• Sports Illustrated reports that two-time Super Bowl MVP Peyton Manning will celebrate his thirty-first birthday by hosting Saturday Night Live. Manning will be the fourth quarterback, the seventh football player, and the twenty-fifth sports figure in SNL’s thirty-two seasons to host the show. However, you should know that those stats are from Wikipedia, which includes such renowned athletes as Hulk Hogan and Tony Danza in their classification of “sports figures.” Manning’s episode airs Saturday, March 24th on NBC.
  • The gal who talked to God, Joan of Arcadia’s Amber Tamblyn, is returning to the realm of the supernatural – except this time, she’ll be battling the forces of the undead. The Hollywood Reporter reported Friday that the actress – who I have a huge crush on — will star in CBS’s zombie comedic-drama Babylon Fields. Tamblyn plays a young woman who killed her abusive father…but when the dead start rising from their graves, Daddy comes home! Dun dun dun! Useless trivia alert: Should Babylon Fields and Gossip Girl get picked up and if Alexis Bledel decides to stay on for another season of Gilmore Girls, all four members of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Tamblyn, Bledel, Gossip’s Blake Lively, and Ugly Betty’s America Ferarra) will each have their own show on four rival networks. That should do wonders for their friendship.
  • On Monday, the THUD News Roundup reported that grumpy Bruce McGill joined the cast of Area 52, NBC’s comedy pilot about a secret military installation. Now, Zap2it is reporting that Paul Reubens, coming off a much-buzzed about appearance on NBC’s 30 Rock, has joined the cast. I don’t know how it happened, but Area 52 is becoming a project to look for – along with the great Reubens and McGill, it stars Jane Lynch (always funny) and Matthew Lillard (sometimes funny).
  • ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money is another pilot to watch – while THUD’s previously reported on the awesome Peter Krause and the pixyish Samaire Armstrong joining the cast, the rich-people drama just got a helluva lot more distinguished. Donald “Pa Bauer” Sutherland and Jill “Syd Field’s Go-To-Actress in Screenplay” Clayburgh have signed to play the head of the Darlings, a rich and powerful family represented by Krause’s idealistic attorney. The family’s named the Darlings, huh? I wonder if that means Sutherland will play a banker and Clayburgh will play a suffragette. (R.I.P. David Tomlinson.)
  • Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for West Side Story (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), has joined the cast of the untitled CBS pilot about three generations of a Latin American family working in the South Florida rum business. Moreno will play the matriarch and mother to Jimmy Smits’s character, who is headlining the series.  Moreno’s last appearance on series television was as the awesome Sister Pete on Oz, so I’m looking forward to this one a little more than I was before. (She’s also one of nine people in history to have won all four major performing arts awards in competition – Oscar, Primetime Emmy, Tony, and Grammy.)
  • In addition to confirming Mary-Louise Parker and Jeffrey Dean Morgan have not broken up (which I should be pissed about, but I’m not), People magazine reported Friday that Cliff Clavin has joined the cast of Dancing with the Stars. Actor John Ratzenberger will replace Vincent Pastore on the hit ABC reality show, which begins March 19th. Think about this: Ratzenberger has been in every Pixar film so far. Pixar is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC, which airs Dancing with the Stars. Watch for the CGI, my fellow conspiracy theorists! Watch for the CGI.