of Thank You For Smoking, in which the movie's former tobacco apologist's new PR firm will take on seemingly impossible image rehabilitation tasks, like trying to convince people that Lindsay Lohan is a hard-working, responsible adult committed to shutting out distractions and fully dedicating herself to her craft. [Variety]
NBC orders three more scripts from 30 Rock, momentarily showing support for the far better of their two low-rated, behind-the-scenes-at-a-sketch-comedy-show series. [THR]
Fox Atomic shuts down production on its update of Revenge of the Nerds, sparing us from a needless remake of a perfectly good nerdsploitation flick. [Variety]
Fox joins CBS in challenging the FCC, claiming that new rules that find "certain words so vile they are automatically actionable" will kill live broadcasting by hampering celebrities' ability to spontaneously say "shit" or "fuck" during awards shows. [THR]