As we approach the end of yet another memorable cycle of American Idol (fare thee well, dreamy-eyed Chris and dreamy-eared Phil!), the country braces for the most devastating rite in the communal search for our next exalted Karaoke Superstar: the singing of the Idol single, in which the two finalists are handed microphones, ordered at gunpoint into a death sphere set up on the stage of the Kodak theater, and are required to sing specially commissioned, unfathomably horrendous songs until someone's head explodes into a cloud of skull and brain fragments. (In the case of a tie, the second runner-up is crowned.)

· Rory and Lorelai will banter adorably no more forever: The CW announces that Gilmore Girls will air its final episode on May 15. We're not too sad, as we're sure the network has alternative MILF-related programming ready to take its place in the Fall. [Variety]
· Chris Von Goetz and Kevin Crotty are named co-heads of the TV lit department at ICM., which had been leaderless since the merger with BWCS. All we really care about: How nice are their shoes? Are we talking Whitesell nice or WMA nice? [THR]
· George Clooney and producing BFF Grant Heslov will co-write a dramedy, about how the CIA used Hollywood to stage a fake movie project (which was so well-faked Var and THR wrote about it) to sneak hostages out of Tehran in 1979, for Warner Brothers. [Variety]
· 28.1 million Idol fans tuned in to watch the final performances of The One Who Thinks He's Justin Timblerlake—As If! and The One Now Free From Being Forced To Wear Funny Hats By Cruel Wardrobe Assistants on Wednesday night. [THR]
· HBO will air a concert featuring the real Timberlake (suck, it Richardson!), its first one in four years. [Variety]

Fox and Marvel have announced they will be spinning off an X-Men character into his own movie. Not Wolverine, however, which is still listed as in development, but telepathic metal manipulator Magneto:

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Special 80s Possession-Comedy Edition: Queen Latifah will star in a remake of Lily Tomlin/Steve Martin farce All of Me for New Line, though it's unclear from the story if their reimagination of the material will call for Latifah to play the possessing spirit or the showier role of host body. Either way, we hope they keep the bit where the guru flushes a toilet each time the telephone rings. That really cracked us up when we were ten. [Variety]
· Last night's two-hour Idol Gives Back special eradicates world poverty, network competition. [THR]
· The FCC declares War on TV Violence, threatening that if networks don't clean up their acts, the government will do it for them. [Variety]
· A puff of pink smoke rises from a chimney atop Lifetime's headquarters, indicating that the company has chosen a new spiritual leader to preside over its housewife-narcotizing slate of eating-disorder-related MOWs. [THR]
· The highly successful, industry-wide Agent Literacy Program continues to pay impresive dividends, as Gersh joins Endeavor in starting a new book division. [Variety]

We will admit to being more than a little excited for the the debut of Steven Spielberg's upcoming Fox competition On the Lot, as television sorely needs an American Idol (or, at the very least, a Project Runway) for Hollywood, and we've never quite gotten over Project Greenlight's tragically abbreviated run. (Gulager!) Today's Variety brings some breathtaking news about the series, reporting that Spielberg is stocking the show's firing squad with some big guns for its launch:

An operative on the Fox lot just dropped us a few pictures of the Earth Day celebration he was beckoned to on his lunch break touting his proud, environmentally responsible employer's efforts to "go green." Apparently, the notice about today's event didn't reach the owner of this Hummer parked in front of an executive office building, as he had yet to joy-ride his defiant monument to fuel-inefficient luxury through the festival, crushing its eco-pansy booths about hybrid vehicles and conservation beneath its tires at the time these photos were taken.

This maddeningly brief report on fallen Idol Sanjaya Malakar's current whereabouts just came in from an operative over at Fox:

· ABC acquires the rights to a "special" described as a "real-life version of The Queen" drawn from "hundreds of hours of footage" of the monarch and royal family, or as such a project was once called, a "documentary." [Variety]
· King of Queens' Leah Remini will star in the "groundbreaking" web series In the Motherhood, the story of three mom girlfriends who struggle to find novel ways to incorporate the fine personal grooming and telecommunications products of joint sponsors Suave and Sprint into their hilarious adventures in advertainment. [THR]
· Var rounds up how the various networks reacted to yesterday's Virginia Tech massacre, including the fact that an unexpectedly sensitive Fox has yanked a new Bones episode that dealt with "human remains being uncovered on a college campus." [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Irene Cara Edition: MGM will sink $25 million into a remake of Fame, hoping that a generation being raised to believe that success is achieved through serial vagina-flashing and assiduous nightclub attendance can relate to an old-fashioned story about people trying to achieve recognition through actual talent and hard work. [THR]
· Dancing with the Stars: One-Legged Tango Edition and The Bachelor: Another Boring, Horny Guy Who's Never Going To Marry Any Of These Fame-Hungry Skanks lead ABC to a Monday night Nielsen win. [Variety]

· Brendan Fraser is happy to cash a huge paycheck for yet another Mummy sequel, but heroine Rachel Weisz abandons the franchise, realizing that her Oscar affords her the chance to do some projects that don't involve her screaming at a tennis ball at the end of a stick representing the giant scarab that will be added months later by an effects house. [Variety]

· Tom Hanks and Ron Howard are in "final negotiations" to return for the Da Vinci Code prequel Angels and Demons, presumably for amounts of money so staggering you would instantly become incontinent upon seeing them discussed in print. [THR]

· Forest Whitaker and Denzel Washington will star in The Great Debaters (think Pride, but with debaters and two Oscar winners instead of swimmers and Terence Howard), which Washington will also direct. [Variety]

· 27.9 million viewers tune in for their last glimpse of Haley Scarnato's legs on Idol; Phil Stacey gets one more week to try and escape elimination by hiding his batlike ears and strangely shaped, clean-shaven cranium under a silly hat. [THR]

· Nielsen discovers a discovers a hidden community of Lost fans who screw up their weekly viewer-tabulation efforts by catching up with the show on the weekends via DVR. [Variety]

There comes a point in every long-running, Peabody Award-winning series' lifespan when its creative team is faced with the artistic dilemma, "Well, we've already done the episode where Oprah's asshole and vagina find themselves in a doomed hostage situation. Where to go from there?" In South Park's case, it was to send a nuclear missile up Hillary Clinton's ladyflower, in a recent, 24-inspired episode entitled The Snuke. (Viacom's YouTube-scouring stormtroopers have already shot on sight anyone suspected to have posted clips, but here's a CNN report about it that, amazingly, never once utters the word "vagina.") A jubilant South Park staffer wrote to tell us about the exciting delivery that soon arrived at the production offices:

The LAT takes a look at the roughly 12,000 network pilots currently in development, trying to make sense of any trends that emerged from last season. What we know: Serialized storytelling is out, except when it's in; viewers love a heavy dose of lighthearted quirk with their hour-long, fashion-centric dramas; and the public's appetite for the plight of fundamentalist Christian sketch comedy actresses was vastly overestimated. There is also the predicament of the half-hour primetime comedy, a languishing format that can only claim Charlie Sheen paycheck-generator Two and a Half Men as its single entry in the Nielsen top 20. It's a problem executives have approached with the kind of no-fail solution that results in a grab-bag pilot crop littered with Geico Cavemen shows and Lee Majors's triumphant return to TV: Greenlight everything and hope someone laughs.

· These people and movies will be in the mix at Cannes this year: Martin Scorsese, The Golden Compass, the Coen Brothers, U2. Get excited for all the fun stuff your boss is gonna get to do in France! [Variety]
· Judd Apatow is getting into the David Krumholtz business in a big way, signing up the actor to write and star in Attorneys at Raw and to co-star in Jake Kasdan's musical biopic spoof Walk Hard. [THR]
· This year's Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Spiderman 3 is shaping up to be even bigger n' crasser than last year's M:i:III Tom Cruise city-crossing, multivehicle stuntacular, with simultaneous screenings in all five boroughs and a marching band angering residents of Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood. [Variety]
· An average of 25 million viewers tune in to watch the the hot one with the legs and the bald one with the funny hats outlast the rocker chick whose name we can never remember on American Idol. (It should go without saying that Sanjaya was nowhere near elimination.) [THR]
· Dealing with Pirates 3's dad-snorting PR crisis will be among Buena Vista's Head Flack in Charge Dennis Rice's last acts at Disney, as he's been brainwashed and stolen away by Tom Cruise to trick the world into believing that United Artists is a real movie studio, and not just an elaborate front for producing training films for Celebrity Centre e-meter repairmen. [Variety]

· Showtime is positively atwitter about heavily promoted costume drama The Tudors' 1.2 million premiere night viewers (over two showings), a number representing the network's biggest debut success since Fat Actress kicked off its tragically short-lived run of three years ago. [Variety]
· Adam Sandler, already over the "dressing like Bob Dylan and moping around" phase of his career, will star in a Disney comedy directed by former choreographer Adam Shankman, Bedtime Stories. [THR]
· Fox's Idol tries to lure timeslot rivals into a false sense of hope by pulling in a smaller-than-usual rating, though one still large enough to crush its competition by a comfortable margin. [Variety]
· The Tribeca Film Festival happily whores itself out to Sony by allowing the studio to premiere Spider-Man 3 at their event on April 30. To its credit, however, the organization did reject an earlier proposal to temporarily rename itself the "The Spider-Man 3 Film Festival of Tribeca" as "too crass." [THR]
· Paul Haggis' The Black Donnellys takes the next step towards "official" cancellation, as NBC has pulled the show from its airwaves effective immediately. [Variety]

In what Var has dubbed Bloody Monday, but which we will counterdub Mercy-Killing Monday to emphasize the networks' compassionate desire to euthanize a handful of shows languishing in a Nielsen coma from which they are unlikely to ever awaken, Fox's The Wedding Bells, ABC's Six Degrees, The CW's 7th Heaven, and NBC's The Black Donnellys have all entered different phases of the always complex cancellation process. This morning, heavy-handed Donelleys creator Paul Haggis is using his pair of stolen Oscars to wipe away the tears he's shedding over the loss of his primetime baby, his pain compounded by Var's swift kick to the gut during this moment of vulnerability:

If all goes according to plans recently unveiled at a corporate event, 11 lucky, chosen 7-Elevens across the U.S.A. will be transformed into living Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional Simpsons convenience store that belongs to Springfield's leading Squishee purveyor, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. The promotion is timed to coincide with the July release of The Simpsons Movie, the motion picture fans have patiently waited 18 years for the opportunity to call the "worst feature-length episode ever."

• I was on American Idol (feat. Blake Lewis) [YouTube]

· To celebrate Fox's order of 13 more episodes of Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, please take a minute to once again relive the televised near-humiliation (hey, he got it right...eventually) of Pledge of Allegiance Guy. Many more special moments like that one are sure to follow! [Variety]
· The floundering First Look Studios is rocked by yet another "mutual decision" for an executive to surrender his or her job, with president Ruth Vitale announcing she's exiting her post once she makes sure Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters gets released without any marketing campaigns that terrify entire cities with their innovative techniques. [THR]
· Ocean's 13 will make its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (though out of competition). What this means to you: Nothing, as your boss is too cheap to fly you to France for the fest, but you at least might get to hear some amusing stories about the French audiences booing the film for not living up to the lofty artistic expectations set by Ocean's 12 . [Variety]
· Daniel Craig is in talks in the Fernando Meirelles drama Blindness, getting a start on the long and frustrating process of obtaining roles in which he's not asked to portray a British superspy. [THR]
· Behold the awesome power of American Idol, which can elevate even the worst, previously low-rated sitcom to unimaginable Nielsen heights! [Variety]

If you caught last night's American Idol elimination round, you may have experienced what could only be described as the kind of fever dream Paula Abdul has after taking one too many daytrips on the Percocet-Mezcal Express. What you were witnessing, however, was no opiate-induced hallucination, but something far more sinister: A Ford Motors-sponsored "music video", featuring the contestants—set adrift on a concept best described as "Let's dress you up as disco and old school hip-hop dancers! That'll be a fun kind of thing!"—performing "Float On" on the Fox backlot. It could have only been less deferential to the source material if producers has opted instead to have their budding superstars encircle Modest Mouse lead singer/songwriter Isaac Brock, beat him unconscious with a variety of blunt objects, then spin around to lower their bellbottoms and tracksuit pants and relieve themselves, Final 12-style, on his broken, bruised body.

A disappointingly coherent center American Idol judge Paula Abdul is offering us little to celebrate by way of memorable meltdowns this season. She did burst into tears last night, but who really cares about that if it isn't immediately followed by blacking out and some involuntary crowd surfing? At least we could still cling to one Idol truth (besides Ryan Seacrest being dwarfed by even the female contestants, regardless of whether or not he happens to be wearing heels), and that's that she and Simon Cowell hate each other's guts. Not so! says Abdul in a recent interview, calling Cowell "a really good friend" and likening him to an "antagonistic brother goofing on me." Alternately, she says she sees Randy Jackson as "kind of like the annoying guy who works in the cubicle next to you who says 'dawg' a lot? But like, no one really knows what he does? And he'll, like, eat the SnackWells in your top drawer when you expressly told him not to? Really, we're just co-workers. Maybe, like, once-in-a-blue-moon after-work-margarita friends, but nothing more."

• The dumbing down of TV quiz shows [WaPo via LAT]