You probably haven’t watched Saturday morning cartoons in, um, well, forever, right?  But, let this cook your noodle: there’s a Teenage Muant Ninja Turtles 25th anniversary crossover/event/cartoon movie Turtles Forever, airing tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. EST on 4Kids.tv (check local listings and all that but most likely the CW).

Holy shit! Eastman and Laird’s black-and-white original comics turtles are joining the ’80s cartoon Turtles and the ’00s cartoon Turtles in some sort of geek-tastic cartoon bacchnalia. 

Yes, I will be glued to the television tomorrow morning to see how the original TMNT incarnation will be portrayed, since they were stoic badasses.

Mark your calendars for Feb. 2 at 9 p.m. ET.  Because that’s when the final season of ABC’s Lost returns.  The network has decided to move the show again (Wednesday to Thursday back to Wednesday) one last time with Tuesday being its new day due to the success of this year’s new sitcoms Modern Family (did you see the episode with Ed Norton and Elizabeth Banks? Talk about wtf!) and Cougar Town.

So Tuesday night.  Good.  Because now there will be something on Tuesday worth watching.

This has been making the rounds over the past few days.  It’s pretty well done.  As Clay Davis would say, “Sheeeeeit!”

Whoa, whoa whoa. Who cares about how Amy Sherman-Palladino would have ended Gilmore Girls had she not been fired from the show before its final season.  The real news here is she admits to the possibility of a GG movie: “If there’s a story to tell, then absolutely I think we’re all going to want to tell it. That’s the bottom line.”  The we in question is Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, otherwise known as Lorelai and Rory Gilmore.  Sherman-Palladino is currently working on a dramedy for HBO and Graham is jumping into NBC’s Parenthood. Still, the slim possibility of a Gilmore Girls movie is pretty a-okay in my book.

I’m sure you were telling yourself this morning you wanted to know more about why James Franco — easily the poet laureate of this generation; a man who not only acts and writes but also racks up secondary degrees like they are baterangs for his yellow utility belt – would take a two-month acting gig with ABC’s General Hospital soap opera.

The most recent SNL Digital Short was an excellent Twilight parody.  Along with their FOX News skit, Penelope returned! and Taylor Swift’s security-aided (to keep Kanye out) musical (lalala) monologue, it was actually a decent SNL last night.

“It’s still a passive activity,” Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, told the New York Times.

Which means that people with DVRs still sit through commercials because they’re too lazy to use a remote.  With 1/3 of US households watching television through their DVR, when factored into ratings, many shows are increasing their viewership in the  range of 7 to 12 percent, with some shows having increases of more than 20 percent.  The four networks together are averaging a 10 percent increase.

Shocking!  But there it is.  Only now have networks come to realize that just because people watch television shows on time delay or on the internet doesn’t mean that people aren’t watching shows.  Doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but I guess it does take a television executive about three years.

V has been the one show I was hoping would redeem this lackluster fall television season.  It is, afterall, based on a popular (cultish?) NBC science fiction show from the early 80s about lizard creations pretending to be humans with nefarious plans for our planet and population. 

It seems like an excellent premise to be reimagined with better effects and acting and more weighty themes to explore.  Why then, did I feel ho-hum about the show after last night’s premiere?

You can read plenty of recaps elsewhere, but suffice it to say there’s a lot going on.  The FX look up to snuff, the acting is all pretty darn good (how could it not be with Elizabeth Mitchell, Alan Tudyk, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Scott Wolff, and Monica Baccarin) for a network television show and the themes are not disimilar from the recent Battlestar Galactica remake (religion, terrorism, identity, etc.). 

There were huge problems with the pilot episodes’s story arc: 1) the humans just accept the aliens with open arms, 2) the exposition/backstory is clumsily handled, 3) two of the main characters easily figure out that the lizard aliens are up to no good, 4) it’s too clean and polished.

Still, none of those complaints are what I’m having difficulty wrapping my brain around this morning.  I’ve never watched a show so anti-progressive as I did the one last night. 

And I’m not alone.  Both Time’s excellent James Poniewozik and Chicago Tribune reviewer Glenn Garvin made note of this: a telegenic messiah from a foreign and alien place comes to the United States with the promise of hope and change offers our citizens science, technology and — gasp! – universal health care. 

Make no mistake, the Obama parallel/allegory here is downright unnerving.  It’s so blatent I really thought some combination of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh were show runners. 

Chew on this basic plot:  charismatic, attractive newcomers win the adulation of America’s youth with the promise of hope & change; they manipulate the braindead media and promise universal healthcare, but a group of real Americans are saavy to their evil (fascist?) hidden identity/agenda and will work to prevent the destruction of humanity. 

It would have been refreshing, or still can be, if the lizard aliens turn out to be the saviors of the human race.  But alas, I don’t think that will be the case.  And yet, and yet, I’m still going to tune in because there’s enough decent story threads that the show has my interest.

Thanks internets! From last week’s “Top Chef” where Padma Lakshmi and guest judge Natalie Portman drop their fair share of fellatio double entendres in 40-seconds. [via]

Some enterprising It’s Always Sunny fan took every Charlie Kelly dance sequence from Seasons 1-5 and made this highly enjoyable supercut.

Charles Kuralt was one of the myriad reasons I began doing what I do.  So it’s nice to see that some of his greatest segments have been packaged together as a DVD collection.

Seth Stevensen pays the man tribute for Slate: “There is something distinctly pre-Internet about the folks who appear in Kuralt’s reports. They harbor no ambition to become famous. They’re odd people, doing oddly beautiful things, tucked away in odd corners of the country. Nowadays, many of them might publicize their doings on personal Web sites and YouTube channels or try to scheme their way onto a reality show. But back then, it was a pleasant, one-in-a-million surprise when Kuralt rolled into town and put them on TV. “They didn’t know there was anything special about themselves,” says Kuralt’s longtime cameraman, Isadore Bleckman, “until Charles held up a mirror to them.”

What amazes me is that with the technology improvements, no one has taken up Charles Kuralt’s mantle for one of the major news organizations.

Usually, I’m not too into the extra webisodes from The Office or any television show for that matter, but this one is pretty good.  Also, the new secretary Erin is beginning to grow on me, so it’s nice to see her get to stretch her comedic chops. 

Subtle Sexuality is a girl group made up of “the beautiful and mysterious” Kelly Kapoor and “the pretty” Erin Hannon, two employees of a certain paper company in Scranton, Penn.

Their first song/video is the Auto-Tune–heavy dance jam “Male Prima Donna,” featuring guest appearances by ‘Nard Dog and Mr. Understood. MORE »

In anticipation of ABC’s V remake, the SyFy Channel has decided to reair the original miniseries this weekend, which is helpful in determing whether or not the new show compares to the old show.  I was too young to catch the sci-fi miniseries when it first aired in 1983, and I haven’t bothered to add it to Netflix.

The marathon starts on Saturday Sunday at 12:30 p.m.