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The sci-fi series that never said die is rising from the Earth once more.

Comedian Patton Oswalt will write ‘Serenity: Float Out,’ a comic book that picks up where the film ‘Serenity’ left off, with the death of the ship’s pilot, Wash.

Oswalt said the new chapter of the ‘Firefly’ saga features the remaining crew christening a new ship, hence the “float out,” and recalling stories of Wash in action.

“We’re basically seeing what could be the start of a new adventure,” Oswalt told MTV.

MTV has also released an image of the comic’s new cover art featuring Wash. The comic from Dark Horse Comics will hit stands on June 2.

Filed under: Other Sci-Fi/Supernatural Shows, Reality-Free

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If you found the fourth season of HBO’s polygamist drama ‘Big Love’ a little heavy on the soapy side, you’re not alone. The show’s creators saw the same thing.

Even though the show’s creators Will Scheffer and Mark V. Olsen credited themselves for creating a challenging season for the show’s main character Bill Henrickson, they also see the need for some tweaking for their audience.

“We think the show has been the richer for having such a large ensemble,” said Scheffer, “but we also feel we’re at a breaking point. We’ve got to pare it down and refocus.”

Do you agree with Scheffer’s assumptions about the fourth season?

[via TV Tattle]

Filed under: Other Drama Shows, Reality-Free

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Does NBC have something to worry about now that Leno is back in the ‘Tonight Show’ chair or is this just a case of settling the new guy in … uh, again?

Dave Letterman’s ‘Late Show’ scored a 1.3 in the demo ratings while Jay Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’ scored a 1.1 on Monday.

What’s to blame? It’s the lead-in’s fault. CBS had the highest prime time lead-in while NBC finished a distant fourth or as Conan O’Brien would call it, “payback.”

Can Leno pull things around or is this a sign of things to come?

Filed under: Late Night, Ratings, Reality-Free, Jay Leno

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It was a communal, sarcastic and distinctly anti-flyover love fest when Seth MacFarlane visited the 2010 PaleyFest Tuesday.

As expected, the event had more of a Comic Con feel to it then the normally more reserved Paley atmosphere. Obsessed fans of ‘Family Guy,’ ‘American Dad’ and ‘The Cleveland Show’ (or fans of all three when you consider they’re all kind of the same show) packed into the lavish Saban Theatre to watch MacFarlane sip a little booze, take a few potshots and soak up the adulation.

MacFarlane was joined by Seth Green, Alex Borstein, Dan Palladino, Steve Marmel, Rich Appel, Mike Barker, Danny Smith and Kara Vallow. But MacFarlane held court as the center of attention.

Unfortunately, the presence of Bill Maher (someone who never really was that funny) as host of an event dedicated to MacFarlane (one of the industry’s most influential and powerful comedic minds) steered the agenda away from discussing the shows’ collective content and future to a more sociopolitical agenda.

Continue reading MacFarlane Takes on the Enemies of ‘Family Guy’ – PaleyFest Report

Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, Programming, Animation, Celebrities, Reality-Free

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The other day on Twitter, Mystery Team director Dan Eckman pointed out that we’ve actually known who Jacob on Lost is all along: He is the guy who dunks The Dude’s head in toilet at the beginning of The Big Lebowski (well, the actor Mark Pellegrino who plays Jacob… but I am under the assumption that all TV shows and movies are real life).

This may not be new information to some, but with recent events unfolding on Lost, it explains why Jacob may actually, in fact, just be a huge a-hole.

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Bill Gates and Bill Clinton testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the United State’s role in improving global health. From these photos, though, it looked like Bill Gates was just happy to be hanging out with coolest MF’er in the world:

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If you’ve never seen the documentary The King of Kong, you’re missing the greatest sports movie ever in all of history. Go rent it. Otherwise this means nothing to you and you’ll never realize how empty your life was before this movie came along. I WEEP for you, sir or madam. I weep.

If you have seen it, hold on to your butts. This story is today’s NY Daily News:

A Queens plastic surgeon has been crowned the king of Donkey Kong.

Dr. Hank Chien, 35, racked up a score of 1,061,700 on the classic arcade video game, smashing the old record by 10,000 points. Chien’s dazzling feat was confirmed by Twin Galaxies, the official score keeper of electronic games.

While it’s sad that hero teacher Steve Wiebe did not take down Billy goddam Mitchell again, it’s nice to have a new expansion team in this fight for the very soul of mankind. Because truthfully, we all know judgement day will come down to a single game of Donkey Kong between good and evil, and Billy Mitchell plays for team evil.

My hat is off to you, Dr. Hank Chien. Now go get laid, sir (but maybe don’t bring up the Donkey Kong thing beforehand).

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Ed. Note: To honor Corey Haim, we’ve invited friend and blogger Mark Graham to share his thoughts on the actor’s untimely passing. — M. Collins

Just because we all knew this day was coming doesn’t make the news any easier to swallow: Corey Haim, eighties teen icon and the Canadian half of the Two Coreys, finally lost the 20-plus year war he waged against substance abuse. Haim collapsed in his North Hollywood apartment in the early hours of this morning after suffering what appears to be an accidental, prescription pill overdose; coincidentally enough, he was living in the very same apartment building where Rick James died back in 2004. Sadly, he never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 2:15 a.m. this morning.

After working as a child actor in Canada, Haim rose to fame Stateside in 1986 when he starred as a bookshy, nerdy teen from the wrong side of the tracks in Lucas. While it initially looked as if Haim could carve out a niche for himself as a lovable geek in the Anthony Michael Hall vein, he promptly did a 180 and turned himself into a veritable teen dream love machine with roles in The Lost Boys and License To Drive. His successes paved the way for cocksure teens like Kirk Cameron (a fellow Canadian!) and Mark-Paul Gosselaar to gain a foothold in pop culture, but sadly, the fame went to his head and he got himself caught up in the excesses of the decade, snorting his way out of the rolodexes of everyone in Hollywood by the year 1990.

Haim went on to work fairly consistently throughout the nineties, but substance abuse issues prevented him from getting work in anything other than lowly regarded straight-to-VHS thrillers. After suffering from a drug-induced stroke in the early aughts, he staged a minor comeback in the last few years after reuniting with his partner-in-crime, Corey Feldman, for a reality show that aired for two seasons on A&E. However, during the course of that show, his erratic behavior and constant sweating were two telltale signs that even if he had stopped doing cocaine on the regular, he still had some significant issues with prescription drug abuse. To wit, the show was canceled after Feldman told producers that he would no longer do the show until his old friend Haim got “the help he truly needs.” Sadly, as the news of this morning teaches us, Haim was clearly never able to get that help.

Although history will almost certainly remember Haim as a cautionary tale, another in a long line of child actors who epitomized the dangers of growing up too fast in Hollywood, we prefer to remember him this way: sitting in a bubble bath, singing along with his not-quite-broken voice to Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s mournful “Ain’t Got No Home,” preparing to do battle with vampires. Rest in peace, Corey.

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Dan Hopper, your usual Lost-Recapper-In-Chief (that’s his actual title here) is away this week and plans to do a full recap of this episode when he returns. However, because this is the only site on the internet still talking about Lost, we wanted to give you guys a forum to sound off on last night’s episode. I won’t do a full recap, but I have some thoughts on my own about this one before the floor is yours. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, don’t read this. I don’t even know why you’ve made it this far to begin with. Stop ruining it for yourself. Go.

The show opened up with Dr. Sideways Teacher Benjamin Linus teaching a bunch of hopeless, not-special-in-least-but-maybe-one public school kids about Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile on the island of Elba. I’m assuming this is some kind of metaphor for SOMEONE on the show… but WHO? Probably that flight attendant who keeps popping up this season.

Teacher Ben is also just so sick of being stuck with detention duty and missing his History Club meetings thanks to that dickhead from Die Hard and Ghostbusters in his most challenging acting role yet: a dickhead principal. Maybe when all this Lost stuff wraps, we can get a Glee-esque spinoff featuring Dr. Sideways Teacher Ben mentoring Alex and a ragtag group of students through the world of extracurricular competitive history.

Back on the island, Jack and Richard Alpert play dynamite roulette in the Black Rock because Richard reveals he can’t die ever since Jacob let him borrow his “Invisible Touch” cassette once. Jack tries to kill himself for the second time this season (even Jack is sick of Jack), but as he predicted, the fuse blows out at the last second. I was really hoping the dynamite would just explode and the smoke would clear only to find Richard and Jack looking like Daffy Duck after he accidentally blows himself up. Then they do it six more times.

Meanwhile, Sideways Ben’s old dad (who we all already know as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite… I’ll get back to this) says he wishes Ben could have gotten his PhD in high school detention. However, they bailed too early on the Dharma Initiative, which apparently still exists in Sidewaystown, USA. See, you can take Lost out of the Dharma Initiative, but you can’t take the Dharma Initiative out of Lost… or something.

So wait… we have Napoleon, dynamite, and Uncle Rico. Coincidence, or was this entire episode a veiled allusion to that offbeat comedy from 2004… THE SAME YEAR OCEANIC FLIGHT CRASHED! Oh man, I’m on to something here. I just figured out all of Lost. I don’t even need to watch the rest of the season. I got it all.

Also, Miles got himself PAID, son.

I’ll leave the rest up to you. Your thoughts on Episode 7 of this increasingly awesome season? Go:

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The fine folks at Mattel have announced that they will be releasing a special Mad Men inspired line of Barbie dolls, including Don and Betty Draper, the silverest of foxes Roger Sterling, and Joan Holloway, who, from the looks of it, received one of Mattel’s trademarked debreastifications.

But the truest of Mad Men fans must wonder… where are the dolls of our most beloved characters? How are we supposed to reenact Sal’s famous bellhop scene without the help of a beefy Salvatore Romano action figure? And what about Pete Campbell? Who’s going to inappropriately touch the rest of our dolls without a smarmy-faced plastic Pete? We need at least 5 more Mad Men dolls to be able to live out our most sordid of Dark-Helmet-like fantasies.

Doll disappointments aside, we obviously adore these dolls. Though isn’t it telling that a KEN DOLL version of Don Draper is somehow still less handsome than the actual living man, Jon Hamm? No flesh-colored plastic crotch nubbin is going to keep this doll away from the bevvy of dolls flinging themselves at his feet. If you see Skipper’s convertible parked outside of the Draper home, don’t act all shocked and sh*t.

Check out The Fab Life’s hilarious animated GIFs of these Mad Men dolls in real life situations! Or, in layman’s terms, getting wasted.

‘Mad Men’ Dolls in a Barbie World, but the Cocktails Must Stay Behind — NY Times

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