Producer New Line, distributor MGM, and Peter Jackson are locked in an epic battle over who has control over The Hobbit after Jackson declares that he's not willing to talk about directing the film until New Line coughs up the Lord of the Rings profits they've allegedly screwed him out of, while New Line counter-threatens to press on without him, a move that would almost certainly result in global fanboy riots. [Variety]
At the International Emmys, "very concerned" parent Steven Spielberg warns that semen-splattered corpses on CSI and people being sliced in half on Heroes might not necessarily be the best things for children to watch. [THR]
Heroes puts up the best 18-49 demo ratings that NBC's seen all season, throwing a spotlight on the momentum-stopping performance of Studio 60's Very Special Episode on the evils of product placement. [Variety]
· Nearly three years later, the FCC and CBS are still fighting over Janet Jackson's nipple. Thanks a lot, Timberlake. [THR]
Anne Hathaway is "close" to signing on to play Agent 99 to Steve Carrell's Maxwell Smart in Get Smart adaptation for Warner Bros. [Variety]

TV producer Mark Burnett has dug his hit-sniffing snout back into the competitive reality show trough and rooted out another winner: By applying the same basic fundamentals of dog-eat-dog survivalism set in literal and urban jungle locales that made Survivor and The Apprentice such enduring hits and merely relocating them to the high seas, CBS is all but certain they have another smash on their hands with Burnett's latest concoction, Survivor With Boats a pirate-themed reality show:

CBS forms a new division, CBS Interactive, headed by star dealmaker Quincy Smith. Smith was involved in Viacom buying Neopets, CNet buying Webshots, and several Google deals. He reports directly to CBS chief Les Moonves.

• You can't pay people to read newspapers these days. [PEJ]
  

A press release in our inbox alerting us to the upcoming nomination announcements for the 33rd Annual People's Choice Awards isn't typically the sort of thing we would bother mentioning, regardless of how thrilled we may be at the prospect of George Lopez getting the popular recognition he so richly deserves as one of America's Favorite Television Actors. But something about the lineup chosen to read this year's nominees struck us as noteworthy:

After writers Max Mutchnick and David Kohan made enough money to have a 50-foot, solid gold Colossi erected inside the CBS Radford lot by mining their personal histories for laughs in Will & Grace (the title characters were based on Mutchnick and his best friend), they've found that each subsequent comedy excavation trip through their pasts has yielded fewer riches and quicker cancellations (see Good Morning Miami and Four Kings, based on their morning show experience and friendship, respectively.) But the THR reports that the duo has convinced CBS to forget about their string of misfires and give them yet another chance to recapture the kind of highly lucrative, homo/hetero buddy-sitcom magic they once stumbled upon with Will & Grace by stripping away all pretense of creativity and just writing about themselves:

For die-hard fans of The Price is Right, today's announcement that Bob Barker plans to retire in June after 35 years with the show hits just as hard as if the beloved octogenarian had stepped up on stage, dramatically brought his quivering skinny-mic towards his lips, and informed the CBS television audience that God Himself had told him (through the voice of deceased announcer Rod Roddy, of course) that He was taking Barker after the very next spin of the Big Wheel. Take heart, Plinko addicts, for you still have more than half a year to enjoy your hero before he finally retreats to the paradisiacal splendor of the exact replica of the Price set he's had built at home, where he will spend the rest of his days being serviced by a private staff of Barker's Beauties, all of whom he's paid handsomely to waive their rights to troublesome sexual harassment claims should they tire of his favorite game, "How Much Did These Funbags Cost?"

Hey, don't like Muslims? You think the Halal cart guy on your block is out to destroy America? Want to share your paranoia with the entire nation? You're in luck, because CBS is on Craigslist wants someone like you to interact with some dirty Arabs.

Realizing that Borat's imminent opening effectively ends his "innocent Kazakh documentarian who doesn't understand why he can't purchase sex from shopgirls at The Gap" ruse, Sacha Baron Cohen is already working on the next character (fat suit? age make-up? differently colored nut-sling?) he'll inhabit for a top-secret movie he's expected to shoot next summer. [Variety]
In arguments that the FCC must relax their rules on large media conglomerates, CBS manages to get a dig in on NBC: "Four years ago, when the FCC last reviewed its broadcast-ownership rules, the YouTube.com domain name had not even been registered, the first Windows version of the audio iPod was just rolling out, Google was only a search engine, cable companies sold primarily video packages, and telephone companies sold primarily voice service....and NBC was the most popular broadcast network thanks to its high-rated sitcom 'Friends' airing in the first hour of primetime." Ouch. We'll spare you the punchline, where they mention NBC's layoffs. You get the point already. [THR
Charlize Theron helps out boyfriend Stuart Townsend by lending her star power to The Battle in Seattle, his directing debut. Cute! [Variety]
Is it pre-Oscar awards season already? The Independent Film Project announces the nominees for its Gotham Awards, which include Half Nelson, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine. [THR]
The placement of TV episodes online by networks and studios hardly seems like news anymore, but Fox will show the first two episodes of the new season of The OC on MySpace and their station sites before they air, and Warner Bros, TV hopes to entice people to start watching The Nine by streaming its pilot episode. [Variety]

Today's NY Times uses the example of Smith, the quickly dispatched CBS drama whose birth/death cycle was an impressively efficient three weeks, to illustrate how the itchy trigger-fingers of jittery, hit-hungry TV executives seem to have doomed the on-air existence of TV's "modest successes," shows that fall somewhere between total Nielsen bed-shitters and instant, inexplicable, Deal or No Deal-type hits. But after hearing CBS head executioner Nina Tassler dissect the reasons she dispassionately strangled the show with a piece of piano wire, Smith sounds less like a "modest success" than a "show that people checked out once or twice, then decided they weren't interested in." Reports the Times:

Now we know the real reason that Sumner Redstone almost cried the night he fired Tom Freston: Freston's golden parachute just cost him $59 million for that one year on the job, plus millions more in consultant fees, deferred compensation, and his 401 (k). That's not just fuck-you money, that's fuck-you-and-everyone- who-looks-like-you money. [Variety]
Demonstrating its mandate to get faster, cheaper, and stupider, NBC orders 10 more episodes of 1 vs. 100—but then seemingly ignores orders from the corporate mothership by picking up six more scripts for newly verboten, expensive 8 pm drama Friday Night Lights. Maybe they fired the guy who's supposed to read the memos from Jeff Zucker. [THR]
John Cusack heads back into Grosse Pointe Blank territory by starring in, writing, and producing the dark political satire Brand Hauser: Stuff Happens, the story of an assassin sent to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister. The movie is set to shoot this month in Bulgaria, which probably tells you all you need to know about the budget. [Variety]
Focus Features buys the drama Underdog from Gideon Yago. Yup, exactly the Gideon Yago you're thinking of while shaking your head and asking, "The MTV kid? Seriously?" [THR]
Now that CBS has bored you so profoundly with endless procedural dramas and flavorless comedies that you can't even be bothered to change the channel, they're now going to try to slip in some edgier shows. Watch out, they're throwing out the rule book! Schlubby sitcom husbands might soon be able to pull only semi-hot wives! [Variety]

It really does get easier for a network to get rid of shows once they've popped their cancellation cherries. And this is largely a philosophical question, but is a show truly "canceled" if it never makes it to the air? It seems like "aborted" might be the more accurate term, but that word makes for far more unsavory headlines.

It's another week, and The Katie Tyler Couric Show is still stuck in third place. But you know what? It's okay, because this is all part of the master plan.

With Katie Couric's ratings dropping back to third place, as is God's intended place for CBS News, the producers are pulling out all the stops to lure in viewers — and there's no harm in reminding everyone of Couric's highly feminine, all-American, Rockwellian wiles. From the Couric & Co. blog:

According to the AP, CBS has announced that it's yanking Smith off the air, making the aborted series the holder of the largely semantic distinction of being the first new fall show cancelled. To show just how serious they are about the break-up, CBS has already scrubbed Smith from the primetime show lists and schedule on its site (see our attached illustration of where it used to live), though they haven't gotten around to changing the timeslot information on its individual page. On a more positive note, those who might have trouble to adjusting to Ray Liotta's premature exit from the airwaves can still visit him in Innertube limbo by clicking on the actor's somber face on the CBS homepage, momentarily streaming themselves back to the happy time before impatient programming executives decided to pull the plug on his Nielsen respirator.

· Apple and Wal-Mart are in talks to figure out a way to work together on movie downloads, perhaps with Wal-Mart getting some kind of kickback from iTunes offerings in return for the retail giant dropping its threats to cut off the DVD sales of any studio that dares cooperate with Apple in undercutting their profit margins. [Variety]
Ugly Betty edges out Survivor: Race Wars in their second half-hours, while CSI beats Grey's in viewers, not the 18-49 demo. The demo always knows that skinny, whiny, lovesick doctors trump pointy-headed crime scene investigators. [THR]
In an attempt to cut down on the sale of counterfeit Superman Returns DVDs, Warner Bros. joins in a price war with the pirates, offering cheap, encrypted copies—at least until the MPAA and the Chinese Government round up and kill everyone with a DVD burner and an internet connection, allowing them to safely raise prices again. [Variety]
The simultaneous release of The Guardian and Open Season presents moviegoers with the undesirable dilemma of choosing between live-action and animated Ashton Kutcher vehicles. We expect a rash of multiplex lobby suicides as ticketbuyers collapse under the incredible pressure of having to make such a difficult choice. [THR]
An investor advisory service urges News Corp shareholders to protest COO Peter Chernin's excessive compensation, but have so far turned a blind eye towards Rupert Murdoch's weekly ritual of burning $10 million in front of the Fox lot's News Cafe, during which he offers a variety of obscene hand gestures to any underling looking askance at his fiery display of corporate profligacy. [Variety]

Just two weeks into the much-derided, color-coded current season of Survivor, producers have opted to do away with their four race-warring tribes by blending them into two diverse groups. No reason was offered—no seismic, segregationist-TV-history-altering moment, such as Sundra of the Manihiki tribe refusing to relinquish her seat at the back of a canoe; just host Jeff Probst, newly enlightened student of the Pan Asian experience, announcing, "You have been living together as tribes base upon ethnicity; it is now time to integrate." But, as Reality Blurred points out, alignments within last night's losing Aitutaki tribe seem to indicate the race vs. race fun is far from over:

A Defamer operative passing by the Two and a Half Men set sent over this photo of Charlie Sheen's trailer door, where the actor was taking a break from the crushing demands of a sitcom actor's schedule, marshaling his strength for a tour-de-force table read performance that would convincingly prove that he's worth every penny of the $350,000 per episode he's reportedly going to be paid this season. Sheen is obviously already taking his responsibilities more seriously now that he's going to be the best-remunerated comedy star on TV, as only a week ago the magnetic sign on his door frequently read "HOOKERS," a downtime activity that definitely didn't help to focus his professional energies.

When happily divorced Charlie Sheen isn't hotly anticipating being on the receiving end of one of his basket-tossed, pigtailed companions, he's hard at work raising American morale with his weekly antics on Two And A Half Men. Realizing that his role of Charlie Harper is one of TV's great, iconic comic creations—forged in the grand tradition of Ralph Kramden or Archie Bunker, just without any discernible character traits, idiosyncracies, or gifts for physical comedy—the show's producers are finally compensating Sheen for his creative contribution by making him the highest paid sitcom actor on television:

SAG looks to increase dues for the first time in seven years, a move that could put an unwelcome financial burden on your favorite bartender, valet parking attendant, or Starbucks barista in between slow-arriving residual checks. [Variety]
· On fledgling network The CW's premiere night, America's Next Top Model carries them to a win in the only demographic they truly care about, 18-34 year-olds, as the kids obviously put in the effort to figure out which channel is the new home of Tyra Banks' trademark sassiness. (Disclosure: We still have no idea what channel The CW landed on here in L.A. We suppose we'll figure it out eventually.) [THR]
· Adorably quirky superproducer Brian Grazer's Imagine TV is hooking up with the FBI to develop a drama about its role in the post-9/11 government. In the meantime, The Graze and his partners are hoping that new CBS series Shark will be a hit and make them incrementally richer. [Variety]
Justin Long will join Bruce Willis in the cast of the fourth Die Hard flick, Live Free or Die Hard, playing an obnoxious Mac enthusiast who scoffs at Willis' every frustrated attempt to download pictures from his digital camera onto his PC. [THR]
Thursday night ABC newcomer Grey's Anatomy defeats CBS timeslot stalwart CSI in both overall and key demographic viewership, leaving Les Moonves no choice but to promise his network affiliates that he plans on having the entire Grey's cast murdered by the end of the month. [Variety]