Sole survivor of the Baldwin Family Career Curse Alec has always been an actor with a conscience, as demonstrated recently by his reaction to a NY Times article about a young female soldier from Phoenix soon headed off to combat. So touched was he by Pvt. Resha Kane's story, Baldwin himself (no, that's no typo—we said himself) tracked down Kane's family to tell them he'd like to contribute to Kane's college tuition fund:

30 Rock star Tracy Morgan (or, as one headline writer who has yet to climb aboard NBC's Comedy Night Done Right train put it, "Ex-'SNL' star Tracy Morgan") has pled guilty to his DUI charge from November. And if he stays out of trouble for the next little while, it appears he'll be off the hook:

In what might be the first shot fired in East Coast/West Coast Half-Hour/Hourlong Funny/Unfunny War between NBC's dueling behind-the-scenes-at-a-sketch-comedy-show primetime series, 30 Rock's Tina Fey offered this one-liner at the expense of presumed NBC Messiah Aaron Sorkin:

Just hours after the Golden Globe nominations were announced, better entertainment news bureaus everywhere were on the phone with the lucky, chosen few, who shared their "where they were" moments (let's get a handle of things, folks—these are the Globes we're talking about) and their initial reactions (generally positive, save for double nominee Clint Eastwood, who felt the final installment of his WWII trilogy—a YouTube video of a hamster making its way through a video game prison camp—was sorely overlooked.) A round-up:
· Best "where were you" answer definitely goes to Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who was stumbling in from a party at 5:30 a.m. to find his wife still awake, watching the results. Nice save, Gonzalez! You know you were toast without the nomination. [Variety]
· Sacha Baron Cohen delivers this statement: "I have been trying to let Borat know this great news but for the last 4 hours both of Kazakhstan's telephones have been engaged. Eventually, Premier Nazarbayev answered and said he would pass on the message as soon as Borat returned from Iran, where he is guest of honor at the Holocaust Denial Conference." [The Hot Blog]
· The WGA nominations were announced today, and HBO is the only TV network (not that it's TV) with two series in each of the major categories (Deadwood and Sopranos/Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage). NBC, meanwhile, picks up four of the five nominees for best new series, pitting 30 Rock against Studio 60 in a contest we can only assume was concocted purely for the guild members' amusement. [THR]

NBC demonstrates its ongoing commitment to struggling, behind-the-scenes- at-sketch-comedy-show programming, picking up 30 Rock for a full season after last night's ratings spike. [Variety]
The Office's John Krasinski join George Clooney in the romantic comedy Leatherheads, in which the two stars try to convince audiences that Renee Zellweger is sexually desirable enough to fight over. [THR]
Columbia and Scott Rudin acquire the screen rights to a still-unpublished "new take" on Cleopatra by biographer Stacy Schiff and producer Scott Rudin. Even though the book centers on Cleopatra as a "a firm ruler and military tactician" rather than as a sexbomb seductress, we wouldn't be surprised if the studio quickly determines that Angelina Jolie is "firm rulerish and tactician-y enough" to send out a big offer. [Variety]
Grey's Anatomy leads ABC to a Thursday night ratings win against the token resistance of CBS's CSI rerun. In other news, no one is watching The OC anymore. [THR]
· The Producers Guild will give Jerry Bruckheimer their Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television, celebrating the superproducer's unparalleled ability to land procedural after procedural on CBS's primetime schedule. [Variety]

Tracy Morgan, who every week on 30 Rock is required to reach deep into his actor's bag of tricks to play a loose approximation of himself, Tracy "proud as a peacork, baby" Jordan, has been picked up on another DUI charge following a night of some overly enthused celebrating of his ascendancy to Must See TV status. Reports TMZ:

The trades eulogize "iconoclastic, prolific, periodically brilliant director" Robert Altman, "one of cinema's great democratic spirits." [Variety, THR]
NBC is developing a TV version of Thank You For Smoking, in which the movie's former tobacco apologist's new PR firm will take on seemingly impossible image rehabilitation tasks, like trying to convince people that Lindsay Lohan is a hard-working, responsible adult committed to shutting out distractions and fully dedicating herself to her craft. [Variety]
NBC orders three more scripts from 30 Rock, momentarily showing support for the far better of their two low-rated, behind-the-scenes-at-a-sketch-comedy-show series. [THR]
Fox Atomic shuts down production on its update of Revenge of the Nerds, sparing us from a needless remake of a perfectly good nerdsploitation flick. [Variety]
Fox joins CBS in challenging the FCC, claiming that new rules that find "certain words so vile they are automatically actionable" will kill live broadcasting by hampering celebrities' ability to spontaneously say "shit" or "fuck" during awards shows. [THR]

Back in August, news emerged that Rachel Dratch was being, er, shifted ("demoted" is a bummer word, as you'll soon see) from her lead role on 30 Rock into one where she'd play a "wide variety" of parts after producers decided to "scrap her character." A couple of days after the initial announcement, we learned that her original character wasn't so much "scrapped" as "given to Jane Krakowski." Dratch spoke to NY Mag's Intelligencer column about how the unfortunate demoting/recasting thing went down:

We missed 30 Rock last night, but a reader's curiosity about the fine kitchen appliance featured prominently in the show's premiere episode sent us to the DVR to have a look for ourselves:

In easily the strangest TV news of the day, NBC signs up Jon Lovitz to star in the unscripted comedy Bad
Judge, in which he will play a "heightened" version of himself (read: encouraged to constantly lapse into his old SNL characters) who hands out unfair—but hilarious!—decisions in real legal cases. [Variety]
NBC's premiere of its new block of Must See Shows With Numbers in Their Titles TV fails to excite audiences, as 30 Rock and 20 Good Years finish third in their respective timeslots. It's starting to look like viewers won't support even a single behind-the-scenes-of-a-sketch-comedy-show series, much less one each from the sitcom and drama genres. [THR]
Noted North Korean cin aste Kim Jong Il's testing of his new nuclear toys isn't stopping stop film executives and journalists from attending the Pusan Film Fest in South Korea, Asia's most important film event. [Variety]
· In other TV-shows-with-numbers-in-the-title news, CBS will give recently cancelled Smith's Tuesday night timeslot to 3 Lbs., its hunky-neurosurgeon drama starring noted boob-tube albatross Mark Feuerstein. His involvement requires us to predict that it will be off the air after no more than five episodes. [THR]
Fox TV Studios nabs the rights to make The Devil Wears Prada for TV, which they'll develop for their broadcast mothership as a single-camera comedy they envision as "like Ugly Betty, but much better looking." [Variety]

On Wednesday, SNL mastermind and 30 Rock executive producer put a positive spin on the decision to demote star Rachel Dratch from a lead character to a "wide variety of roles," telling Variety, "The way it's been rewritten, it's a much funnier part." Of course, what he meant to say was, "The way it's been recast, it's a much blonder, more conventionally bimbonic part." Reports today's THR:

We blame Andy Dick's wandering tongue for making us miss yesterday's Variety story on Rachel Dratch's new role—or roles, as the case may be—on NBC's upcoming series for those who'll find Aaron Sorkin's 60-minute treatment of the behind-the-scenes zaniness at SNL too demanding, the comparatively bite-sized 30 Rock, but we still think it's worth pointing out even in its unacceptably stale, day-old form. (The internet news cycle is a cruel, unfeeling bitch.) Reports Variety: