If, like many Americans, you have never laid eyes on the sadistic torture fest known as NBC's Celebrity Circus, please allow today's clip to be your first. Now that the show is finished cracking ribs and breaking celebrity forearms, its reason for being felt willfully out of reach until this clip brought it all home: what if, underneath it all, Celebrity Circus is just an elaborate parody of the typical reality competition? As you watch Brady Bunch alum Christopher Knight (dressed as a model for International Male) swing through the air to the tunes of the Black-Eyed Peas' "Let's Get It Started," finally facing a trio of judges cut from the usual "generic, dippy, and British" mold, allow your mind to ponder the thought: is it possible to spoof a show that's already a parody of itself?

OK, so that didn't happen. But were you going to watch this video if we billed it as "Antonio Sabato Jr. recreates some of the most famous hood ornaments of all time on NBC's ghetto, circus-themed reality experiment?" Every time we tune into Celebrity Circus, we feel like something really awkward and sad just happened the second before—like that weird French contortionist judge lady just broke the news to Rachel Hunter she has trapeze cancer or something. Everyone's always crying and looking down at the floor and snapping at each other. Then they cut to a training video, and Stacey Dash is sliding into an MRI machine and her Hammock of Death partner is standing in a hospital waiting room, tensely explaining that things don't look good. You get the point. This is not fun! This is nothing like a circus! These Z-list celebrities clearly don't want to be there. Would you really want to told by a panel of circus freaks that you failed to maintain a convincing smile while rotating 360 degrees in a little-person gyroscope? Let's face it—this was a terrible idea. [Celebrity Circus]

While we never expected Celebrity Circus to be a magical panacea that would cure us from the premature onset of the summer television doldrums, it's fair to say that we here at Defamer HQ were all more than a little bit pumped to watch last night's premiere. After all, as proud Gen Xers, we have fond, kitsch-filled memories of watching Lynda Carter dodge knives and William "The Greatest American Hero" Katt rock the shit out of the Giant Wheel Of Death. So when perfect '80s-storm plundering Ben Silverman announced plans earlier this year that NBC would be airing the show, we marked and calendars and began dusting off our bean bags and hot air popcorn poppers in preparation for what we thought was going to be an awesome night of television. But much to our dismay, our dreams were shattered when we found out that Celebrity Circus wasn't a one-time event where everyone comes together to celebrate the spirit of, well, circusness. Rather, we were hoodwinked into watching yet another entry in the tiresome reality "competition" genre, filled with yet another panel of judges with distracting accents and/or speech impediments. What a drag.

If you, like us, have been making involuntary smacking sounds in anticipation of tomorrow's premiere of Celebrity Circus—NBC's marriage of two separately wonderful things into a third, exponentially more wonderful thing—then this amuse bouche from the NY Post detailing the cast's various injuries and near-brushes with tiger-swat death is almost certainly going to get your salivary glands doing double-time:

· Here's what we can tell you about NBC's Celebrity Circus, possibly the most significant televised amateur circus event in recent history: Joey Fatone will be ringmaster. Scheduled to appear: Christopher Knight, Rachel Hunter, Antonio Sabato Jr., Blu Cantrell, and Jason "Wee Man" Acuna, whom we'll assume will be fired at some point from the Lil' Caesar's Cannon of Doom™. [Variety]
· Fox is sitting atop the big studio heap entering into the summer box office season (OMG! It's almost the summer box office season! Who's excited?!), but Warner Bros., with its one-two-three punch of Speed Racer, Get Smart, and The Dark Knight should comfortably take the lead. (Especially when you look at Fox's roster: Eddie Murphy's Dave and The X-Files: I'm Trying As Hard As I Can To Buy This Alien Mumbo-Jumbo, Mulder.) [THR]

What does NBC's revolutionary, 52-week programming schedule mean for you, the couchbound summer viewer with no interest in interacting with your children or lowering your cholesterol? Lots of really long, really crappy reality TV! Marketed under the tagline "All-American Summer," many of your TV-wasteland favorites are returning in super-sized, 90-minute episodes (presumably because it was really hard to follow the action of America's Got Talent when it was confined to the hour-format).