We’re turning into the unofficial Doogie Howser fan blog here at The Sly. But it’s all good. I think people could afford to have more Doogie in their lives. So now that Dr. Horrible has ended and the numbers are being crunched as to the business side of things, which Joss himself seems to concur, what’s doing with The Doog?

Well, glad you asked. Or rather we asked. A while back we mentioned that Feist would be adding some hipster indie cred to Sesame Street on the 39th season premiere. And guess who’s going to be there with her? That’s right. It’s the Doogster*.

He’ll be playing a shoe fairy. “Not the shoe fairy – the fairy shoe person. It’s quite a different connotation. I was asked by Sesame Street to be a part of a song and I just leapt at the opportunity. Jim Henson was the only person I ever wrote a fan letter to as a kid and I’m a wild fan of puppets and the Henson Company in general,” he told After Elton. “They wrote a song, wanted me to sing it. There are all these different mythical characters this season. Sandra Oh plays another type of fairy that Abby Cadabra creates and so we got to do this big musical number with puppets and dancing. It was a great, great afternoon. It’s one demographic that I have yet to win over.”

Well consider them won over.

*Joss has the best line about people calling NPH “Doogie.” When he said that Doogie has a name and it’s “Barney.” That just kills me. Always quick with a joke that Joss Whedon character. [via]

I’m not sure how HBO and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under & American Beauty scribe) will pull off a vampire show or what the angle will be on vampires, but the notion that vampires can walk amongst regular humans because of a product from Japan called Tru Blood is intriguing.

The poster was sorta meh?, but the viral videos on YouTube providing lots of background for the show are promising, or maybe the right word is intriguing.

Still, it stars Anna Paquin, as a barmaid in Louisiana who can read people’s minds. It’s based on the “Southern Vampire” series of books by Charlaine Harris. We’ll at least be checking it out when it debuts on Sept. 7. Since we love all things vampires.

Hopefully, some sort of slayer or big corporation conspiracy will take place, or at the very least Kate Beckinsale will show up in some leather outfit.

The SciFi Channel just released the first trailer for the upcoming Caprica. The show, at least from the trailer, threw me for a loop. It looks remarkably different, visually anyhow, than it’s predecessor Battlestar Galactica. Looks like Ron Moore is interested in telling a science-fiction family drama that will somehow lead into the show every geek loves. It’s almost pastoral in a way, like a scifi Rockwell painting.

There will be baggage with this show, simply because of the greatness of Battlestar. Still, the premise about two families who bond over a tragedy and help create the first Cylon model looks like it will raise some fascinating questions and moral dilemmas. We all know by now how this story turns out, well, those that watch Battlestar do anyway.

Joseph Adama (Admiral Bill Adama’s father) uses his dead daughter to build the first Cylon. That’s some heavy shit right there.

According to this interview show creator Ron Moore gave with the Chicago Tribune, “Caprica” is set 51 years before the events of “Battlestar Galactica.” According to a March press release from Sci Fi, “’Caprica’ follows two rival families – the Greystones and the Adamas – as they grow, compete, and thrive in the vibrant world of the 12 Colonies. Enmeshed in the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons, the two houses go toe-to-toe.”

Moore also said during the interview that Caprica is, “shot very different, and I think I was particularly attracted to the idea of doing a science fiction piece that was not built on a foundation of action adventure. It wasn’t about Vipers and it wasn’t about the Cylons attacking every other week. It was really a character piece. It was really a drama, and you can infuse with a lot of political commentary and a lot of religious overtones and really dig into a people and a society and how and why it all came unglued.”

(Man that’s a clever headline.  I am so witty.)

The Death of Entertainment—or, as some call it, the date Jimmy Fallon takes the “Late Night” reigns from Conan O’Brien—will begin a bit earlier than expected.  Lorne Michaels decided to put Fallon on the Interwebs to “work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.”

Read: Try his damndest not to suck so terribly that no one watches “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.”  I don’t think it’s possible.  I think Fallon is going to suck hard.  He’s worse than the Iraq War.

If this were any other host—or, indeed, anyone else in the entire fucking world—it’d be an interesting idea.  Michaels intends on posting Fallon’s abortions at 12:30AM every night to get the audience in the menstrual flow.  It affords the unfunny comedian a unique opportunity to generate a “voice” and begin compiling an audience.

However, I find it hard to believe anyone will boot up their PCs during Conan to watch Fallon giggle at his own jokes to the backdrop of a silent, resentful audience.

Thank the Gods we can all put the speculation to rest.  I was getting worried that the new series Caprica might be all we got for a long, long while.  It’s also possible that Caprica may just go to series that the backdoor pilot/movie will be folded into the first season.  Essentially, the SciFi network has enough confidence in the show’s lasting appeal and quality to make a go of it.  iF Magazine has more deets about the upcoming SciFi schedule.

I’ve held off on posting about the new season of 24 for the most part simply because the last few seasons have slipped in quality with the death knell of  last season, which struck me as a shameful parody of the show.  It has reached a point, I believe, where they either have to call it quits or radically reinvent the show.  It sounds as if the new season will be neither of those two things.

The producers had a chance to do so last season, where instead of a season where Jack Bauer skips around town doing the same old thing, battling the same old plot twists, they should have made the entire season about Jack Bauer breaking out of a Chinese prison and attempting to get back home to America.  It would have been the perfect ending to the show.  Jack on the run, out numbered and facing the heat in Southeast Asia.

Anyway, this time Jack Bauer plays the White savior for the fictional dark continental country of Sengala.  Can’t say this trailer makes me want to see the new season, but I know I’ll watch.

Am I alone in thinking that season 2 of NBC’s Heroes was full of turdiness? It was awful and my main problem, besides the terrible writing on the show, is that we want to see these people fly their freak flags, ya know? I want this to be like X-Men, where the characters are all fighting to save the world and the stakes are high and it’s intense. I don’t really care about the personal psychobabble that the show always seems to wallow in.

That aside, I’m still cautiously excited for the start of Season 3. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since the end of Season 2, that I forgot just how much the show irked me or maybe because I’d like to get reacquainted with Kristen Bell, but perhaps I’m hoping that some characters will get killed off. Cough, Nicki, cough. Seriously.

The biggest issue I have with Heroes is that there are no stakes because no one gets killed off unless you are a henchmen, a cop or some third-tier character. There is no danger on the show. If they focussed on two or three characters (Peter, Claire and Hiro would be the obvs choice) and everyone else had the potential to be killed off then I’d be excited. <Lebowski impersonation>It would be like living on the edge, man!</Lebowski impersonation>

We’ll see if good really does battle evil on Sept. 22, 2008.

It’s not a spin-off.  Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari will be starring in an Office-like show, one with the same tone, style, and vision of the original but one that has no connection to the original.  In other words, they take place in two separate television universes, so don’t expect Steve Carrell or Jim and Pam (can’ think of their real life names) to show up in this new version of the show.  Just seems like NBC doesn’t really know what to do with this show, which sounds like they think a show that isn’t a direct spin-off of the original won’t succeed.  [Nikki Finke]

We’re glad the kids will have someone cool to sing along with, even if the adults are all sick to death of Feist’s “1-2-3-4″ when the venerable PBS show debuts its 39th season this year. Leslie Feist will drop by to teach kids to count to four.

A salient point is to be made here. In the actual song, Feist herself has a hard time counting to 10. In fact, she doesn’t do it. Second, we’re a bit miffed that she doesn’t have a showdown with The Count. This would have been the way to go.

In the wake of Yo Gabba Gabba’s hipster credentials, is Sesame Street trying to do the same. They have Will Arnett, Heidi Klum and Jack Black making stops to the stoop made famous by Big Bird, Oscar and Grover.

The network that helped to redefine television (there words not ours, of course) has been in a rut lately.  One generation is gone, now that The Wire ended and another is beginning.  It doesn’t help that Showtime has clearly stolen their mojo (yes you read that right, as of this post Showtime is the better of the two networks for television).  But the network has several projects in the works from big name talent and many of them sound promising.  Variety has a rundown of what viewers can expect from HBO in the coming years.

A few random casting things we felt compelled to share.  First, The CW’s new 90210 sequel landed a major coup by getting Nat (Joe E. Tata) to come back to the Peach Pit.  No word on if he’ll be a recurring character again.  But, wow, awesome. Now if we can just secure Dylan and Brandon.  Robert Downey Jr. is making the most of his post-Iron Man celebrity by signing up to play Det. Sherlock Holmes for director Guy Ritchie.  This is supposed to be a grittier version of the detective, closer to the heroin-using, opium-smoking detective from the books.  Can’t wait to see what RDJ does with that.

Collider has a review of the pilot script for the upcoming Ron Moore helmed, Battlestar Galactica spin-off project Caprica. It’s a precursor to the super-awesome sci-fi show.  We won’t give away the details here, but suffice it to say, the reviewer loved what he read. “Did you know that Dr. Frankenstein lives on in the world of Battlestar Gallactica? That is the ultimate story being told here. Someone angry at the universe defies the gods in an attempt to bring the dead back to life. There are always consequences. In this case, roughly fifty years later humanity barely hangs onto existence after attempted genocide by robots called Cylons. Still, isn’t some good father-daughter time worth that?”