· Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are frantically finalizing the shooting script of Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons before the Oct. 31st deadline, hoping that the mad rush towards production won't jeopardize the duo's ability to produce the kind of easily digestible, crowd-pleasing entertainment that always results from their lucrative collaborations. Meanwhile, star Tom Hanks has been presented with a hair-growing schedule that will barely provide the actor with enough time to reproduce his character's signature demi-mullet. Truly, no one is immune from the pressures of the looming™ strike. [Variety]
· In what is always a good sign for a floundering series, The Bionic Woman gets another new showrunner, not even two months after "creative differences" ended NBC's short-lived love affair with Glen Morgan. [THR]

· Why does it take the threat of a strike for people to start cranking out the truly genius ideas? Fox has ordered a script that could generate a Prison Break spin-off set in a women's penitentiary, a project that would be perfect for Michelle Rodriguez once she concludes some previous obligations. [THR]
· ABC's Cavemen inches ever closer to joining Viva Laughlin in the Fall season's "bold TV experiments canceled too soon to see how terrible they could eventually become" club, drawing its lowest key demo ratings to date. Somewhere, Hugh Jackman's wife sheds a tear in sympathy. [Variety]

· Attempting to keep vital a love affair they began back on the set of Gangs of New York, director Martin Scorcese and still-boyish muse Leonardo DiCaprio will reteam once again on Shutter Island, an adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel about a U.S. Marshal investigating the disappearance of a dangerous crazy lady in the 1950s. [Variety]
· ABC picks up the back nine episodes for this season of Pushing Daisies, bringing their order to a full 22 hours of beautifully shot, expensively produced whimsy. You know, unless the writers fulfill the networks' secret wish to wipe out the rest of the TV season. [THR]
· ABC's Samantha Who? posts another "solid" Nielsen performance on Monday night, while NBC's Heroes set a new series low. Also: Dancing with the Stars wins the night behind Marie Osmond's dramatic fainting spell, leading producers to plan a stunt in which Jennie Garth will suffer an orchestrated, on-camera ankle fracture on next week's show. [Variety]

As we all await the dread-inducing tolling of the bell atop WGA headquarters that will indicate the union has received strike authorization from its membership, it seems like a good time consider the effect that the looming work stoppage is already having on the call-rolling underclass that allows the town to function. Over at Fishbowl LA, a disgruntled employee laments that Fox has decided to cut back on assistant overtime to help lessen the financial burden of a strike while leaving their bosses' expense accounts untouched:

· Finding The View to be an unacceptably highbrow discussion of topics of concern to the modern woman with the free time to watch TV during the day, Debi Mazar, Aida Turturro, and Karen Duffy are shopping around a "New Jersey take" on the format. [THR]
· As fleetingly exciting as it was when the studios dropped that residual-rollback proposal they never would have followed through on, the threat of a strike remains "high." Keep stockpiling those canned goods, everyone! [Variety]
· The CW's Online Nation earns the distinction of being the first new Fall show to be canceled. Somewhere, a trio of underachieving, modern-day Neanderthals breathe a sigh of relief that they've survived the initial round of network executions. [THR]

While beating up ruffians, Bruce Willis doesn't have time to rip and encode his movies, nor deal with the copy-protected gunk served on iTunes. Fox has wised up and is offering a special two-for-one Live Free or Die Hard deal: The DVD will contain a DRM-free digital copy of the film meant for playback on computers and portable video players. [Techdirt]

· Showing a Baueresque level of self-sacrifice, Kiefer Sutherland takes one for his TV team, pleading out to 48 days of jail time that can be served on a two-stint schedule that won't interrupt the shooting of 24, even though he probably could have served fewer days if he'd opted for a consecutive sentence. If eighteen months of being tortured by the Chinese couldn't break him, seven weeks should be a breeze. [THR]
· After putting up "solid" premiere numbers, ABC's bold Cavemen experiment falters, dropping off 25 percent in its second week. Enjoy your lovable, squash-playing, Swedish-furniture-hawking Neanderthals while you still can. [Variety]

Viewers of Fox's drama Prison Break got an unpleasant gift last night (giant spoiler ahead): The fate of Sara, played by actress Sarah Wayne Callies, was revealed when a bloody box was opened, containing her decapitated head inside. Lest Break fans assume the character's gruesome demise was the product of writers' room revenge after a difficult and failed negotiation (Callies had a baby recently and reportedly declined producers initial offer of 13 episodes), EP Matt Olmstead explained the creative process that left them with no option but to serve up their star's head in a box:

An email sent to guests of a show on the soon-to-debut (and, you know, jingoistically crazytarded seeming!) Fox Business Channel contains the following sentence: "Just a reminder we do ask that any of our guests do not drink alcoholic beverages before going on the air."

If you worship at the Church of Family Guy, you're undoubtedly familiar with the ditty "I Need a Jew," sung at the precise moment of episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" when Griffin patriarch Peter realizes he's helpless to manage his finances without the aid of an arithmetically-astute Member of the Tribe. A full four years after the episode first aired, the copyright owner of Pinocchio classic "When You Wish Upon a Star" is now suing "Fox Broadcasting Co., the Cartoon Network and others" for infringement. A Fox spokesperson had "no comment," and its suspected their lawyers are currently mapping their strategy: They've already eliminated playing the "fair Jew-use" card, as the song-parody managed to be penned by the single goyische comedy-writer named Seth currently working in Hollywood.

· Oh, Johnny Drama, you're so much better than this: Kevin Dillon will star in the 300 spoof National Lampoon's 301: The Legend of Awesomest Maximus Wallace Leonidas. Will someone please book him for some personal appearances and save him from this kind of strike-insurance slumming? [Variety]
· Cavemen's overhauled series premiere "performed OK" in the Tuesday night Nielsens, while House lead Fox to victory in primetime. [THR]
· Natalie Portman joins the cast of the remake of the Danish love-triangle drama Brothers, in which she'll play the sister-in-law boinked by dreamy-eyed homewrecker Jake Gyllenhaal while sleepy-eyed soldier Tobey Maguire is off fighting in Afghanistan. [Variety]

· NBC angers its network rivals by working some technically allowed, but "morally" questionable, Nielsen voodoo by repeating its Heroes premiere on Saturday night and adding that showing's ratings to the series' original Monday night number. We think. This developing feud over ratings-reporting gamesmanship is as confusing as it is scintillating. [Variety]
· In simpler Nielsen-related news, House is still huge, averaging 18.1 million viewers in its best-ever performance not artificially enhanced by an American Idol lead-in [THR]
· Creative triple-threat Kevin James will write, produce, and star in Mall Cop. We'll refrain from relating the logline and let your imaginations run wild with the comedic possibilities evoked by the combination of America's most beloved schlub and that offbeat occupation. [Variety]
· Fox calls up Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy from its FX basic-cable farm team to their network major league club, giving a series commitment to Murphy's female workplace drama Queen B. [THR]
· NBC will bottle up eight midseason episodes of Mark Burnett's latest reality TV brain fart, My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad, which seeks to combine "the family fun and kid empowerment of '[Are You Smarter Than A] 5th Grader' with the universally relatable concept of bragging that your dad is best." It's still unclear whether or not the proud fathers in question will be required to beat each other senseless at the end of each show to truly prove their paternal supremacy. [Variety]

"This morning Fox's competitors are chortling over a promo that ran during last night's Prison Break that called K-Ville the "No. 1 new drama of the season" among adults 18 to 49. Given only two new dramas actually aired before Monday night, this claim essentially brags that K-Ville beat The CW's Gossip Girl." [TV Week]

And as for the guy who challenged his manhood over the way he handled the aftermath of Reilly's unexpected firing, Silverman acknowledges there's some buzz on Pushing Daises, but does take a shot at Steve McPherson's beloved Cavemen, which internet blogsite Cavefamer has called "twenty-two rollicking, Cro-Magtastic minutes of laughing and thinking that will make you forget all about auto-insurance commercials!"

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Unoriginality Is Easy As 1-2-3 Edition: Denzel Washington will star in director Tony Scott's sure-to-be incomprehensible remake of The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, assuming a role originally played by Walter Matthau and not-so-memorably reprised by Edward James Olmos in a 1998 made-for-TV version. [Variety]
· NBC throws money at big-name screenwriters for its Heroes: Origins spinoff, signing up X2/Superman Returns co-writer Michael Dougherty and Hostel's Eli Roth to script episodes tackling the backstory issues of the hit series' characters, such as why Ali Larter's evil reflection is so angry all the time. [THR]
· Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac will star in the Dimension comedy Soul Men, a project that regrettably is in no way related to the classic, similarly titled C. Thomas Howell/Rae Dawn Chong self-tanning farce of 1986. [Variety]
· The Family Guy's Very Special Star Wars-Themed Episode posts a "strong" performance in its ultimately doomed Nielsen attack against NBC's Sunday Night Football. [THR]
· Kevin Spacey will return to TV (well, sort of) after a 16-year hiatus, starring in HBO's Recount as the Gore campaign chief of staff who challenged the disputed balloting in Florida during the 2000 presidential election. [Variety]

Amidst all the hubbub about MediaDefender — the file-sharing policing agency whose private email files were recently spewed across the Internet, revealing unsavory antipiracy plans — one particularly interesting tidbit has bubbled to the surface. The Pirate Bay, a major file-sharing site, says it now has proof from those files that the music and movie industries have been paying hackers to attack the site. It is now taking this information to the police and charging the Swedish arms of Fox, EMI Music, Universal, Paramount, Atari, Activision, Ubisoft and Sony with technical sabotage, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, and spamming.

· What showbiz name evokes Rat Pack-era Hollywood cool more than any other? That's right: Brett Ratner. The singularly hacky Rush Hour 3 director, continuing his ongoing mission to diminish the legacies of legends whose lifestyles he desperately wishes to emulate, will reteam with screechy muse Chris Tucker for an adaptation of Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, a tell-all bio about Sinatra's relationship with his valet. "I think [Ratner's] channeling Frank sometimes," says one the book's authors, rolling around in a pile of New Line's option cash. [Variety]
· Dan Rather opens a can containing $70 million worth of legal whoop-ass on CBS, claiming that the network scapegoated him for the Memogate scandal. [THR]
· DreamWorks Animation runs screaming from a May 2009 box office confrontation with James Cameron's Avatar, moving their Monsters Vs. Aliens to a safer Easter '09 release date. [Variety]
· Fox picks up Raffik, a police procedural about a Borat-like Albanian detective dispatched to the US Americas to amuse the LAPD with his observations about the differences in their law enforcement techniques. [THR]
· The premiere numbers for Kelsey Grammer's Back to You, Gordon "Scorched Bollocks" Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and the New Mexico Child Welfare Department's Kid Nation are uniformly "solid" but "unspectacular." Also, as expected, plenty of female teenagers watched Gossip Girl. [Variety]

While the scintillating debate about whether Fox's censors directed the profanity-erasing silence-rays of its Sphere of Censorship against Sally Field for either the "goddamned" or "no more...wars" portions of her rambling acceptance speech rages on, we thought it would be fun to share a clip of some the filthy, filthy things that the network's Standards & Practices allowed on the air during the Emmys telecast.

· CBS has quietly set up preview screenings of Kid Nation at elementary schools in major markets for students, parents, and teachers, where families can come together and discuss the exciting child-labor-law issues raised by the controversial new series, as well as receive assurances from the network that no children were eaten by bears during the show's production, even though that unlikely eventuality was covered by that now-infamous waiver. [Variety]
· HBO Films greenlights a feature version of Grey Gardens, the 1975 crazy-cat-lady documentary that has also recently spawned a crazy-cat-lady Broadway musical, and which will star Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. [THR]
· In an onscreen pairing that will result in a dramatic showdown between the dreamiest and the sleepiest sets of blue eyes in all of Young Hollywood, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire are in negotiations to join Brothers, director Jim Sheridan's remake of a Danish-language war drama. Our prediction: after their first shared scene, Maguire locks himself in his trailer, ashamed that his orbs will never sparkle like Gyllenhaal's. [Variety]
· Star Trek's JJ Abrams chooses Zoe Saldana as the new Uhura. [THR]
· Huzzah! The Fall TV season is here! And while we didn't watch the solidly rated premiere of Fox's K-ville last night, it's nice to know that we have finally something to neglect besides shows about remembering karaoke lyrics. [Variety]

· Last night's Emmys drew the second-smallest TV audience in the awards show's history with an anemic average of 13.1 million viewers. No one, it seems, was tantalized by the sketchy possibility of Britney Spears showing up to apologize for destroying her career, or by the prospect of emergency host Ryan Seacrest breaking into song. Congratulations, America: you saved yourself over three hours of torture. (We were not so lucky.) [Variety]
· Tina Fey hopes 30 Rock's big win for Best Comedy Series will bring viewers to her show—obviously, she wasn't privy to the preliminary Emmy Nielsens when she made that crazy wish. [THR]
· AMC has an Emmy coming-out party, capturing four awards for Broken Trail. [Variety]
· Remember Pop-Up Video, the show that provided you with amusing, if useless, factoids about the "music videos" one used to be able to watch on VH1? It's coming back in a mobile format, allowing you to learn everything you ever wanted to know about "Hollaback Girl" by staring at your cellphone's tiny screen while stopped at a red light. [THR]
· Internet-creating former VP Al Gore doesn't even know the URL of his interactive TV network's website. [Update: Whoops, yes he does!] [variety]