· Comedy Central decides not to renew The Showbiz Show for a fourth season, officially freeing David Spade from the conflict-inviting hosting duties that sometimes put him in the uncomfortable position of having to use puppets to explain how Heather Locklear's marriage was already over by the time he was banging her. [Variety]
· APA signs Graham Greene, Chris Kattan and Heather Matarazzo, a trio of "gets" that should help the agency to finally put the days of having to endure dismissive "Who the fuck invited APA?!" jokes on Entourage behind them. [THR]
· Pushing Daisies—which we enjoyed quite a bit despite the crushing hype—posts the best debut numbers of any new 8 pm timeslot show this season. (Can't ABC just funnel the entire Cavemen budget into Daises to keep that expensive, Burtonesque look?) Meanwhile, NBC's Bionic Woman pumps-and-dumps, falling off 30 percent from its first-week ratings. [Variety]
· Ehren Kruger joins Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci in writing the screenplay that director Michael Bay will use as a rough guide for where to place his giant fucking robots on Transformers 2. [THR]
· DreamWorks is wisely trying to keep their Norbit dream team of Eddie Murphy and critic-proof producer Brain Robbins intact, entering final negotiations to reunite them for the comedy A Thousand Words, the story of a guy who "only has 1,000 words left to speak before he dies." [Variety]

· Critic-proof director/producer Brian Robbins takes on Jailhouse Rock, a film based on the real-life story of an American Idol-like signing competition (the "Inmate Idle Singing Con-Test") that took place in an Arizona jail, for Disney. While it's probably too soon to think about casting, it's hard not to imagine Robbins throwing some orange jumpsuits on his Wild Hogs dream team and letting them loose on renditions of "Summer Lovin'" and "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights." Projected opening weekend gross: $42 million. [Variety]
· Ben Stiller, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Hudson, Paulie Walnuts, Bobby Baccala, Alicia Keys,and Sheryl Crow are among those who've signed up for Elmo's Christmas Countdown, a one-hour Muppets holiday special in which the famous will help the ticklish star count down the days to Jesus's birth. [THR]
· HBO renews Big Love for a third, 12-episode season, which should be completed well in advance of a possible strike. In other HBO news, John from Cincinnati still makes no fucking sense. [Variety]
· Fox wins another uneventful, creatively barren, rerun-heavy summer Monday night behind Hell's Kitchen and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? [THR]
· ABC greenlights Here Come the Newlyweds, a reality competition series in which six newly married couples fight to the death (or at least to the divorce) over a steadily increasing cash prize. [Variety]

Following a screening at the SXSW Film Festival, Variety is head-over-heels, ass-over-teakettle, fill-me-up-with-your-bastard-slacker-lovechild in lust with Knocked Up, Judd Apatow's probing exploration of what happens when individuals from different beauty castes violate societal norms by mistakenly procreating:

The trades bring some unfathomably sad news this morning: producers Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins, whose Tollins/Robbins Productions have recently given the world populist masterworks such as Norbit and Wild Hogs, have announced that they are taking steps to separate themselves from a beautiful partnership that's lasted longer than a decade. The duo insist that they've recently realized that they've grown apart, and that their friendly split will involve joint custody of projects they've developed together, as well as the occasional awkward social interaction stemming from their inextricably enmeshed lives. Reports Var:

Not content to let his comments in yesterday's THR about how out of touch critics are with the tastes of mainstream audiences stand on their own, a defiant Wild Hogs producer Brian Robbins took the skirmish to the pages of the trade papers for a second straight day, buying this two-page spread in both Variety and the Reporter to once again declare his triumph over cinematic elitism. An earlier version of the ad, in which Robbins was depicted sodomizing a comically oversized rotten tomato, was rejected for its potentially offensive content.