Last week, MTV tested the limits of our Hills skepticism by staging a Jagermeister-sponsored intervention for Holly while the series' only talent, Jayde, gutted herself with broken alcohol bottles and pleaded for Brody's impossible affection. This week, producers gorged themselves on the bread and butter of its Hills franchise: awkward confrontation-filled parties and pseudo-breakups. Read about the winners of this week's Fake/Real Jackpot -- and get your Justin Bobby/Johnny Depp Cry Baby printable photo comparison -- after the jump!
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Performance artist James Franco will follow up his General Hospital arc as a monochromatic Port Charles stranger with a guest appearance on 30 Rock. In the episode, which begins production this week, Franco is lured into an agent-engineered fauxmance with Jenna (Jane Krakowski). While there is a 25 percent chance that the Milk actor will be nominated for a Guest Actor Emmy even if he is wheeled around Studio 6H unconscious in a Spider-Man mask, let's hope he has more scenery to chew than last week's guest star Betty White. [EW]
· After scrubbing a toilet on Oprah today and sharing her own OCD tip for airplane travel ("I always get a bottle of vodka and go into those nasty bathrooms and I wipe them down."), Kirstie Alley was granted a few minutes to plug her new A&E reality series. The ten half-hour episodes will document Alley's struggles to lose her post-Weight Watchers weight while raising teenagers.
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Here's your first look at James Franco as Franco, the role he's set to start playing (for personal, performance-art reasons) on long-running daytime drama General Hospital beginning Nov. 20th. Here's what we can deduce after several minutes of intense observation:
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Tonight, Kathy Griffin attempts to win over a new demographic with a cable stand-up act that incorporates Mexican blue collar humor and a ventriloquist dummy named BJ. Just kidding. Her 7th Bravo comedy special airs tonight with expected jabs at Jon Gosselin, Homecoming Princess Dakota Fanning and Michael Jackson.
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The main danger with turning the 1983 alien invasion miniseries V into a viable 2009 series is -- well -- doing it at all. V is a sci-fi monolith, a creepy bacchanal of ooze, lizard-people, and enough camp to make it all palatable. Its hair-raising birthing scene still competes with Alien for most unforgettable womb excretion ever. That said, it also belongs in 1983, when melodrama reigned and Muppet Workshop creations served as monsters in climactic scenes. ABC's new revamp compensates by taking V out of the puppet show and into the big-budget world of cityscapes, Scott Wolf, and special effects -- all the while gaining a self-seriousness that feels just as invasive as the "Visitors" themselves.
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One of the most important college goals is to craft the perfect schedule -- a delicate balance between ballbusting Organic Chemistry labs and the 90-minute nap found in any course containing "Postmodern," "Literary" or "Criticism" in its title. From the lowliest junior college to the corridors of the Ivy League, course selection can make or break a semester. With its endowment in a freefall, Harvard has decided to throw a Hail Mary in that direction by offering a new Sociology course with HBO's The Wire as its central text. For all the students wait-listed by the big H or without the proper familial connections to get over the Longfellow Bridge, you can feel content knowing that students in Cambridge are doing exactly what you do every Saturday: Rolling up a gram of mid-grade, watching David Simon's magnum opus and eventually making a Taco Bell run. Only those Crimson losers have to take notes.
But Harvard isn't the first school making use of the idiot box in the classroom. Your proof arrives in today's Movieline Nine.
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James Belushi is 55 this year, a scary number for any longtime comic actor. Aside from whimpering when the Sea-Bond commercials on Game Show Network come on and fearing the shoulder-dislocating capacity of the can-crusher in the garage, a 55-year-old comedian sometimes believes that starring in a television drama sounds like the right thing to do. Variety has it that the comic star of According to Jim is planning to play a defense attorney in a TV drama based on the life of lawyer and commentator Mickey Sherman. But does this comedian have the stalwart center -- nay, colon -- of our classic silly-to-serious TV legends?
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In the second major sponsor switch-off of the week, Stephen Colbert agreed to back the U.S. Speedskating team last night after their original sponsor, DSB Bank, folded. A heroic gesture for sure, commemorated by special guest Dan Jansen and executive director of U.S. Speedskating Bob Crowley, who signed papers on air. Despite the fanfare though, it's Colbert's fans -- and not the show -- who will be supporting the team. Now, if only he could volunteer members of the Colbert Nation to pay for a scripted drama on NBC. The bit in question comes about two minutes into the provided link. [Colbert Report]
On the eve of Edward Norton's By the People: The Election of Barack Obama's HBO premiere, Showtime rolls out Barry Levinson's Poliwood, a documentary examining the positive and negative effects that celebrities have on politics. The program revisits last year's Democratic and Republican national conventions to explore the public's take on movie stars' political outspokenness. The 90-minute film includes conversations with Ellen Burstyn, Susan Sarandon, Sting, Elvis Costello, Annette Bening, Tim Daly (who also produced the documentary) and many others.
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It's hard enough for some Americans to make sense of 30 Rock's specific cultural references (Ann Curry's pent-up rage, Lou Dobbs' immigration agenda, and Ann Coulter, to name just a few) so it's understandable that the charm of Tina Fey's banter-heavy sitcom could be lost in translation. But when network ZDFNeo reported that the ratings from 30 Rock's German debut last night were a big, fat zero, we couldn't help but question why Deutschland would turn its nose up at one of America's best sitcoms -- especially when Liz Lemon throws in the occasional German punch line. And then we remembered why.
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Against all odds and Diane Sawyer's bitter blinks, Rihanna will allegedly "tell all" on Thursday's episode of Good Morning America and on Friday's edition of 20/20 . In the meantime, let's bandy the finer journalistic points of this occasion: For instance, will Rihanna mockingly don a baby-blue sweater and bow-tie? Will she too make a misguided Shakespearean reference, claw at an ugly patch of brunette in Sawyer's hair, and exclaim, "Out, out, damn spot?" And lastly, will she dedicate her new single "Russian Roulette" to "all the ladies out there getting hunted like deer"? Preview after the jump.
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Jay Leno gave a deliciously passive-aggressive interview to Broadcasting & Cable today, and though the host purports not to be stung by criticism of his new show, he can still rattle off the most cutting comments from memory ("My favorite one is, someone on a blog said they hope I die of AIDS in one of my old cars"). Still, the most interesting portion of the interview is when Leno basically says that if someone would like to give him his 11:35 time slot back...well, it's not like he's going to ask for it, but if someone were to give it to him, he would be totally OK with that. Actually, more than OK. Actually, could someone offer it to him right now?
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The Mad Men moment we've been waiting for all season finally arrived Sunday night -- or make that "moments," plural, one big black cascade of gruesome American dramas. Which, with one week to go before the season finale, raises the question: Can things possibly get any worse for the inhabitants of television's bleakest series? Count on Matthew Weiner and crew to try their hardest. But first things first: Week 12! Bring a tissue.
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After garnering Comedy Central's biggest premiere ratings ever, the zany ventriloquism of The Jeff Dunham Show earned wooden numbers for its second episode. (His joke, not mine.) The show's low number (2.3 million viewers) on Thursday could owe itself to the World Series, but I'm prepared to make judgments based on the material alone. Where did Dunham's rib-tickling racism and rootin'-tootin' homophobia go wrong this week?
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