Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the show everyone but Dan Rather hates, defended The Newsroom tonight at a Television Critics Association panel with Jeff Daniels. Those reports that he fired everyone on his writing staff except his ex-girlfriend? Untrue, says Sorkin.

While we eagerly await Will McAvoy having the guts to openly demand stricter gun control laws two years from now, Newsroom creator Aaron Sorkin has canned his entire writing staff, this despite decent ratings and second season renewal. Oh, but he did keep one writer: ex-girlfriend Corinne Kingsbury.

The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's new television show for HBO, has a lot of obvious problems, dissected at length here and elsewhere. But the show at least nailed its reverence for broadcast journalism of yore, if you believe official Gawker Newsroom episode recapper Dan Rather. Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley, and, yes, Rather: they were newsmen, the show argues from the opening credits. Today's anchors are pundits and airheads.

Variety reports that HBO has picked up Eastbound & Down a fourth season. This is something of a surprise, as creators Jody Hill and Danny McBride (who also plays the show's anti-hero Kenny Powers) had said that its third season, which wrapped in April, would be its last. It was indicated in a promo after the penultimate episode that the finale would be the "season finale," as opposed to the finale finale. Little did we know that would turn out to be gospel.

If you're not one of the privileged masses who subscribe to HBO, and you still want to watch Aaron Sorkin's new series The Newsroom, here's your chance. You can now watch the entire first episode (which clocks in at just over 70 minutes) on YouTube.

The Drummer from Bad Company is set to become a grandfather once again, as People reports his daughter, Drummer from Bad Company daughter and star of Girls Jemima Kirke, is pregnant.

A counterpoint to John Cook's final Girls recap.

On tonight's Real Time, Bill Maher offered some advice to the Occupy Movement: get organized and take it to the next level. Maher wants, and believes it to be possible, that with the right moves, the Occupy Movement can be as important for driving Democratic ideology as the Tea Party is for the Republicans.

HBO today acknowledged an ongoing viral Internet campaign to convince the premium cable channel operator to allow people to subscribe to its streaming service HBO GO without signing up for the channel itself, but said it would not be making this option available — at least for now.

I bitch and bitch about Game of Thrones' tell-don't-show policy, but when this show shuts the fuck up, cuts the shit of having its characters talk about interesting things that are happening elsewhere or in the past or in the future instead of actually portraying those things, and gives us real action to sink our teeth into, it all seems worth it. At least, that was the case on last night's episode, which featured the most gorgeous display of carnage (involving green wildfire that Tyrion procured to fend off Stannis Baratheon's attack on King's Landing) I've ever seen on television.

It's graduation time and that means various notables are giving commencement addresses like nobody's business. Last week, Mitt Romney spoke at Liberty University, which provided Bill Maher with a jumping off point on tonight's Real Time. I know this is gonna shock you, but Maher isn't a big fan of any part of it.

It's become clear that Joe Biden going off script during last week's appearance on Meet the Press accelerated President Obama's statement on gay marriage, which is fine by Bill Maher. On tonight's Real Time, Maher made a plea for more of Biden's gaffes, so long as they lead to Democrats saying what they actually believe and not just what they think is politically prudent.

In the week before the premiere of HBO's Girls an average of 23 articles were published about the show every day. Veep, the network's other new half-hour comedy, was the subject of an average of 3.1 articles per day. (Data via Google Trends.) And yet Veep drew 1.7 million viewers for its premiere, while Girls picked up 1.1 million.

The appropriate response to Girls, a television program about pretty young White Nationalists seeking abortions and love in the Big City, is silence. But we are in the noise business, and today is the 21st anniversary of the death of Johnny Thunders, so here is a recap.

Bill Maher closed tonight's Real Time with a rant about how the GOP has begun to politicize issues for no other reason than being reactionary. He cited pink slime, the environment and Rick Santorum's opposition to college as evidence that the GOP isn't interested in much besides saying no to what they deem the liberal agenda. It's all part of their war against common sense.

This week, on the internet, we are talking about 25-year-old prodigy Lena Dunham's new HBO show Girls and race. (Girls and gender was last week's topic. Keep up.) On Monday, after the show's premiere, Jenna Wortham wrote on the Hairpin about her disappointment in the show's overwhelming whiteness: "[T]hese girls... are beautiful, they are ballsy, they are trying to figure it out... I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen, right alongside them."

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Today is Ian MacKaye's 50th birthday so I guess it's as good a time as any to realize you hate young people. Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization. This is a recap of it.

HBO's Game of Thrones has a lot of nudity in it, sometimes that nudity seems completely gratuitous and unnecessary. Last night, Saturday Night Live proposed a theory as to why that is.

Earlier this week, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended five games by the club for his comments about the longevity of Fidel Castro. On tonight's Real Time, Bill Maher wondered why Guillen was suspended and pontificated that maybe Fidel Castro isn't so bad, at least not when compared to some of the world's other unsavory heads of state.