Network line-ups are bursting at the seams with detective dramas, set in almost every U.S. metropolis and centering around every imaginable form of crime fighter, from the hard-boiled FBI detective to the bored hipster to the hard-living Oklahoma City floozy/detective and supernaturally-assisted mothers. So just how do you engineer a new strain of detective drama when nearly every precinct and private eye persona has been explored? Allow Academy Award-winning actor George Clooney to show you.
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Movieline did all it could to brief Seth MacFarlane for his variety hour debut, but the Family Guy creator is (apparently) an insubordinate pupil. Microsoft announced it is pulling out of its exclusive sponsorship deal with MacFarlane's upcoming special Family Guy Presents: Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show, declaring that the program is not a "fit" with the brand. More bitchy quibbles from Microsoft after the jump!
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The Halloween season is an exciting time for fall television, especially when your favorite series sync up with the holiday. Sometimes shows culminate their own spooky traditions (How I Met Your Mother's 'Slutty Pumpkin,' Roseanne's homemade haunted houses) and other times, it's a chance for programs to invoke bizarre scenarios (My So-Called Life's school lock-in) that frame some of the weirdest episodes in special circumstance TV history. Tonight, Castle tries to spread the holiday fear by incorporating vampires and werewolves into one of ABC's best mystery cases yet.
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Bravo's Top Chef has become the network's reality-competition stronghold following the hasty departure of Project Runway, and now it produces spin-offs faster than the average network crime drama. Top Chef: Just Desserts, a competition for pastry chefs, will begin airing sometime in 2010. Padma Lakshmi's return as Catatonic Emcee remains to be seen, but I definitely prefer her over Top Chef Masters's Kelly Choi thanks to one of Lakshmi's fantastic, Quickfire-related accomplishments.
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It was Couples Week on Mad Men, an intimate array of men, women and the deep, dark, dog-food-advertising secrets that come between them. And if those weren't intense enough for you, there were family histories of psychiatry and assumed identities to help gird the tension as well. So why did it all seem so... bloodless?
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On Friday night, Jay Leno squandered a potentially fortuitous appearance by First Lady Michelle Obama to ask her about Halloween costumes, her iPod playlist (was this another corporate plug?) and the birthday party she threw for her dog. Wherever your entertainment preferences lie, rest assured that the first lady's chit chatty segment still boosted Leno's ratings 17%, out of the toilet in which his numbers triumphantly plunged last week. With 6.1 million viewers, The Jay Leno Show managed to beat out Fox's Dollhouse. [Hollywood Reporter]
In an attempt to become a parent-friendly, mall-brand version of AMC, the rerun-contingent TV Land network has given pilot orders to two original sitcoms: Hot in Cleveland, a project from Sean Hayes's production company about women from LA who crash-land in Cleveland and start their lives anew, and Retired at 35, about a man who quits life in New York to move in with his parents at a Florida retirement community. It's no surprise that both of these scenarios likely entail a new life devoted to regular TV Land viewing. More peculiar, however, is that TV Land still hasn't updated its most renewable classic as a reality series.
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With a bountiful production schedule in place that includes three recently wrapped features and roughly seven projects in development, no one expected Jennifer Aniston to join her Friends alums in venturing back to the small screen. Sure, maybe she would reprise that old lesbian bit on Courteney Cox's sexually charged Cougar Town or return to 30 Rock as Jack Donaghy's crazy, hat-making two-night stand, but develop her own talk show...on cable?
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Though ABC has been tight-lipped about when the final season of Lost will be premiering (refusing to get any more specific than "early 2010"), a hyperventilating Harvard student forced visiting producer Carlton Cuse to give up some of the goods this weekend. To calm the ailing Lost superfan, Cuse revealed that the show will return in mid-January, go off the air opposite the Winter Olympics, then resume, full speed ahead, until its series finale. [Arts at Harvard]
During World War II, Americans channeled their civilian energy into war bonds, scrap metal drives and USO volunteer efforts. Over fifty years later, our country is again in peril but we choose to take our minds off of combat with a different kind of distraction: gross-out television. In honor of this shift in wartime priorities and the upcoming Halloween holiday, Movieline has compiled some of the creepiest TV shows on basic cable today. While scanning through this article instead of reading about this weekend's Baghdad bombings, consider which is worse: knowing that pedophiles in the Southwest are pleasuring themselves to TLC's Toddlers & Tiaras or at this moment, a Discovery Health camera crew is staging a reenactment of an Arby's bathroom birth?
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At the age of 23, Jordan Reid had spent a year developing and co-starring in one of the most storied television pilots in recent history. The original It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode was shot guerrilla style in her apartment for an estimated $85 and picked up by FX. Reid starred as the first Sweet Dee, next to her boyfriend and Sunny creator Rob McElhenney, and friends Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day. A rare Hollywood success story -- until Reid broke up with McElhenney and she was promptly forced out of the series altogether.
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Placing The Jeff Dunham Show within Comedy Central's programming array is a challenge. Let's see: It combines Chappelle's Show's sketch format (We're doing OK so far), South Park's invocation of racism and homophobia -- minus that onus of irony, darn it!-- and the googly-eyed, happy-slappy contrivance of Mind of Mencia. So what do we have? Voila: a quagmire of petty laughs and offensive gags aimed at the desperately ignorant. You'll be relieved to find there is a niche for such obscure humor; The Jeff Dunham Show dragged in Comedy Central's highest premiere ratings ever.
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In 1998, Law & Order aired a pivotal episode in its police procedural oeuvre. Entitled Tabloid and based on Princess Diana's recent death, writers tweaked a few minor details of the international tragedy to stage an entire investigation around a fatal car crash caused by reckless gossip reporters. Since that groundbreaking "ripped from the headlines" episode, it has become a bit of a game to scan through each morning's paper and predict which slightly-altered-for-television pedophile strangling or Central Park dismemberment case your grandmother will be watching over cold coffee and jam cookies in a month. With this knowledge, that L&O regularly exploits high-profile headlines with a few minor changes to uphold the series prefacing declaration that "the story and characters are fictional", Movieline predicts the inevitable episodes harvested from the David Letterman and Balloon Boy scandals.
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Saved By the Bell alum Tiffani Thiessen co-stars in USA's latest crime series, which cribs Catch Me If You Can's story line. Matthew Bomer stars as an expert counterfeiter (and Thiessen's on-camera husband) hired by the FBI to track down con artists. The Today Show video circulating after this morning's host Jenna Wolf mispronounced Matt Bomer's last name, will only boost ratings.
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I wait every year for this Project Runway challenge, where the designers reveal their inspirations, admit this is their first time leaving Omaha, talk about how flowers are "interesting things to look at," and Michael Kors and an extra-special designer (this time, Irina) wonder simultaneously if they're the only living artists left on Earth. Pack your suitcase, page Carmen Sandiego, and get ready for globe-trotting antics featuring lessons from esteemed geography professor Carol Hannah.
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