
Whoops! Auto-play. After the jump, feel free to witnesseth the Lord Our God Morgan Freeman taking a nap on the teevee. -Eds
Every day, someone tells me, "Wm.™ Steven Hump-Me? You got it EEEEEEEASY. All you do is sit around on your spectacular honey-baked ham and watch TV! I call that EEEEEEEASY." Well, it's not so EEEEEEEASY! I thought this TV-criticizing gig would be the EEEEEEEASiest job in the world—until I discovered there's a considerable amount of typing involved! As it turns out, the pearls of wisdom shooting from my mouth don't automatically land on the page—unless, we're talking about my other "pearls of wisdom." I actually have to type them or hire an intern to type them for me. Not easy when all I have to offer for payment are "pearls of wisdom." (I'll let you guess which "pearls" I'm talking about.)
Typing is especially a "p" in the "a" when it comes to television stuff. For example, the ABC show starring Sarah Chalke called How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life). That took me, like, 10 minutes to type! And I had to look up how to spell Sarah Chalke's name! Fuck YOU, Sarah Chalke! And fuck How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life), too!
HOWEVER! Since How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life)—
UGGNNHHH!—just got canceled, I should be happy I never have to type How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life) again, right? Well, I'M NOT. Because just after ABC said it canceled How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life), it announced it's picking up Joss Whedon's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.—which just took me 20 minutes to type! Not only did I have to look up Joss Whedon's name (Fuck YOU, Joss Whedon and your hard-to-spell "special snowflake" name!), but the constant CAP LETTER PERIOD CAP LETTER PERIOD CAP LETTER PERIOD DRIVES ME INSAAAAAAAANE!! (Fuck YOU, too, M*A*S*H!)
And recent days gave me a good but sad one, as this past Friday, Alan O'Day, the songwriter who created "Angie Baby" (as well as the #1 hit "Undercover Angel" and the hilariously titled album Caress Me Pretty Music) passed away at age 72. Here's the cartoon video that was made of his career-defining song, which was broadcast on The Sonny and Cher Show. Also, today is Cher's birthday. Anyway, please enjoy the cartoon "Angie Baby." (And if you need more Angie, don't miss this great live performance and this unnerving computer animation.)
RIP, Alan O'Day.
This morning, our pal Humpy told us about the seven trailers for upcoming new Fox shows. Just about all of those trailers are terrible. The only one that personally interests me, Almost Human, is basically Alien Nation with robots. But two of the trailers are exceptionally bad. Here's fish-out-of-water supernatural fairy tale cop show Sleepy Hollow:
And here's the Seth MacFarlane-produced white-dudes-behaving-badly sitcom Dads:
They're both so bad, in such different ways, that I can't tell which is worse. Can you?
After 8 years, SNL regular Bill Hader—best known perhaps as the heeeeeelarious Stefon—is leaving the show. Fine, but don't take Stefon with you!
Adult Swim is returning with another Greatest Event in Television History (last year's was an exact recreation of the opening credits of Simon & Simon, starring Adam Scott and Jon Hamm), this time Scott and Parks & Rec co-star Amy Poehler will recreate the classic romantic detective series Hart to Hart! (This "greatest event" will surely be the "greatest event" ever!)
In Parks & Rec related news... here's "Tron Swanson."
Popwatch asks the question, "Who should replace Seth Meyers at the SNL "Weekend Update" desk?" They say John Mulaney—who is ohhhhhhhkay, but I say, Anthony Jeselnek! WHAT DO YOU SAY?
R.I.P. famed TV psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers—dead at age 85.
Ordinarily annoyingly nice comedian Wayne Brady threatens to "beat Bill Maher's ass in public." Not so nice now!
And finally, Fox releases a whopping SEVEN new trailers for their fall shows, most notably Sleepy Hollow, J.J. Abrams robot cop show Almost Human, and Andy Samberg's police comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine—which I wish was funnier! BE MORE FUNNIER.
As promised/warned, here is the first official teaser/trailer for the most awesome, yet annoying to type, show of the fall season Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And it features every fanboy's current fave, Coulson. And his car! And somebody punching somebody else in the face with fire, I think? I dunno. Life moves fast when you're with the annoying to type Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D! (That's why you should also read io9's report on "Every single clue hidden inside the Agents of SHIELD trailer!")
Look, I'm not watching this thing. I want to go into the fourth season of Arrested Development completely fresh, and I don't know why anyone would want some of the jokes telegraphed in advance. But if you want to see it, here it is:
In which you find out what Jon Stewart would do if someone served him frosting on another man's dick.
Get More:
Watch RuPaul's Drag Race Full Episodes, RuPaul, Logo TV
Now all I want to do is go watch Death Becomes Her for millionth time. ("Could you just not breathe?")
Anyway, to read about the hometown reaction to this news last night at Julia's, click here.
I'm a huge Mr. Rogers fan, and I have high hopes for this project:
The sweater wearing children’s TV icon Fred Rogers is the subject of A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, an Alexis Jolly spec script that has sold to Justin Nappi and Kevin Turen’s Treehouse Pictures.
The commenters at Deadline are calling for Steve Carell, Paul Reubens, Michael Keaton, Ty Burrell, Jim Parsons, or Steve Coogan to star as Fred Rogers. Personally, I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt would be perfect for it; he's got a kind of gentle, Buddha thing going on with his smile that seems more Mr. Rogers-y than any of those other candidates.
Last Tuesday's Drag Race post here on Slog mentioned in a celebratory headline that Jinkx Monsoon made it into the top three, and commenters were very, very not happy. So... so as not to spoil anyone's alerts, I'm not saying nada until after the jump. No, I am saying nada. Anyway, please do go down into the jump so we can talk about whatever it was that may or may not have happened last night! Allegedly! Also, your urgent attention is needed! I will explain.
Plus! Jinkx Monsoon's alter-ego Jerick Hoffer was at Julia's last night, interviewed by BenDeLaCreme, and many hilarious and insightful things were said, the best of which are after the jump. See you down there.

[Sniff, sniff] WHOO! Let's get this thing STARTED! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Cocaine: One Man's Seduction is the 1983 made-for-TV movie about—surprise!—a man who becomes seduced by cocaine, which proves to be a terrible mistress, forcing him to jump around all sweaty and yell at his wife. This man is played by Dennis Weaver, an actor who appeared on Gunsmoke (which I never watched) and also released a couple country-and-western albums (which I never heard). Nevertheless, I now love him, for he is great in this film. In the spaces between his mustache and non-whitened teeth and three-piece suit, the whole of 1983 is evoked.
Weaver's soon-to-be-yelled-at wife is played by Karen Grassle, best known as Ma on Little House on the Prairie, and the couple's son Buddy is played by James Spader, in a rare non-asshole teen role.
The film starts proving its awesomeness within seconds, as the opening credits roll over upsetting pencil sketches of an ever-more-distraught Dennis Weaver. We're then plunged into Dennis Weaver's home life—a perfect TV movie of cheerful good mornings and glasses of orange juice sipped hurriedly before running out the door. But all is not well in Dennis Weaver's professional life. Long the top seller at his real estate agency, he's since plummeted to seventh, and when he's shut out of a major agency expansion, he angrily realizes he needs to up his game if he's going to stay relevant in the real-estate world. During an impromptu work party, a fun-loving lady offers him some cocaine, but he refuses....
Here is the INSANELY NSFW trailer for Eli Roth's upcoming Netflix original TV series* Hemlock Grove. Just in case you are acronym-illiterate, let me just repeat: This is not safe for work.
What do you think?
* And if you don't have Netflix, you should bear in mind that House of Cards, the first Netflix-original series, is already coming out on DVD this June, so you shouldn't feel too left out. You'll be able to get all this stuff from your local video store soon enough.

From the artsy heights of Holy Motors we plunge back down into the world of schlocky made-for-TV movies with Cocaine: One Man's Seduction, the 1983 TV drama about cocaine and how it seduces one man (who happens to be a maritally-troubled real estate agent played by Dennis Weaver).
Watch Cocaine: One Man's Seduction any time you want on Netflix Streaming—or rent the DVD from Scarecrow!—and we'll discuss it here on Slog next Wednesday starting at noon.
Fox is threatening to pull its broadcast network off the airwaves if the courts or lawmakers don't do something about Aereo, a startup that provides local over-the-air (OTA) channels to customers via the Internet. Aereo, which so far serves only the New York City market, has managed to legally evade paying the retransmission fees local stations normally charge cable companies, by providing each customer their own tiny, dime-sized antenna in a centrally located antenna farm. Clever. The service also provides customers with cloud-based DVR functionality.
I suppose Fox is free to do whatever they want to do with their network, but honestly, what a bunch of douchebags. Somebody should remind them that they get to use these airwaves—valuable broadcast spectrum—for free. FOR FREE. If they can't make a viable business out of this enormous public subsidy, then I say we should just auction off their TV spectrum to the highest bidder.
Rupert Murdoch fancies himself a champion of the free market—so much so that he has attacked taxpayer subsidized libraries and public broadcasting for providing unfair competition to hardworking capitalists like himself. Yet the minute his business model gets bumped by a fellow capitalist, he goes running to the government. Again, what a douchebag.
(Also, is there any other industry whose starting point is to treat all their customers like they are thieves?)
The Verge just published a great scoop about Microsoft's next Xbox plans:
Microsoft is investing in TV in a big way with its next Xbox console as part of a fight for the living room. Multiple sources familiar with the company's Xbox plans have revealed to The Verge that Microsoft will introduce a feature that lets its next-generation console take over a TV and set-top box in a similar way to Google TV. We understand that the next Xbox will require an online connection to use the entertainment services, allowing them to be always-on for streaming and access to TV signals.
If it's true, this is a pretty ballsy move on Microsoft's part. Tech companies have been trying to find ways into consumers' television sets for years now, but none of the more grandiose plans, like Google TV, have yet succeeded. Unless there's an easy way to opt out of this television OS, I'm imagining that some consumers might opt out of the Xbox entirely. And then there's the fact that the recent Sim City debacle has proven that consumers aren't happy about products that require them to be online to play games. Meanwhile, other buyers will be pissed to discover that you still need a cable subscriptions to watch cable TV; the most giddy tech TV ideas—like Apple's much-speculated-about-but-never-materialized iTV, or Intel's upcoming project—involve cable replacements. It'll be interesting to see how this thing lands; it'll either be a crazy success or a crazy failure.
Alex Maidy at JoBlo.com says that the creators of Breaking Bad might be working on a Breaking Bad spinoff:
Saul Goodman, the sleazy lawyer played by Bob Odenkirk, may be getting his own show according to Deadline. The potential series would apparently be a comedy of either the half hour or full hour variety. All signs point to no studio audience. The show is in the very early stages but would like be produced by BREAKING BAD's Gilligan and the writer who created the character of Saul Goodman, Peter Gould.
On the one hand, Bob Odenkirk is amazing as Saul Goodman. On the other hand, one of the things I've always loved about Breaking Bad is the fact that it feels self-contained. A spinoff series could seriously dilute the novelistic feeling of the original show.
HBO has been killing it lately—with of course Game of Thrones, Veep, the upcoming Liberace biopic [WATCH THAT TRAILER!!!] and now a new comedy series from Christopher Guest called Family Tree, starring Chris Dowd and every single person from every Christopher Guest movie ever. It debuts Sun May 12 at 10:30 pm and it looks very funny. WATCH THAT TRAILER!!!
As you may have read, while I totally support the Veronica Mars movie, there was no way I was going to support the Kickstarter—for reasons I have already discussed. HOWEVER! This morning I learned I am a HORSE'S ASS—because I had no idea that contributors who gave $25 or more to the Kickstarter would receive an awesome promotional Veronica Mars T-shirt! Here it is, modeled by Logan Echolls himself, Jason Dohring.
SQUEEEEEE! And goddammit!! I'm a horse's ass. There's another almost as cool shirt, here.
There's been speculation for some time, but it's finally official:
After months of speculation, a slew of news stories, a ton of late-night jokes and a Jay Leno-Jimmy Fallon duet, NBC has set a date for Leno’s departure from The Tonight Show and officially anointed Fallon as the new host of the venerable late-night franchise. Leno will depart The Tonight Show in spring 2014 after 22 years, and he will be replaced by Fallon. The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon will be based in New York, where the show originated, and will be set at the 30 Rock studio that now houses Fallon’s Late Night, which is undergoing renovation that is slated to be completed in 2014 in time for the re-launch of The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon will be executive produced by Lorne Michaels, marking the first time the Saturday Night Live and Late Night executive producer has been in charge of NBC’s flagship late-night show.
The change will happen after the Winter Olympics in early 2014. Leno will go back to doing a traveling standup show in front of prescription drug-addled old Republicans until he finally turns to dust and blows away three hundred years hence. Leno agreed to this deal, which means he basically destroyed Conan O'Brien's career out of spite a couple years back. In a recent Slog poll about this transition, we successfully determined that Slog doesn't really give much of a shit either way.
Nic Healey of CNET reports that Game of Thrones is now the most torrented TV show in the world:
Within hours of airing, episode one of season three had smashed the previous swarm record (the total number of seeders and leechers), which had been held by the season three premiere of Heroes.
According to TorrentFreak, 163,088 people were sharing one single torrent of the Game of Thrones episode, just under 20,000 more than the Heroes record. By the next day, 1 April, conservative estimates of the number of seeded torrents suggested that the episode had been downloaded at least 1 million times.
I know that not all those people would pay to stream Game of Thrones, but I bet a significant portion of them would. And I'm not one of those people who thinks that every bit of media has to be available to every consumer at every moment on every platform—releasing movies exclusively in theaters first is a good way to make a movie into an event, for example—but I do think that television shows have traditionally been most successful when large groups of people are watching them at the same time. It would work in HBO's favor if they made Game of Thrones available; clearly, a large number of people consider it to be event television, and they're not willing to wait for the DVD release.
(Also: Is anyone else shocked to learn that the first episode of season three of Heroes was still the record holder for total number of seeders and leechers at the beginning of 2013? Also also: Is anyone else shocked to learn that there was a third season of Heroes?)
Hey, everyone. Fuck-up time. In today's Stranger Suggest, I recommend going to Julia's on Broadway to watch Jinkx Monsoon watching herself on RuPaul's Drag Race. This weekly viewing party is hosted by BenDeLaCreme, who spends commercial breaks asking Jinkx hilarious and gossipy questions. I've been before and it's fun and you should go. But! You should know that, if you go tonight, Jinkx Monsoon will not be there, alas, as she is in Chicago this week.
Should you still go? Absolutely. BenDeLaCreme will be there, hosting and performing and being hilarious and looking great, and an extra-special guest drag queen will be there too: Major Scales, the drag persona of Richard Andriessen. As you know if you are in the know, Major Scales and Jinkx Monsoon are real-life roommates, so expect some really juicy gossip about dishes and laundry and who takes longer showers. According to a source, Julia's is working on getting the technology to work to Skype Jinkx into the viewing party tonight, but that is not guaranteed.
May I recommend one more time to get there early? Get there early. It gets crowded fast.
As you know, my regular Walking Dead and Girls recap went all ker-fuckle when Girls ended their season two weeks early. So last week I paired the Dead with a recap of an old episode of Boy Meets World (which was great) and this week I'm pairing it with an old episode of my second favorite sitcom ever, Blossom! So hit the jump for all the spoilers you could ever want about last night's season finale of The Walking Dead... and some Blossom, too! LET'S START CHITTY-CHATTING!


Following the so-bad-it's-good TV movie Someone I Touched and the so-fascinating-you'll-ignore-the-crappier-parts documentary The Imposter, the third installment of the Slog Netflix Streaming Club draws from the service's vast collection of television programs—specifically, the legendarily brilliant and still somehow underrated series Freaks & Geeks, of which we will be discussing episode four: "Kim Kelly Is My Friend."
Full disclosure: I love "Kim Kelly Is My Friend" so much I could die. Others have different favorite Freaks and Geeks episodes, but for me, "Kim Kelly Is My Friend" is the series' apex, capturing so much that's true (and rarely presented on TV) about high-school life. (The minute-by-minute navigation of horror! The never-ending status play! The pain-relieving properties of treating someone else like shit!)
The basic plot of the episode: After being repeatedly treated like shit by Kim "queen of the cool kids" Kelly, Lindsay finds herself drawn into a day-long, high-drama friendship with Kim. Meanwhile, Lindsay's little brother Sam is navigating his own trouble with Kim Kelly, who's been bullying him at school, along with her bad-girl friend Karen Scarfoli. The stories overlap as Kim storms the Weir household, bringing a tornado of drama with her.
But Freaks & Geeks is all about the tiny brilliant moments that add up to brilliant episodes, and here's a list of the tiny moments that mean the most to me:
* Kim's instinctive shit-stirring: "Hey Karen, was this guy trying to break into your locker?"
* Bill's genuine alarm and concern about the "PYGMY GEEK" graffiti on Sam's locker. (Bill is a great friend.)
* Karen Scarfoli's "What happened to my artwork? I spent a lot of time on that!" (And her Journey tour jersey.)
* The intensity of the escape scene from Kim Kelly's house, with Linda Cardellini's Lindsay giving a horror-movie-worthy performance (for a minute or so).
*The nightmare (lived by Sam) of having your school bully storm into your bedroom and refuse to leave.
But the episode belongs to actor Busy Phillips and scriptwriter Mike White, who make Kim Kelly the best realized cool girl/bad girl in TV history—lashing out in all directions (but hitting all the little points of her emotional tornados precisely), recoiling at the slightest hint of resistance, sniffing like a wounded animal at the Weirs' dinner table. And the glimpse we get of her home life makes it all make horrifying sense. It's masterful, right down to Kim's final sashay away, her glossy blonde hair cascading perfectly down the back on her baby-blue ski jacket.
Please continue the discussion in the comments.