According to a leaked focus-group report, NBC's new Amy Poehler sitcom Parks and Recreation is a flop. But NBC's boy-genius Ben Silverman says it's cool, because whatever—focus groups always hate on stuff, man.
· NBC's Jeff Zucker has been strongly hinting that his network's upfront presentation to advertisers may be scaled back this year, if not eliminated entirely; in lieu of the customary "dog and pony show," Zucker may instead ask lieutenant Ben Silverman to show a 30-second clip of American Gladiators injuries to a ballroom full of media buyers, then circle the room with a burlap sack into which they can place the portion of their ad budgets they'd like to spend on the Peacock's new primetime schedule. [Variety]
· Stop the presses! Sundance's money-burning glory days may have briefly returned! Focus Features has reportedly closed an early morning, locked-in-the-CAA-condo-until-someone-wildly-overpays, $10 million deal for "high-school satire" Hamlet 2. [THR]
[After the jump: The WGA/AMPTP Talks: A New Hope; Selma Blair is close to joining the NBC family; Gladiators still popular. ]
Perhaps hoping to avert an ugly incident in which obsolescent Tonight Show host Jay Leno makes a last-ditch effort to save his job by chaining himself to his desk while wrecking balls emblazoned with a cheerful peacock logo demolish his beloved Burbank studio, NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker reasserted yesterday that the show will be handed over to Conan O'Brien as planned, recent intimations that Leno isn't quite ready for early retirement notwithstanding:
Just five days after SNL's "Dick in a Box" (variously and coyly referred to as "A Special Box," "Special Treat in a Box," and "A Special Christmas Box") debuted on the show and on the YouTubes, the NY Times delivers the inside scoop on how a brave consortium of late-night programming executives, lawyers, and NBC's highest-ranking officers decided to release an uncensored version of the liberally bleeped clip on the internet, allowing fans to remove any lingering doubts that the male sex organs being sneakily proffered to the delighted women in the video may have, in fact, been referred to as "cock(s) in a box," best network decency practices be (cautiously) damned. Reports the Times:
