In what Var has dubbed Bloody Monday, but which we will counterdub Mercy-Killing Monday to emphasize the networks' compassionate desire to euthanize a handful of shows languishing in a Nielsen coma from which they are unlikely to ever awaken, Fox's The Wedding Bells, ABC's Six Degrees, The CW's 7th Heaven, and NBC's The Black Donnellys have all entered different phases of the always complex cancellation process. This morning, heavy-handed Donelleys creator Paul Haggis is using his pair of stolen Oscars to wipe away the tears he's shedding over the loss of his primetime baby, his pain compounded by Var's swift kick to the gut during this moment of vulnerability:

We hate to return so quickly to the Golden Globes nominations, but since we made a point of spotlighting Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip creator Aaron Sorkin's hope that a Globe nod would elevate his Little Serious-Minded Sketch Comedy Drama That Could from a "critical hit" into the type of hit that people actually watch, we thought it relevant to note that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association decided not to sprinkle its magic Nielsen dust on the series, granting a single nomination recognizing Sarah Paulson's performance as the proud Krazee Khristian who so glows with talent that her cast members can only gaze upon her through welding masks. We trust that Sorkin will handle this disappointment maturely, refraining from the petty impulse to have Matthew Perry and Brad Whitford hold forth at length about the meaninglessness of awards shows on a future episode, lambasting the "back-slapping, junket-whore buffet monkeys who wouldn't know quality programming if a DVD screener lodged itself next to the empty heads lodged in their asses" for abandoning his show in its hour of need.

Like nearly all seemingly feel-good Hollywood stories, March of the Penguins's triumphant run is ending in legal ugliness, with the doc's director of photography suing for a director credit on the film. [Variety]
Jason Lee will star in and produce Krater, a comedy about a late 70s/early 80s rock band who hires a lead singer with "secret Broadway ambitions" a description that we will decode as "is secretly gay." [THR]
Getting a whiff of the awards buzz on Letters from Iwo Jima, Warner Bros. pushes director Clint Eastwood in front of as many media members as possible, politely urges him not to confuse people by talking about the other World War II movie he recently did for another studio that everyone's already forgotten about. [Variety]
The Reporter calls 2006 the "Year of the Apology." Serial apologizers Mel Gibson and Michael Richards figure prominently. [THR]
With Studio 60 getting the week off, made-for-TV holiday flick A Year Without a Santa Claus ably filled in as NBC's designated Monday night ratings momentum-stopper, even though the movie completely ignored the lessons we learned about the sham that is Christmas on S60's uplifting holiday special. [Variety]

The Slug blog thinks it sees evidence of creeping Jordan McDeere-ism in fledgling network abomination The CW's hiring practices, throwing together this side-by-side-by-side to illustrate how current programming VP Gayle Hirsch and drama development VP Joanna Klein (or some combination thereof) resemble Studio 60's maverick NBS executive (who herself is supposedly based on ABC/NBC exec Jamie Tarses). Personally, we don't see it, even though we've always maintained that all brunette TV executives look alike (especially on Headshot Day), but we'll allow that we might be thrown off by both CW employees' impressive ability to muster more complex facial expressions in these liberally airbrushed photos than Amanda Peet has in five episodes' worth of appearances on her show.

We continue this afternoon's exhaustive coverage of disappointing, expensive television dramas with this brief report about an online survey regarding Studio 60 a reader was asked to take after self-identifying as a disgruntled viewer of NBC's programming, an interesting window into how the network tests a show that recently built an entire episode about the evils of focus group testing:

With a background in advertising and roughly sixty-eight versions of his Law & Order franchise currently on the air, cops-and-lawyers-procedural brandmaster Dick Wolf is uniquely qualified to declare that anyone who thinks they know how commerce, emerging platforms, and traditional programming will intersect in the future is quite obviously hitting the pipe. Reports the WSJ: