The moment that hit-starved Fox executives have been anxiously awaiting is finally here: the first overnight American Idol Nielsens, huge enough to erase the bitter memories of a dozen canceled OJ confession specials or failed sitcoms. The sixth season premiere of America's favorite talent show of the damned drew a (preliminary) average of 37.3 million viewers, and earned an 18-49 rating unseen since The One Where Chandler Takes Out His Pals And Then Turns The Gun On Himself (well, that's the way we like to remember it). Var offers perspective on the staggering opening night numbers:

While this just-discovered video of American Idol judge and serial technical difficulty victim Paula Abdul giving an interview to a Fox Dallas affiliate's morning show is decidedly lighter on the slurry, incoherent, and fidgety delights that made her recent Seattle and San Francisco appearances instant classics of the "What the hell is she on?" genre, it does have a special moment in which Abdul closes her eyes for a full six seconds, prompting her concerned inquisitor to ask the subject if she's a little "sleepy." At the conclusion of the interview, the nodding-off footage is replayed and the matter is turned over for consideration by the local morning show tribunal, who after being informed that "the producers" cleared the interview with the explanation that Abdul was "tired," offer their opinions in between fits of uncomfortable laughter, ranging from "Wow...I've never been that tired! The last time I was that tired I was asleep!" to "Obviously, she was a little [finger quotes] 'out of it'" to "Did she have the flu or something maybe?" We commend "the producers" for authorizing the clip to air, allowing audiences to decide on their own if Abdul's unexpected power-nap was merely the product of junket exhaustion, or the sudden metabolizing of the Klonopin-and-wheatgrass smoothie with which the Idol judge begins each grueling day of publicity obligations.

· A tip to those easily freaked out by the way 24 dramatizes the methods that terrorists can use to wipe you out: You might want to skip tonight's episode.
· Britney Spears dropped $40k to stay at the two-story Hugh Hefner Sky Villa at the Palms over the weekend, which includes a fee for the concierge to keep the kids busy at the slot machines while mommy and her new friend test out the Jacuzzi.
· Compared to the bi-curious pain that Miss Nevada USA put Donald Trump through, you'd think he'd be pretty excited that Miss New Jersey USA merely was impregnated by her live-in boyfriend. And the Miss USA folks really move fast, as the runner-up who assumed the NJ tiara due to her predecessor's inability to uphold the pageant's anti-knocking-up bylaws already has her headshot in the place of honor on MissNewJerseyUSA.com.
· Stars Killed By Gunfire: Perhaps the most morbid local TV station website slideshow we've ever seen. A real achievement!
· Cocktail conversation topics to avoid with director Taylor Hackford: "'Ask him what he's done since 'Ray' - that's guaranteed to get you punched out,' one pal of the couple helpfully advised."

UPDATE: Want another one? Go here. There was apparently a whole via-satellite junket full of uncomfortable moments!

• Paula Abdul - What is she smokin'??? [YouTube via The Evil Beet]

· Gail BermanWatch:Var reads this morning's LAT story about Berman's imminent departure from Paramount and puts in some calls at the studio, getting a no comment and a promise that a statement about the situation is forthcoming. Meanwhile, the Reporter updates that "a source close to the executive" says Berman is negotiating a separation settlement. We're on pins and needles over here as we await the forwarding of a heartbreaking press release. [Variety, THR]
· Madonna's Maverick Films and HBO Films combine their resources to lock up the highly coveted, non-Johnny Knoxville part of the Jackass collective for the wacky firefighter comedy Hosed, in which we assume Steve-O and the gang do nothing but give each other firehose enemas and test the limits of their genitals' resistance to open flame. [THR]
· Paramount will sell its movies on iTunes. In a statement about their move to exploit the digital platform, studio boss Brad Grey made no comment on Gail Berman's reportedly imminent departure. [Variety]
· Fox House "easily trounced" (is there any other way?) L&O: Criminal Intent and the People's Choice Awards in the ratings last night, giving the network a nice win as it awaits next week's return of Nielsen juggernaut American Idol. [THR]

Having defeated a raft of lawsuits aimed at removing scenes that various "victims" of Kazakhstan's leading documentarian found to portray their racism/misogyny/dinner parties in an unflattering light, the Borat DVD is scheduled to be released on DVD March 6th without any changes to the original theatrical version. [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, 'Sex and the City'-related Pilot Pick-up Edition: ABC picks up Cashmere Mafia ("the next generation of Sex and the City. ") and Brett Ratner's Women's Murder Club ("CSI meets Sex and the City"), while NBC goes straight to the source, greenlighting SATC author Candace Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle. [THR]
It's been approximately five minutes since we've mentioned Donald Trump, so: The Donald and producer Mark Burnett are being sued for age discrimination by a rejected Apprentice applicant, who claims the show favors the young and hot over the old and litigious. [Variety]
Fox wiped out all Monday night competition with its BCS championship game between Florida and Ohio State, but NBC's Deal or No Deal and CBS comedy block still perform respectably. Once again, Studio 60 continued its hiatus and thus had no momentum-killing effect on NBC's Nielsen fortunes. [THR]
· Scooby Doo creator Iwao Takamoto dies at 81. The cause of death is officially "heart failure," but we suspect foul play by a disgruntled local farmer wearing a rubber mask. [Variety]

Mere hours after Fox shocked the world by announcing that director James Cameron had ended a decade of well-publicized indecision by choosing a project called Avatar as his long-awaited follow-up to Titanic, Paramount proudly revealed that it was getting into the M. Night Shyamalan business by hiring the master of gotcha! cinema to adapt a Nickelodeon TV series into a possible movie franchise. The name of this high-profile undertaking? You probably already see where this is going: Avatar: The Last Airbender. The projects have nothing in common except the small matter of their nearly identical titles, but both studios are already claiming sole ownership of the name, according to Var:

Prodded perhaps by the electric pink tazer zaps of an increasingly emboldened and networked queer gossip community, a trend has emerged in which noted aspiring-astronaut-boy-band-members and male TV personalities have reluctantly emerged from their anal-retentively organized closets. Not Wentworth Miller, however, who in a recent interview with the Australian AP made it clear that there will be no People magazine covers featuring the Prison Break star under bold yellow letters announcing his enthusiastic appreciation of sex with hot men:

Fans inclined to take Fox up on its above-referenced request to send in videos explaining how Seth Cohen's ability to lay the hottest chick in school despite being a comics-obsessed social pariah helped them kick their cutting habits may want to hold off on their submissions, as the network today finally made the long-awaited announcement that it's euthanizing the struggling series. Series creator Josh "I'm Too Busy With Other Stuff To Even Notice This Is Happening" Schwartz puts a happy face on the news in the Fox press release about the show's demise:

We pass along the above Fox.com promotional clip for 24's upcoming premiere not only because the idea of Santa Claus using CTU resources to infiltrate a chimney-free stronghold is certainly cute enough to waste two minutes of an already useless pre-holiday workday on, but to point out its missed opportunity to appeal to the series' hardcore fans: When the little girl opens that present in the final frames, it really should've contained the freshly severed head of a terrorist (a double-agent elf who sold him out as part of a convoluted plan to divert a toy shipment to the Middle East?) that Santa had to kill to ensure the completion of his Yuletide mission. Still, not a bad effort.

The aborted O.J. Simpson If I Did It confessional book and TV special has already claimed the livelihood and reputation of publisher Judith Regan—who may or may not have hubristically blamed her downfall on the machinations of a secret society of dreidle-spinning ill-wishers—but that brings little comfort to the victims' families; particularly Fred Goldman, who watched in disbelief as Simpson told interviewers he'd already spent whatever blood money he'd made from the deal, yet has seen none of the $38 million awarded to him in the civil ruling over his son's wrongful death. Goldman filed suit against Simpson today, and, according to the court papers posted by The Smoking Gun, he's coming for News Corp. next:

Good news, heathens/Satanists/church-burning Nordic black metal bands: according to a study by nutbag finger-waggers show business watchdog group the Parents Television Council, the idiot box is twice the incubator of prime-time Godlessness that it was a year ago. And in perhaps the least surprising finding in the history of crackpot research projects, Fox is leading the charge against the faithful. Reports the LAT:

· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Back to the Jungle, Again Edition: Warner Bros. and producer Jerry Weintraub are developing a "new take" on Tarzan; only the potential involvement of director Guillermo del Toro gives us hope the project might evolve into something other than an excuse to put Ashton Kutcher in a loincloth. [Variety]
Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, dies at the age of 83. [THR]
Director RJ Cutler will follow around Vogue's Anna Wintour as she prepares the magazine's fifty-pound fall fashion issue, hoping to capture documentary footage of the assistant-abusing atrocities fictionalized in The Devil Wears Prada. [Variety]
· CBS wins a "quiet" Thursday night in the ratings behind CSI and Survivor; Meanwhile, The OC continues to tank. How long until they stunt-kill Chino or Seth? [THR]
Scott Rudin and Miramax are adapting Pulitzer-winning play Doubt for film. Playwright John Patrick Shanley will write and direct the movie version, planning on using a liberal amount of NY location shooting to avoid that not-so-fresh, "this still feels like a play" feeling that afflicts so many stage-to-screen adaptations. [Variety]

A teaser trailer for Live Free Or Die Hard intended to premiere in front of Eragon and Pursuit of Happyness today was "accidentally" leaked online yesterday afternoon by Yahoo! (the offending page was quickly pulled), a completely unorchestrated error that resulted in the clip's immediate proliferation on the YouTubes. (Egads! What will the studio do to counteract the publicity disaster represented by a fully finished movie commercial getting out 15 hours early? Heads will roll!) At the risk of becoming party to Fox's transparent ploy to build buzz for the resurrection of its moribund "desperate guy fighting terrorists all by himself" franchise, we present the teaser, in which so much shit blows up and so many cars are launched through the air in a single minute (without a hint of plot) that we wouldn't have been surprised to see the words "A BRETT RATNER FILM" pass across the screen.

We missed this pretty dead-on Mad TV parody of Studio 60 back when it originally aired in November, due largely to the fact that we had no idea that Mad TV is still on the air. (Usually when we say that, we're just being wiseasses, but we genuinely thought the show was canceled two years ago—hey, even their official website thinks they only went 10 seasons.) But now, thanks to the power of YouTube, we're offered a peek into a parallel television universe, where the Sorkinesque patter crackles rather than grates ("Dammit! Can anyone here be a fluffer, is a fluffer, *know* a fluffer?!"), where we fully believe in the talent of Savannah, their featured performer, and where the stakes are appropriately high—we find ourselves not only caring deeply about our tumescent boys at King's Air Force Base in Bellevue, Illinois, but believing that if their rocks are not gotten off, national security would, in fact, be compromised. Enjoy your all too brief trip to Studio 69 on Van Nuys Boulevard.

Fox orders eight episodes of the Mark Burnett game show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Unfortunately, the competition won't pit adults against school kids, just ask them questions from fifth grade textbooks. The children will, however, be on hand as lifelines and to remind their elders how stupid they've become in their dotage, a decreased mental capacity probably resulting from watching the network's brain-smoothing reality TV programming. [Variety]
Frequent Academy Award nominee (but zero-time winner) Ennio Morricone will receive an honorary Oscar for his legendary score-composing work, a recognition the Academy hopes will make up for decades of painful snubs. [THR]
Johnny Depp's shingle goes on an acquisition spree, buying up the film rights to three books and hiring writer D.V. DeVincentis to adapt Nick Hornby's lighthearted suicide novel, A Long Way Down. [Variety]
The Devil Wears Prada actress and Texas fright wig model Anne Hathaway enters the supernatural thriller part of her career, signing up to star in Passengers, the story of a grief counselor to whom freaky, Sarah Michelle Gellar-level shit inevitably happens. [THR]
Film production company Bauer Martinez celebrates the holidays by laying off 20 percent of its staff, citing the recent bombing of their Van Wilder sequel and Harsh Times as reasons for the Yuletide firings. Merry Christmas, new job hunters! [Variety]

Following quickly after yesterday's ruling against the slave-owners'-rights-espousing frat boys seeking to have their scene in the Borat movie removed from the DVD release, comes another lawsuit brought against the filmmakers by a South Carolinian claiming to have been duped by the prankster now famous the world over, Sacha Baron Cohen. In a scene that never made it to the movie's final cut, Borat earns some money as a bathroom attendant at an upscale restaurant. It's a short sequence that has made the rounds on TV and online (but has since been pulled down by YouTube 2.0, Lame Edition), and now its full-bladdered mark is suing to ensure his Pee of Shame never sees the DVD extras light of day:

For more than two television seasons, Orange County has enjoyed the free publicity (and definite article value-add) provided by relatively low-rated but culturally influential Fox dramedy The O.C., which week after week portrayed the county as an incredibly glamorous teen playground where the spoiled children of successful citizens party by the beach, haunt shopping malls, and listen to arena-headlining indie rock bands in tiny venues friendly to underage music fans. Today's LAT notes that the tourism boost "The" O.C.'s experienced could be imperiled by the cancellation that seems inevitable for the struggling series, as fans like this one may no longer crisscross the globe to briefly live out their TV-inspired dreams: