The Vampires Give Back. An operative deep undercover in Tampa writes us: "I am stymied as to why Sam Trammell and Rutina Wesley ("Sam" and "Tara") from HBO's True Blood are in my office's conference room giving out autographs and pictures with all 500 of the employees in my Tampa, FL cable company's office. Is it normal for a show to bring its actors on a tour of Florida suburbs to shake hands with call center employees, tech staff, etc.? Is this kind of grassroots PR work a good sign for the show, or a bad one?" Gee, we don't really know, though when we stop to think about it, the Austin Nichols and Luke Perry John From Cincinnati Visits A Surf Shop Near You! tour did come just weeks before its cancellation. Take from that what you will. [Defamer]

What's to be done when you've exhausted every conceivable scenario in which to place your series's quartet of homoerotically bonded ne'er-do-wells? In Entourage's case, it means sending them to the desert with Eric "Abs of Steel" Roberts and a bag of magic mushrooms for a mind-expanding journey towards should-Vince-or-shouldn't-Vince-do-a-Benji-movie enlightenment.The result is something akin to what might happen if the CAA Death Star were to hover off from its Century City docking bay and touch down gently in the middle of the Burning Man festival. In the clip above, Ari loses the group, and in the process, all control of his perverse, stranglehold-reliant existence. Is it any wonder that as he panics among the boulders, he turns to his own rock—fiercely loyal gaysian henchman Lloyd—for guidance? With a sixth season announced today, we look forward to future episodes in which the lovable foursome pull off their socks and inject some of Roberts's premium brown sugar between their toes in a heroin-fueled attempt at divining whether or not Vinnie should take on the lead in Eight Below 2. [Entourage]

♦ Not surprisingly, ratings for SNL this past weekend exceeded expectations. Some 10 million people tuned in for Tina Fey's Sarah Palin skit. [WSJ, THR]
♦ Michelle Obama will appear on Jon Stewart on Wednesday. [HuffPo]
♦ Beverly Hills Chihuahua took the top spot at the weekend box office with $29 million. [Mojo]
♦ Joe Hagan takes a long look at the Times-owning Sulzbergers in this week's issue of New York. [NYM]
♦ AdAge has released its list of the 10 best magazines. [AdAge]
♦ Campbell Brown is working out nicely for CNN: Ratings are substantially higher than they were for Paula Zahn and she's beating Keith Olbermann most nights, too. [NYT]
♦ Ratings for Desperate Housewives continue to decline. [TVDecoder]
♦ HBO's Entourage has been renewed for a sixth season. [THR]

The Sopranos has been off the air for more than a year now. But that hasn't stopped HBO from squeezing every last penny out of the extraordinarily successful series. The latest marketing gambit: A line of Sopranos wines is now being introduced, with bottles running between $14.99 and $33.99. The vino will be the subject of a national media campaign timed for the holidays. Because nothing looks better on a festive Thanksgiving table than a bottle of wine featuring a bloody handgun. [Luxist]

♦ Now that Tina Fey is suddenly cool again, publishers are falling over themselves to sign her as an author. The bidding is up to $6 million. [NYP]
♦ Katie Couric: She's back! [AP]
♦ Footage of Elisabeth Hasselbeck feuding with the other View gals over Sarah Palin this morning. [MollyGood]
♦ Norman Lear is teaming up with HBO on a drama series about "the world of 1970s pro wrestling." [THR]
♦ NBC has picked up a remake of the Partridge Family. [THR]
♦ TV's fall lineup has been a ratings disappointment. [WSJ]
♦ Solid ratings for House and Fringe elevated Fox to No. 1 on Tuesday. [TV Decoder]
♦ Citizen journalism has its dangers. Just ask CBS! [AdAge]

Site YouTube Reviewed began banging the drum early and loudly that the original content project for YouTube from HBO Labs, Hooking Up, is terrible. They've since chronicled everyone from YouTube's content partnership wrangler George Stromoplous to one of the YouTube fameballs who appears in the show, Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams, distancing themselves from endorsing the show. And now it seems that someone at HBO is trying to juice the subscriber stats to make the show look more popular than it is.Which, granted, has a long tradition on YouTube (even Williams has admitted to gaming his view counts in his early days on the site). How might it hurt the popular video distribution platform? But once again, it's not the kind of thing advertisers like to hear — especially while YouTube's parent company, Google, has CEO Eric Schmidt telling anyone who will listen how awesomely transparent online advertising is. If YouTube doesn't act to stop a content partner from gaming the viewership numbers, it will have a hard time convincing advertisers to buy inventory when those advertisers feel some of that inventory is fraudulent. Especially when those advertisers can create distribute their own ads using YouTube for free and get reliable data for themselves by simply not manipulating audience metrics.

♦ Financial news outlets are performing well, not surprisingly. CNBC's Closing Bell saw ratings increase 70% last week. [AdAge]
♦ HBO has optioned the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons with Tina Brown producing. [Variety via NYO]
♦ Furniture mogul Eric Villency is teaming up with Cotton (yes, the industry trade group) on a web-based reality TV show. [AdAge]
♦ Sarah Palin got cozy with Rupert Murdoch last night. [Politico]
♦ Thanks to hefty tax breaks, a record 19 primetime series will be filmed in NYC in 2008-9, compared to 12 last year. [NYT]
♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain last night after the senator cancelled his scheduled appearance. [Gawker]
♦ Should Andrea Mitchell really be covering the financial crisis given her husband is former Fed chair Alan Greenspan? [CJR]

· Nicole Kidman will star in The Eighth Wonder, an action-adventure whose goal "is to be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies." Damn—comparisons were always our SAT Achilles' heel. We're just going to darken the oval next to Romancing the Stone and be done with it. [THR] · Miley Cyrus will star in a Disney movie tailor-made for the virginal superstar by author Nicholas Sparks, whom we hold personally responsible for the recent shmaltzalanche to devastate Hollywood. How can he make us blubber sufficiently if the lead actress can't even consummate her love for the soldier she reluctantly waves off to war from a sunlit dock? We shall see. [Variety] · Michael "For My Next Song, I'll Play Beethoven's Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major and Sparkle My Pants Off!" Douglas will first star as a horny auto magnate in Solitary Man. [Variety] · David Spade will star in Divorced Guys. [Variety] · True Blood already got its second season pickup after just two episode airings, with effusive network reps citing an "unprecedented" 24% increase in viewers since the premiere, who roundly found the show "a lot less awful and confusing than John From Cincinnati!" [THR]

· True Blood's premiere drew just 1.44 million viewers—about a half-million better than Tell Me You Love Me, but 2 million short of what John From Cincinnati managed to score in its slot following The Sopranos's series finale. We haven't watched it yet, because we find vampires annoying. Enough with the biting and the capes, already! [LAT]
· "The expression I use is that a 747 can't make a sharp right turn," says studio head Katherine Pope about the dilemma of attracting new viewers to NBC's Life after the show's truncated first season. However, a 747 can make a sharp downward turn, tailspin, then crash and burn. Let's hope Life doesn't. We liked it. [Variety] · Patricia Heaton and Treat Williams will star as the real world parents of a child with Tourette Syndrome in CBS MOW Front of the Class. Instead of swear words and racial epithets, however, the student in the TV version will involuntarily shout out Jell-O flavors. [THR] · Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinksi re-team for Rango, a motion-capture CG animated film about a "pet who goes on an adventure." [Variety] · Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, and Eric Roberts have been cast in indie thriller The Steam Experiment, about "six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse," pitched to investors of "Hostel with shvitzing." [THR]

HBO is creating an Internet TV show called "Hooking Up" which will feature seven YouTube-famous personalities. Philip DeFranco and Kevin Wu? Yeah, we'd never heard of them — but their videos and those of five other lucky videographers picked by HBO have generated a total of 35 million views. Why would HBO, known for high-quality productions like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and The Wire, risk tainting a brand people actually shell out money for on their monthly cable bills? HBO parent Time Warner should have released "Hooking Up" on the AOL-owned social network Bebo, and let HBO stick with content worth paying for. Here are the videos that landed their stars, inexplicably, an HBO deal:SXEPhil, "Doda Elektroda has some huge......": 4,871,621 views

• The sixth season of Project Runway has been pushed back and will not debut on Lifetime until January 2009. [EW]

· Noted shlockteur Stephen Sommers will write and direct Warner Bros.'s splashy Tarzan remake, set to push the flimsy-loincloth envelope further than any version to come before. [Variety] · Ravenous Spanish pantry-pirate Gwyneth Paltrow has hopped aboard a space skiff and escaped the CAA Death Star, having signed on with UTA on Tuesday afternoon. The direct implications this has upon your day-to-day lives should be negligible. [Variety] · Ted Danson has been cast in HBO comedy pilot Bored to Death, playing the "pompous but articulate magazine editor" mentor to Jason Schwartzman's "struggling Brooklyn writer with a drinking problem." [THR] · The Wonder Years writer-producer Bob Brush has been given a very strings-attached pilot order of Lost in the '80s, pitched as what happens when "Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets The Ice Storm," then sleeps with The Ice Storm's best friend Square Pegs, accidentally getting her pregnant and producing a son named Ordinary People. [THR] · Surprise! SAG and the AMPTP are fighting. The latest: SAG sent a 12-page letter to members outlining their problems with the producers' final offer, which they characterize as "one-sided and filled with misrepresentations." [THR]

With just a little over a week until the new season of Entourage begins, we thought we'd take a moment to salute the most complex and rewarding of all relationships in that ongoing industry sausage fest: that of Ari and Lloyd. And no better examples of their glorious co-dependency exist than in those moments when everyone's favorite double-banger-securing Zeus completely loses his shit on his fiercely loyal Gaysian henchman. Defamer videographer Molly McAleer combed through the Entourage archives to find the greatest of all spittle-flecked Ari-Lloyed exchanges—though call us biased, our favorite one didn't make the cut.

Time Warner yesterday announced some weak quarterly financials, with earnings off 26 percent. But there was a big bright spot, the media conglomerate's cable networks like HBO and CNN, where profits were up 18 percent, led by advertising gains. There's a similar situation at NBC Universal, where ratings gains at Bravo (Runway, Top Chef), MSNBC (Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews) and even the USA Network have formed a thick silver lining around the storm cloud that is the flagship broadcast network. The business-side gains add a financial dimension to the cable industry's creative golden age, described by the Times' David Carr in June and obvious to anyone with a smartly programmed DVR or Netflix queue. Cable is the swaggering golden child of television, and it's only going to get more confident, because the advertising model that's fueling all its fun happens to be perfect for a recession.

· Oh, goody! Eight-ball-faced (literally, not in the Andy Dick sense) Looney Tunes character Marvin The Martian will get his own Warner Bros. feature, in which he shall finally be reunited with his beloved eludium pu36 explosive space modulator. [Variety]
· HBO secured rights to Liza Palmer's chunk lit classic, Conversations With the Fat Girl. [Variety]
· In more HBO news—these guys are desperate for a hit! Everyone's tuning over to AMC! FUCKING AMC!!!—they've returned to executive producer Mark Wahlberg's muscled embrace, greenlighting his pilot How to Make It in America. It's about "three enterprising downtown twentysomethings who hustle their way through New York City determined to achieve the American dream," aka NYCtourage. [THR]
· ABC purchased French sitcom Fais pas ci, fais pas ca for Americanization by Samantha Who? co-EP Bob Kushell. [THR]
· Josh Lucas will star in Tim Robbins's Showtime pilot Possible Side Effects, about a pharmaceutical dynasty. The title is a humorous play on the common warnings you find on prescription drug literature. [THR]

• Keith Kelly of the Post reports that 14 of the 17 staffers at Fortune Small Business are getting the axe. [NYP]

One of the most stirringly batshit films we've seen this year, Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal debuts on HBO tonight after a successful premiere run at last month's Los Angeles Film Festival. We've tipped you previously to some of the harrowing dynamics herein: Ex-madam Heidi Fleiss nabs a land deal in Pahrump, Nev., where she'll attempt to make her comeback with an all-male brothel for women. Civic outrage, meth relapses and an inheritance of tropical birds conspire to scuttle her dream. Hilarity decidedly does not ensue.

The New York subway system is taking full advantage of its plan to sell all flat surfaces for advertising, including the outside of trains. The latest and most appropriate sponsor of the metal cattle car that you squeeze yourself into every depressing morning: Mad Men, the acclaimed show about advertising! Even if you barely miss your train as it pulls away, leaving you frustrated and abandoned, you'll still be educated about the existence of Mad Men. Sweet. More pics of the hellaciously busy interior of these message-wielding cars, after the jump.

Like it or not, it's time to let go of any qualms you may have about welcoming a successor to Harry Potter's tween-bewitching throne and embrace what will surely become the zeitgeisty-est franchise of the decade. Twilight is here, it's a little bit queer, and don't even try ignoring it. The dewy, sexy, hickey-adorned film version of the hugely successful books centered around hot teenage vampires has begun garnering its first feature stories in the glossies, and the millions of "fan girls" obsessed with the tales are mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. The new issue of EW features the film's two newbie stars on its cover, and the odd photo is setting message boards and fan sites ablaze with criticism from the series' longtime devotees. And angry fans aren't the only obstacle Twilight faces — too-cool-for-school Alan Ball has a vampire show premiering on HBO later this year and, unlike "powdered donut" Edward and "plain" Bella, his blood-suckers sit at the cool kids' table...

From the creator of The Wire! Sort of! The Iraq miniseries Generation Kill premieres this weekend on HBO, with do-no-wrong David Simon linked as co-writer/executive producer of the seven-part event. The LA Times had a look and seems to have liked it fine, despite the fingerprints of journalist and source author Evan Wright having smudged some of the central characters' "expository dialogue."