As the various, cretinous cast members of The Hills took to David Letterman's couch in recent weeks, more than a few of us were left wondering how the entertainment landscape had so quickly devolved from the days when the effortlessly charming and talented likes of Teri Garr would grace his stage—the two trading bon mots and flirting shamelessly, with Paul Shaffer providing a suitably white-funkified musical backdrop to the fizzy proceedings. They say you can't capture lightning in a bottle twice (do they say that? Or are we mixing our metaphors? Where were we? Oh right, Dave and Teri), but you also can't deny chemistry, and it was on abundant display when the two were reunited last night. They're grayer now, and slower—Dave touchingly guided Teri, who is suffering from MS, to her chair—but you can't deny the spark is still there. As Letterman stuck to his, "Did you do it with Elvis?"-line of questioning, Garr shot down the long-standing rumors that the two had once engaged in naked-pretzel antics themselves. But after the jump, we'd invite you to compare and contrast a classic pairing from 1986, in which an amorous Dave opens with, "I'd like to get a can of Windex and go to work." Suddenly, his preoccupation with Elvis makes sense, in a vicarious-thrills-seeking way. It's good to be The King.

David Letterman and Julia Roberts were reunited on last night's Late Show, and it didn't feel so hot. The self-exiled Most Powerful Actress in Show Business seemed to us unnecessarily hard on the host and gushing dad, who was trying to make some point about celebrity baby-math (something about exponential levels of household chaos, not the old adage about knocking $5 mil off the opening weekend for every pregnancy). He was swiftly made to look the buffoon by the Charlie Wilson's War star and her rigidly literal-minded interpretation of family-sizes. And no one makes Dave look the buffoon—well, except maybe Julia. [Late Show]

Gripped by a paralzying case of Rain Manesque echolalia on her Late Show appearance last night ("OK, so you're going to follow Harrison Ford. He has a movie coming out? Indiana Jones? Then Dave will ask you all about your little E! reality show. Don't forget to have fun!") aspiring Lohan Ali seemed incapable of responding with much more than a nervous, "Yeah," to most of host David Letterman's questions. (We've added dings to help you count them: 21 in two minutes.)

Watching Shia LaBeouf recount for David Letterman the amusing circumstances surrounding his arrest last November at a Chicago Walgreens for drunken, public benzoyl-peroxide abuse, we were suddenly left wanting to know how—likable as he is—he so quickly ascended to superstar status. Well, that's the great thing about media-saturation campaigns riding the coattails of massive summer movie releases: Those kinds of wishes are easily granted. According to a profile in the new GQ, it all started when Steven Spielberg saw LaBeouf's Disturbia audition tape, and instantly cast him in Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That was easy! But just who is this charismatic, precocious, and ridiculously named young man? And from whence does he come? Not too far, as GQ reports—in fact, as close by as a traveling tubesteak sideshow in Echo Park:

Stopping by the heiress-friendly zone of the Ed Sullivan Theater to plug her latest exciting venture—MTV's So You Want to Be Paris Hilton's New Top Friend or whatever—the Hottie or the Nottie star admitted she had never seen an episode of that network's massively popular realitainment, The Hills. It was a pronouncement so startling—where else do people like Hilton turn to fill the long hours between hair-extension-launch press conferences and the next SLR-hotboxing or pole-rocking opportunity?—that it instantly called to mind her blanket denial of having ever engaged in drug use of any kind during her post-incarceration Larry King Live interview. While both statements seem highly unlikely, King responded by voicing his skepticism on a later broadcast, while Letterman instead chose to hang himself in his office by Brooks Brothers necktie 30 minutes after taping. [Late Show with David Letterman]

It's time to salute David Letterman, who continues to do a great service for us, the non-Hills watcher with only a vague idea of what the hell's going on with that inexplicably popular program. Thanks to the Reality TV Catfight Reform Act of 2007, Heidi Montag was granted equal Late Show broadcast time to that of Lauren Conrad, whereupon she too was grilled by Dave on the ins and outs of their feud. Apparently, the MacGuffin propelling much of this season's warfare was a much-discussed, but yet-to-surface sex tape starring Conrad and her former lover.

Jimmy Fallon's long-rumored takeover of NBC's Late Night is now officially going to happen and will be announced in the coming weeks, according to anonymously-sourced reports from Fox News, Variety, Hollywood Reporter and Reuters. Current Late Night host Conan O'Brien is expected to take over from Jay Leno next year following a six-month break, and Leno is being pushed out. On Saturday Night Live, Fallon was famous for fumbling his lines by cracking up, and was recently named one of the two least funny comedians in the country. He'll take some jeers when he starts, but the critics were brutally hard on O'Brien in his early days, as well. And Fallon's already practiced being a tough, take-no-guff talk show host, as his well-liked Barry Gibb character on SNL, shown in the video after the jump (complete with another insult to the dignity of Times columnist Thomas Friedman).

Judy Greer has been orbiting around stardom for the better part of the last 10 years. And although she's had a couple of delicious supporting turns over the years (13 Going On 30, Adaptation, Jawbreaker), she's never quite broken through into the leading lady category ... until now. Ashton Kutcher picked her to be the lead of his new ABC comedy, Miss Guided, and now the lovely and talented Miss Greer is getting her first taste of hitting the promotional circuit as a star. And guess what? She's eating it up. She was as giddy as a school girl during her appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman last night, but also managed to rein in her emotions enough to tell Dave a funny story about how she's still forced to endure some of the humilities that the Hollywood machine puts second fiddles through.

Dave Letterman has a long history of getting flirty with his guests. From Madonna to Drew Barrymore, from Julia Roberts to any one of the countless number of leggy supermodels he's talked to over the years, Diamond Dave has never been one to shy away from batting his proverbial lashes at his guests. Depending on his mood, this flirtatiousness generally takes shape in either a slew of complimentary bon mots or, when he's feeling aggressive, a subtle graze of the knee. But when Gossip Girl Blake Lively showed up on the set on Friday night proclaiming that Dave was one of her "childhood crushes", the sexual tension between the two was not only palpable, it approached the level of David Addison and Maddie Hayes.

· On last night's Late Show, Dave and Vince Vaughn hopped into the Career Wayback machine and revisited the time Vince nearly got his ass kicked by a steroid-enhanced Peter Billingsley. An after-school special classic!
· Amy Winehouse will miss the Grammys because she been denied a U.S. visa; the Embassy fears she might attempt to use her bloodstream to smuggle enough drugs into L.A. to kill everyone in the Staples Center. [rimshot]
· Wisely, John Mayer knows that all bloggers must be allowed no closer than 30 feet to him, even on supposedly safe cruise ships.
· Hey, unicorn! [via our favorite unicorn pusher]

Paris Hilton's last appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman was, in no uncertain terms, one of the greatest moments in U.S. television history, to go up there with the moon landing, the final episode of M*A*S*H, and the entire run of Joe Millionaire in the annals of essential road-markers tracking the rise, fall, and eventual obliteration of a once-promising colonial social experiment.

Sean Young's bravura, Julian Schnabel-taunting performance at Saturday night's tragically untelevised DGA Awards is now officially the stuff of Hollywood legend; not only was the incident immortalized on Variety's party-monitoring V-page today (a "spirited moment" of "tipsy heckling," giggles the trade paper!), but it was openly shared with millions of David Letterman's viewers Monday night by Big Brother host and Les Moonves trophy wife Julie Chen, who didn't require any arm-twisting to cough up the name of "the well-known actress" who caused the now-much-discussed disturbance, or to take a game stab at recreating the slurred outbursts that led to Young's ejection from the event.

Yes, we realize that critiquing picket-line chants is so early November '07, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus's recollection on last night's Late Show of her time marching with her WGA brethren transported us all the way back to those early moments of the strike, when each day brought tales of the new and exciting ways writers were communicating their Guild's message.

Sad news for the bear-chasers and drifter-fetishists who'd been so delighted by returning Late Show host David Letterman's recent facial hair growth: On tonight's show, Letterman will announce an on-air beard-shaving stunt scheduled for Monday that will restore his face to its smooth-as-Paul-Shaffer's-head, pre-strike state. Those who fear their newfound attraction to the comedian will fade with each tragic swipe of a barber's blade should make sure they set their TiVos to record tonight's program, lest they find themselves separated from the hirsute object of their late-night affection until CBS is ready to start rerunning these sure-to-be wildly popular "Letterbear" episodes. [NY Daily News]

· Overcoming the apparently mild inconvenience of putting on shows without their striking writers, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien still triumphed over fully staffed talk-show rivals David Letterman and Craig Ferguson in Wednesday night's Nielsen battle. In fairness to the WGA-approved programs, however, it should be noted that many viewers might have chosen to tune in to Leno out of irresistible curiosity about how unfunny the host would be on his own. [THR]
· Though the Golden Globes briefly harbored hope that the Writers Guild might give them a waiver for their rapidly approaching awards show, the WGA isn't going to cut them a break and still plans to picket. [Variety]

Though we've already awarded victory in last night's Return of Late Night TV talk-show wars to Conan O'Brien, whose downy Strike Beard simultaneously displayed solidarity with his absent writing staff and offered comfort to millions of fans anxious about how Hollywood's labor unrest affects the Masturbating Bear's ability to release the painful tension in his ursine nether-regions, we think it's important that everyone be provided with an opportunity to make up their own minds about whether the jokes scripted by Guild scribes were actually more successful than ones delivered by hosts forced to generate their own material. To that end, Gawker Media video operative Richard Blakeley whipped up this montage (click the above thumbnail to view) allowing you to compare their parallel efforts at entertaining America. Enjoy.

Sporting an intimidating beard meant to show the effects of his difficult, two-month-long, tragically scribe-deprived hibernation, David Letterman symbolically crossed a twirling line formed by his Eugene V. Debs Picket Dancers and returned to work, bolstered by the full services of his newly contracted Guild writers. We haven't seen Jay Leno's opening yet, but we're going to assume he won't be doing a self-effacing version of the picket-line bit, wary that the saboteurs who've previously feasted on a vulnerable Carson Daly might have infiltrated his dance troupe, ready to paddle him with "Shame on You, Jay!" signs for going back to work without his striking staff.

As nearly every article we've read to date on the possible impact of the writers strike has pointed out, the first victims of the walkout will be late-night talk shows; without the script lead-times enjoyed by sitcom and drama productions, their hosts will immediately be pushed in front of the cameras without material produced by their absentee writing staffs, forced to read from cue cards offering no more detailed commentary on the day's events than [NEXT THREE MINUTES: RIFF UNCOMFORTABLY ON HOW YOU HAVE NO ONE TO WRITE JOKES ABOUT WHATEVER IT WAS THAT BRITNEY SPEARS/GEORGE BUSH/HILLARY CLINTON DID TODAY.]

· After what he did to Paris Hilton the other night, we were expecting David Letterman to lead off his Alec Baldwin interview with, "So, you had a little trouble with some voicemail or something a few months ago, eh?" Instead, we got a story about a boat. But we suppose the Hilton segment earned Letterman a night off.
· Chuck Zito generously offers to referee the theoretical, $5 million grudge match between Pam Anderson exes Kid Rock and Tommy Lee, or failing that, just beat the shit out of them both.
· Metromix divides the town into LC and Heidi-friendly zones, helping fans of The Hills stay on turf where they'll feel safe.
· We always knew that tramp Chairy was going to wind up on the street. All Pee Wee's bitches do.
· Here's hoping the proprietor of the Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians blogspot doesn't give up before the premise is thoroughly exhausted. There are still some places to take it, even after hitting Bruce Jenner.

· Just for the proverbial shits n' giggles, here's another clip from Dr. Phil's Late Show appearance last night. Panties, or the lack thereof, are discussed.
· The LAT gets to know Hoboken Beach Diet Guy, with whom you're already probably pretty well acquainted by now.
· Leave Britney Alone Guy gets his Gallery of the Absurd moment. Also, his Howard Stern moment. And his ABC News moment.
· Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone might not become a huge hit in the UK.