· A scene from an upcoming Desperate Housewives in which Kyle MacLachlan goes down on Marcia Cross, "with explosive results," according to Variety, was distributed on YouTube. This angered ABC execs, who insist it wasn't an "official leak" intended to build buzz. We're starting to feel extremely nauseous at the moment. [Variety]
· What do Idi Amin, Diane Arbus, Truman Capote and John Lennon have in common—besides being invitees #2 through #5 to the ultimate dinner party/coke-fueled-orgy of our wildest fantasies? They're all the subject of movies at the Telluride Film Festival. [Variety]
· Fox is stumped, not knowing what possibly more than Emily Deschanel's terrific rack audiences could need to show up for their faltering forensics drama, Bones. [Variety]
· NBC swaps the Jeffrey Tambor/John Lithgow sitcom Twenty Good Years with 30 Rock, putting it in the 8:30 slot, because, Kevin Reilly explains, it makes for a "more compatible lead-in to 'The Biggest Loser'." Take from that what you will, Misters Tambor and Lithgow. [THR]
· CBS wins a Thursday night with mainly reruns of CSI and Without A Trace. One can only imagine how well the network would have done had those CSI staff dunderheads not blabbed about the exciting K-Fed surprise. [THR]

Realizing, like Survivor, that their own, aging CBS series could use a little free publicity by way of a headline-grabbing controversy, the producers of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation wisely opted out of launching a spinoff entitled CSI: Black People, and instead cast Vanilla Ice-channeling couchhusband Kevin Federline in a guest-starring role. (Plot details are under wraps, though we hear he plays a murder victim ironically strangled to death in his sleep with his own wife-beater by the wealthy dimwit he's been sponging off for years.) Arrangements had been made to give People the exclusive non-story, but a leak occurred, resulting in a stern missive from CBS' publicity department being issued to the entire "CSI Team." A Defamer operative forwarded the e-mail to us:

General Motors—whose long and storied sponsorship arrangement with Survivor helped sell literally dozens of Pontiac Azteks—has announced it would be parting ways with the series this season, but that their decision was purely based upon business reasons, and not because the new gimmick of pitting races against each other might, you know, alienate 100% of their customer base. Reports Television Week:

There is nothing in this life we enjoy more than stories recounting the petty squabbles of powerful men, so imagine for a moment our delight over today's NY Post article dedicated to the ongoing, though somewhat disappointingly one-sided, bloodfeud between generously betoothed future galactic despot Les Moonves of CBS Corp. and his favorite new pincushion, Viacom's Tom Freston. The Post gives us an overdue State of the Slap-Fight update:

· AOL struggles to find new reasons to justify its pointless existence in a broadband world by offering downloadable movies from most of the majors, set at the three price points of $19.99, $14.99 and $9.99, or crap, crappier and crappiest. [Variety]
· More online entertainment news—we know, it's too much sexy, you can't bear it. CBS will stream episodes of some of their series, such as The Unit and The Class, in the hope that eyeballs they've lost to computer porn might shift over to some of their shows once they're, uh, done with their computer porn business. [Variety]
· A national janitors' union presents their Golden Broom Awards for the "worst place for janitors to work." (Wouldn't a golden broom suggest excellence in the custodial arts? We would have gone with the Leaky Bucket Awards, but hey, not our gig.) Winners this year include NBC Studios, Universal Citywalk and Warner Music Group. Defamer commentators go wild with "Tom Cruise new career opportunity" jokes. [Variety]
· Gerard Butler and Hilary Swank will put their ambisexual chemistry to the test in P.S. I Love You, a movie we will not see because it is called P.S. I Love You. [THR]
· THR claims this year's Emmys arrive among "a din of disenchantment." Hey, if it makes you feel better, Emmy, we'll check you out. On TiVo. Well, we'll just fast forward to the Conan O'Brien bits and to see if Ellen Burstyn wins The Leaky Bucket the Emmy for her 14-second performance. [THR]

If CBS' goal was to get people talking again about a show no one has given a shit about for years, then yes, divvying up this season's out-of-work-actor cast of Survivor into four piles of headshots of increasing darkness definitely proves how Mark Burnett is a true visionary of the genre. But not everyone is as energized by the hook:

Beating even the impressive headlines-to-episode turnaround times of Matt Stone and Trey Parker themselves, a Defamer reader drafted this cast photo of the inevitable South Park episode skewering Survivor: Cook Island and its almost-too-ridiculous -to-be-parodied race vs. race premise. We look forward to the requisite scene in which Cartman sensitively explains to Kyle why he can't play along at home, because "there's no bleeping Jew Tribe, Jew," though we can't help but feel this would have been the perfect opportunity for the recently departed Chef to preach in the final moments how it's time we all looked past something as surface as skin color, unless it's a shade of delicious mocha-chocolate covering the large expanse of a plus-plus-sized hooker's ass.

You've now had some time to digest the fact that CBS has actually gone there, and decided the best way to spice up their castaway game show is by courting contestants from the many shades of the diversity rainbow (wisely omitting the Arab-American Tribe—too terroristy), then running the lucky chosen few under a race-reading UPC bar-code scanner and sorting them accordingly. Highly entertaining is the absurd lengths host Jeff Probst, as demonstrated in this interview with The Slug blog, will shoot for in order to justify this as something other than what it is: a cynical ploy calculated to get people talking and tuning in. RealityBlurred.com also points out that Survivor: Cook Island's far flung cross section of technicolor America may have more in common than their wildly varying skin tones first suggest:

• Survivor - Cook Islands - Early Show Intro [YouTube]

Katie Couric takes over as anchor of CBS Evening News on September 5. Normally that would be all ye know, and all ye need to know. But in the networks' continuing struggle to remake every anchor into a hybrid of Cronkitean gravitas and Brokawvian humility, Couric has already been pre-killed by a tidal wave of overexposure. From a mawkishly overwrought farewell on Today to a ludicrously conceived "listening tour" and a $10 million ad campaign to build up her "trustiness," Couric is everywhere too much and too loud. And with so much overthinking about the hustle & flow of her newscast, it's obviously going to be The Katie Couric Show (with news).

It's hard to believe that twelve seasons of Survivor have come and gone without a single player having been bludgeoned to death in the dead of night with an immunity idol, only to be strung up in a banana tree as a warning to anyone who might think of bogarting that evening's rice ration. But that long-awaited, TV-MA episode could finally arrive in the coming season, when, if the internet rumors are correct, the added, incendiary element of dividing teams according to race could ratchet up the tension considerably:

Network news: it's the story that just keeps giving. Today the Times takes a long look at the increased level of network news competition in anticipation of Katie Couric's splashy-yet-deliberately-unsplashy debut as the anchor of the CBS evening news. NBC is hanging gargantuan banners of Brian Williams outside of the CBS studio (a technique taken straight from the New York Post) while Williams blathers on about the "anchor-viewer relationship"; ABC's Charlie Gibson is being marketed as "Your Trusted Source," which hearkens back to the late Peter Jennings, whose slogan was "Trust is Earned." Blah trust blah blah trust blah.

· CBS announces that it will stream episodes of its shows (at least the ones it fully owns) on its broadband Innertube channel the day after they initially air on the "real" network. The online shows will still be ad-supported, so those looking to destabilize CBS's business model should still watch on DVR and blast through the commercials. [Variety]
Naturally, no plan to use a new platform for the delivery of creative content would be complete without an attempt to fuck the various Guilds in the ass. [Variety]
Fox Searchlight lands Wes Anderson's next project, Dajeerling Limited, which will employ Anderson regulars Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman, and, we hope, trusty safecracker/manservant Kumar Pallana. [THR]
Declining XM and Sirius stock prices have investors saying that the two satellite radio providers should merge, raising the tantalizing possibility that Howard Stern could one day browbeat new co-host Oprah Winfrey into riding the Sybian. [THR]
In what could be an epic brood-off, Focus Features signs up Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix to star in the adaptation of the novel Reservation Road, with Ruffalo playing a character who flees the scene after running over Phoenix's son. [Variety]

CBS announces that it will play TV on the Internet. Yes, with commercials. Yes, for free. Yes, whole episodes that also appear on TV. Only fewer commercials.

· Now that we've been softened up to 9/11-based Hollywood projects by United 93 and World Trade Center, it's time to gird ourselves for the onslaught of TV specials tied to the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Especially promising (read: dread-inducing) is ABC's upcoming Path to 9/11 miniseries, which will run with "limited commercial" interruption, a choice network head Steve McPherson explains thusly: "Some things you do for commerce and some things because they are the right thing to do." Apparently, it's OK to make a little money from a tragedy, but not too much. [Variety]
· Pirates 2 pulls down another $44 million at the international box office, and jumps nine places on the all-time worldwide list with its $855 million cumulative gross. Yup, still a shitload of money. [THR]
News Corp prepares to roll out the next phase of its evil plan to coopt the internet as a distribution channel for its entertainment products, announcing plans to sell downloads of Fox TV shows and films via MySpace and Direct2Drive. [Variety]
Agent Dance Mini Edition: Veteran TV agent Steve Glick lasts just a year at ICM, as he ditches/is ditched by the agency following its purchase of BWCS and its shinier television department. [THR]
CBS Paramount TV signs up Laguna Beach producers Gary and Julie Auerbach to create more "unscripted" shows that forego even token attempts at representing reality. [Variety]

Your afternoon video microhumor: Cable access show in Tampa, Florida, captures porcine conservative radio host Tony Katz versus strip-club owning liberal county commissioner candidate Joe Redner. After holding forth in a dignified though extemporaneous fashion ("You're a liar!", "You're fat!"), Katz storms off the set, only to return and hurl a chair at his ponytailed foe. Of the several possible video clips of the incident (including Youtube, which sadly doesn't include a shot of Katz and is thus unsatisfying), we're going with the CBS segment as our favorite — see if you can count just how many times they show Redner taking the chair in the face. Everyone drink!

The Wall Street Journal reports that, as is appropriate for her new gig as CBS' shiny new anchor, Katie Couric will likely abandon her colorful Today show wardrobe in favor of something more serious and befitting of the evening news (guess that means no more pink jumpers or colorful culottes). There's a CBS promo airing that shows Couric in a dark suit sporting a pearl necklace, the suit suggesting that Couric is classy and trustworthy (the pearl necklace, on the otherhand, signifies her evening pastimes).

CBS Corp's Les Moonves' sinister plan to slowly destroy corporate rival/brother Tom Freston of Viacom proceeds apace with the announcement that CBS's film unit will produce 4 to 6 mid-budgeted movies a year, which Moonves will then use to stock Showtime and reduce the network's dependence on Freston's Paramount product. That clear? No? Just imagine Moonves kicking Freston in the balls and you've got the gist. [Variety]
Christian Bale is "close to a deal" to star opposite Russell Crowe in James Mangold's western remake 3:10 to Yuma, which has survived a disastrous history of prolonged languishing in turnaround and rumored Tom Cruise involvement long enough to finally find some financing. [THR]
· Former Project Greenlight superstar and Weinstein survivor Jon Gordon lasts just a year as president of production at Universal, but publicly bears no ill will (yet) over his ankling/shitcanning: "Obviously, this is sudden. There are talks under way and things are not resolved now. I have no animosity towards these guys. I think there is a really good team in place." Gordon plans on spending the weekend designing a full-page Variety ad thanking the studio for the opportunity to be let go. [Variety]
World Trade Center premiered in New York last night, representing a "major test" for Paramount both because it's the first true project produced by the Brad Grey regime and the fact that it contains an obvious metaphor for his leadership of the studio. Is it too soon to joke about Grey piloting planes full of laid-off employees into the Paramount watertower? [Variety]
The Fox pilot The Adventures of Big Handsome Guy and His Little Friend finds it way onto the YouTube circuit, prompting 20th Century Fox Television to announce its intention to hunt down and kill the source of the leak. [THR]

Macauley Culkin will star with Eliza Dushku in the dark comedy Sex and
Breakfast, which will attempt to coax edgy laughter from the disconnect of watching the Home Alone kid engage in group sex. [Variety]
Be prepared to excuse yourselves for some alone time after getting all worked up by these two sexy trade paper stories about multimedia conglomerate profit reports. [THR, THR ]
Seeking new and exciting ways of delivering episodes of The Hills to a cherished demographic, MTV is buying Y2M, the nation's largest network of online college newspapers. [Variety]
Sony and MGM move ahead with their Pink Panther sequel by hiring a writing team of "newcomers" whose work will eventually be undone by scores of uncredited rewrites. [THR]
Conservative CBS eschews the willy-nilly fall TV season premiere strategy of its crazy whippsnapper competitors, and will instead roll out new episodes of its various series in a single week. [Variety]

ICM acquisition of BWCS is called a "perfect" fit, especially once they get rid of all those superfluous agents that might that fit a little too tight for comfort. [Variety, THR]
CBS will cough up the $550,000 indecency fine for showing Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl, but only because they have to pay the penalty to fight the ruling in court. [THR]
The WGA and America's Next Top Model writers continue to strike outside the show's offices, while The CW continues to dodge their unionization request by telling the strikers to kill a few months talking to the National Labor Relations Board. [Variety]
· Ed Helms will reunite with Daily Show buddy Steve Carell in a recurring role on The Office. [THR]
ABC's American Idol knockoff The One pulls such amazingly low ratings that's it's canceled a mere week after its anemic debut. We'd like to think this means that viewers are tired of AI clones, but we know that seven more series like this will probably rise to take its place. [Variety]