• House lost me this season with the weak-ass way they ended out of the David Morse storyline, which took months of pressure, tension (“Good thing you failed to become a mom, because you suck at it!” never gets old) and the possibility of real change for Greg House and restored the status quo with a few last-minute revelations. The show continues to do extremely well in the ratings, and today, Fox picked up the Hugh Laurie medical drama for a fourth season. Also receiving an early pickup was the forensic anthropologist show Bones, which will start its third season this fall.
  • Nip/Tuck creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy will be sticking around for a fifth season of the hit plastic surgery drama, reports Variety.com. The deal, which allows Murphy to pursue other projects for the Fox networks, pays the big-eared writer an annual salary of around four million dollars. Murphy will start prepping Nip/Tuck’s fifth season immediately, which will see the series move from Miami to Los Angeles. Nip/Tuck is one of those shows that I tried watching on DVD, but I found it too glossy and nasty even for me, but I hear so many good things repeatedly that I ought to give it a second shot one of these days.
  • In our recent roundup of upcoming pilots, THUD covered K-Ville, the FOX buddy-cop show set in a post-Katrina New Orleans. TV.com reported recently that the show has cast its two leads – Cole “Bo Laramie” Hauser and Anthony “Antwon Mitchell” Anderson. Anderson appears to be playing the “good cop,” as an idealistic policeman who believes New Orleans can recover. There’s no word as to whether that makes Hauser the “bad cop.” I like both these guys, and they’ve both made careers out of roles that didn’t really allow them to show off their skills. From time to time, though, they’d get a chance to shine – and I hope that K-Ville lets them show what they’ve got.
  • I pity the kids who would watch a Robert Halmi adaptation of a literary classic like Gulliver’s Travels or The Odyssey instead of reading the book for school. See, Halmi’s notorious for adding in elements to his adaptations or changing things wholesale for the sake of “family entertainment,” and the results are frequently bad, and often colossal failures when it comes to sweeps. I don’t know how this guy is still getting work, but he is, because the adorable and charming Zooey Deschanel is playing the lead in Tin Man, Halmi’s science fiction retelling of The Wizard of Oz. Deschanel will play DG, a woman who finds herself transported into the “Outer Zone” (see what they did there?), a world of wonder that is also full of dark magic. Alan Cumming plays the Scarecrow-like character, which is actually a pretty clever bit of casting. Tin Man starts shooting next month in Vancouver, and will premiere as the Sci Fi Channel’s winter event in December 2007. 
  • One of the most entertaining things about the Law & Order multiverse is not if they’ll rip a big celebrity scandal from the headlines, but how they’ll change the names to protect the innocent. Highlights have included Gary Busey as Fake Robert Blake, Elliot Stabler Vs. Michael Jackson, toy kingpin, Norman Reedus as Fake Tom Cruise, and, most recently, Chevy Chase as Fake Mel Gibson. Now, Bobby Cannavale, of The Station Agent and the upcoming M.O.N.Y. will join their ranks when he plays Fake O.J. Simpson in an upcoming episode based on the recent Judith Regan publishing scandal. The episode doesn’t have an airdate yet, but deals with the murder of a female publisher who is murdered after she backs out of a book written by a former baseball star (Cannavale) acquitted of murdering his wife. (This item also comes from the New York Post’s Page Six, but given Wolf’s M.O. and shamelessness in the past, it seems like one of those items you can actually believe.)
  • It turns out that story THUD ran about the possibility of Ben & Jerry’s releasing a Stephen Colbert themed ice cream wasn’t an example of our liberal bias after all. The Vermont ice-cream company announced the new flavor, “Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream”, vanilla with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel, on Wednesday, calling it “the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth.” Colbert’s share of the proceeds will go to a charity which will then distribute the money to various causes. It’s no Dublin Mudslide, but that sounds pretty damn tasty.