On last night's Late Show, David Letterman invited shouty self-help personality Dr. Phil to speak truth to celebutard power in the wake of the latest Britney Spears meltdown, hoping that the unvarnished words of Oprah's Favorite Tough-Love-Providing Thing might help Spears and her panty-eschewing peers get their collective acts together. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Phil will countenance no talk about alcohol or drugs' role as the moral lubricant in desperate starlets' decisions to share their virtue with the public; these coddled fame-whores, argues the good fake-doctor, know exactly how much vagina they're going to flash before a single cocktail is poured or rail is blown.

So overcrowded is the summer movie marketplace that the only way to distinguish one's upcoming blockbuster product from the blowing-shit-up competition is to hit the talk show circuit and recreate some of the fun that awaits fickle moviegoers upon their next trip to the multiplex.

Late last night, all of America came to a standstill as Lindsay Lohan turned up on Letterman to help promote Georgia Rule (we'll assume it was a good faith effort to make up some of the time she missed due to "exhaustion" and "immaturity"), hoping that the perpetually troubled starlet might reveal what's actually going on in those blurry News of the World bathroom stall photos.

You can see bits and pieces of this all over the place today, but here's the whole enchilada — Michael Richards appearing via satellite on The Late Show with David Letterman last night, during a scheduled appearance by his pal Jerry Seinfeld. Richards apologizes for his on-stage racist tirade last week, and while he appears totally sincere and contrite, the whole thing comes loaded with enough squirmy discomfort to make Andy Kaufman's ghost rise up and applaud. Stop laughing!