• Hachette is cutting salaries and asking staff to work overtime. Fun! [Gawker]
• Amazon is blaming an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error" for the dropping the sales rankings of thousands of gay and lesbian books. [AFP]
• Bravo has picked up four new shows, including one produced by Sarah Jessica Parker and another by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. [THR, THR]
• NBC's Boston affiliate, WHDH, has backed down from its threat to skip Jay Leno's new 10pm show when it debuts this fall. [B&C]
• Marriott will no longer automatically provide guests with a free copy of USA Today or the Journal. You're gonna have to ask for it from now on. [E&P]

A comedy gets a major cast, an HBO movie gets majorly political. A skater gets a reality show, as do many, many fashion people. Because they're so interesting! Everyone watches TV on the internet now, especially Lost.

Watching your favorite shows on TV is a vital part of life, although it does cut into precious shopping time, right? Bravo to the rescue: Going one step further from lucrative sponsorship tie-ins like Tresemmé for Project Runway, the network will soon be promoting and selling its own specially-manufactured products on its highest-rated shows. So fear not: When you spot the Kooba bags worn by the girls in NYC Prep, the forthcoming reality show about rich Manhattan teens, you'll be instantly prompted to go to Bravo's website and order one for $595; same goes for wine, flowers, and knives featured on Top Chef, the winning outfit on Runway-ripoff The Fashion Show, and so forth.

For all the talk about NBC Universal's flagship network or about its urbane Bravo cable network, it turns out the entertainment company makes its real money on the channel with professional wrestling and re-runs.

Good news, Project Runway fans: The legal feud between NBC chief Jeff Zucker and Weinstein Co. co-founder Harvey Weinstein over the show's fate has been settled—and it didn't even require having the two face off in a cage fighting match, although that would have been nice, come to think of it. The Weinstein Co. agreed to pay a "multiple millions" to NBC for ripping the show away NBC-owned Bravo and taking it to Lifetime, although Weinstein agreed to hold off airing new episodes until August, which gives Bravo a headstart with their Runway lookalike, The Fashion Show.

NBC Universal has released a statement declaring an end to the bloody Project Runway Wars. The statement, sent by NBC, claims Harvey Weinstein has congratulated Jeff Zucker. So, it could be an April Fools' prank:

No wonder Countess LuAnn de Lesseps was spotted getting into an elevator with an mysterious man the other night: The Real Housewives star is said to be separating from her husband after 16 years.

• Ralph Lauren closed out Fashion Week with a predictably opulent show. Anna Wintour turned up with Morley Safer in tow since 60 Minutes is filming a segment on the Vogue editrix. Blake Lively, however, did not appear all that interested in the conversation. [NYT, WWD, FWD, Racked]
• David Lauren appeared at Ralph's show with his leg in a cast. "He just sort of stepped off an uneven sidewalk wrong," explained Lauren Bush. [NYM]
• In the end, good design won out this week, says Cathy Horyn. [NYT]
• Hamish Bowles says Marc Jacobs' and Alexander Wang's shows were "two bright spots in his week." Also: He could really use a nap. [NYO]
• Did you feel the depression this week? "Serotonin levels are down." [NYT]
• A bit of advice from Barneys' Julie Gilhart: "Bet on leggings." [NYM]
• Isaac Mizrahi and Kelly Rowland will handle the hosting duties on the new Bravo series, The Fashion Show. Fern Mallis will serve as judge. Yay. [Variety]
• Karl Lagerfeld knows what people want: Behold the Chanel Segway. [Pipeline]
• London Fashion Week started today. Enjoy! [Vogue UK]

• CBS reports that profits plunged 52 percent last quarter. [Variety]
• The editor of the Post is defending the chimp cartoon in yesterday's paper; meanwhile, Al Sharpton led a protest outside News Corp. today. [E&P, WCBS]
• Despite the horrible reviews, the second-season premiere of Bravo's Real Housewives of New York City on Tuesday set a high for the series. [THR]
• Chris Mitchell has been named the publisher of Conde Nast Traveler. [MW]
• Conan O'Brien will conclude his 16-year Late Night run on Friday. Then it's off to LA to take over for Jay Leno as host of the Tonight Show. [NYT]

So much for the Real Housewives of New York City. The show hasn't debuted yet—it starts tonight on Bravo—but it's already been ravaged by critics, even ones who willingly admit to being fans of the 17 other iterations of the show. (After all, it's not too often that a critic tells the entire cast of a reality show to "drop dead.") The main beef? Not that the show focuses on horrible women who happily spend a weekend afternoon "gearing up for an event for a magazine called Social Life." That's nothing new, of course. It's that the show is hopelessly out of touch with the current economic climate. It was all well and good for Simon Van Kempen to pretend he had a dollar to his name when the economy was cruising along. Now that the world is falling apart and Simon is still "spending" $8,000 on resort-wear? "The whole enterprise, like so much else on Bravo, the 'affluencer' network, feels like a moldy leftover from the pre-Obama age," writes Ginia Bellafante in the Times.

Typically, Project Runway rolls into Fashion Week with a huge swath of catchphrase-aspiring designers already cut. However, ongoing legal battles are forcing the new, still-delayed season to employ some subterfuge for Friday's big show.

The Bravo network is planning a real live realistic reality show about private school kids in Manhattan. It's Gossip Girl for those who prefer reality television! Because people love despising rich kids.

• Bravo is producing a reality series about New York City private school kids. Not surprisingly, it's being dubbed as "the real-life Gossip Girl." [B&C]
• Walter Anderson is stepping down as chairman and CEO of Parade. Richard Beckman has been mentioned as a possible replacement. [NYP]
• The recession has led more TV stations to accept liquor and sex ads. [LAT]
• Fox is testing out shorter commercial breaks. [NYT]
• Sirius XM is closer to a deal with satellite mogul Charles Ergen. [WSJ]
• Google is quitting the radio business. [AdWeek]
• Condé Nast has pulled the plug on a Japanese version of Glamour. [WWD]

Only in our nightmares does Barbara Walters shriek, "Do you have sex?" in a repeated, accusatory tone—and yet, when it happened on The View today, it was strangely satisfying.

Interviewed today by People, last night's Top Chef casualty [spoiler alert!] Jeff McGinnes had some choice shit-talking words for head judge Tom Colicchio, before suggesting the show portrayed him as a shirt-a-phobic "sex object."

On last night's Top Chef Super Bowl All-Star Face-Off Synergistic Cross-Promotion Can-We-Fit-Quaker-Oats-in-There-Somehow Extravaganza, the surviving chefs of Season 5—a group we find ourselves strangely attached to—were forced to cook head-to-head with past Chef contestants.

Look into the eyes of Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton, and what do you see? A wild sycophancy that has led the man to the edge of a nervous breakdown, perhaps?

When the Great Pop Culture Doomsday concludes, none among us will have houses left standing, let alone refuge, succor, or our Blackberries. In that sense, then, Real Housewives breakout NeNe Leakes was ahead of the curve by getting evicted from her mansion, but she is not going to take the attendant bad press lying down! Patiently, NeNe waited for Bravo himbo Andy Cohen to stop blogging about whatever "trashy hookaaa" he was fixated on, then hijacked Cohen's blog to release an official statement on the matter:

A Thanksgiving dinner almost seems superfluous after the feast that was last night's Real Housewives of Atlanta reunion special. There were almost too many highlights to name, though we're sure that noted NeNe aficionado Anderson Cooper was squealing when the buxom breakout went flying at adulteress Kim Zolciak, screaming, "CLOSE YOUR LEGS TO MARRIED MEN! CLOSE YOUR LEGS TO MARRIED MEN!" (She then had to be sat on to avoid further confrontations.) Still, Kim proved her worth in one head-spinning, wig-justifying anecdote:When Bravo figurehead Andy Cohen related an email sent by viewer "Murtice, from Oakland" inquiring about Kim's suspicious hairdo, the Housewife collapsed into a dizzy-making story about how she only had to wear a wig because she had... well, if someone else would like to say "cancer," then she'll go with that. However, after milking what little sympathy she could out of a stone-faced, skeptical NeNe, Cohen pressed Kim further, forcing her to relate a breakdown at Chili's (!) where she discovered that actually, she never had cancer in the first place. It's a fictional miracle! Videogum's got the clip: Click to view

When it moved Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime, Weinstein Company transformed the latter cable network from overearnest television for spinsters into something more chic and cheeky, or so some people said at the time. Weinstein Company was promptly sued by Bravo parent NBC Universal, which won an unexpected victory in court and impounded the show. Lifetime has been stewing, bitterly, and yelling at its cats, like a spurned mistress, and now Lifetime has decided it's going to sue Harvey Weinstein's company, presumably for being a slimy jerk who said the divorce was final when really he wasn't even separated yet. This makes 2008 the year of total meltdown for Weinstein: