"Unless I’m misunderstanding something, I don’t know why, after the job Jay has done for them, why they would relinquish that... I guess empathy is the right word." [Times]

· Looks like Ben Silverman isn't the only one who should be updating his resume. After 246 episodes of Deal Or No Deal, last night marked the first time that a contestant took home the million dollar briefcase, which can't be good for The Banker's employment status. Congrats go out to Jessica Robinson but, truth be told, we still don't like her as much as the "I Can Do 200 Of These!" guy. [NBC] · Just the other week, we finally learned why Christian Bale sounded so hoarse in The Dark Knight. Now, can someone please explain why Bale and Kermit The Frog have never been seen in the same place at the same time before? If only Robert Stack were still alive... [ONTD] · Finally, a Friedberg/Seltzer production did the impossible. After failing with Meet The Spartans, Date Movie and Epic Movie, Disaster Movie managed to score a perfect 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. [Best Week Ever] · Everyone over at The CW is crowing that they managed to lure 3.4 million viewers into watching Gossip Girl's second season premiere last night. Those sound like good numbers, except when you compare it to the 7.7 million that tuned into TNT's Raising The Bar. Zack Morris will always be cooler than Serena Van Der Woodsen. [TV Week] · Hey Chauncey, Go Fuck Yourself Buddy: A Mad Men Wishlist. [This Recording]

What's the best way to get people who don't watch TV to start watching it? For starters, advertising TV shows somewhere other than on TV. Give NBC this much credit: The network, which has seen better days in the ratings, hopes to attract viewers by releasing fall season premieres on Hulu a week ahead of their television air date.Networks have been experimenting with early releases online for some time now as a way to counteract modern viewing habits such as skipping past all the network promos with a TiVo. But just a couple of weeks ago, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was telling us all that by not airing Olympic events live or letting viewers watch them online, the network was creating "excitement" via "word of mouth" by withholding the opening ceremonies. Then again, the opening ceremonies in Beijing were actually interesting. The third-place network is correctly guessing that there's no way anybody is going to be eagerly anticipating the new season of Knight Rider — which is going to need all the help it can get.

While it's hardly a secret that embattled NBC chief Ben Silverman likes to party, never have his carousing ways received the sort of harsh buzz dealt out this weekend by Nikki Finke, who spent the better part of a blockbuster post detailing how Silverman's antics are about to cost him his job. No, seriously this time! According to a variety of anonymous NBC sources, Silverman is the network's very own Man Who Wasn't There, missing meetings on a regular basis and spending the entire, crucial month of August in Beijing while his colleagues expected him to decamp for a week at most (in all fairness, those Ryan Seacrest remotes weren't going to tape themselves!). However, it seems that the NBC chief's biggest problem is EVP Teri Weinberg, a Silverman protege whose romantic involvement with an NBC showrunner caused upward-failing NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker to step in and terminate that writer's deal:

Is NBC programming whiz Ben Silverman hooked on drugs? And is Jeff Zucker hoping he quits before he has to fire him? That's what Nikki Finke has to say: "Last Thursday was Ben's first day in the office all month after attending the Beijing Olympics and guesting aboard Elisabeth Murdoch's yacht... But a pressing issue has been Silverman's partying ways, especially his excessive off-hours drinking and drug-taking, which has not only been visible to but also prompted complaints from Hollywood's TV community." [Deadline Hollywood]

· Low-budget suspense movie The Strangers, which managed to pretty effectively scare the crap out of us, is getting a sequel. It promises to cover all the rooms in a house Liv Tyler wasn't chased through by a trio of masked psychopaths in the original. [Variety] · NBC gives Chuck gets a full-season order, while America's Got Talent—which seems on course to reward a male Britney Spears impersonator $1 million—got a fourth season. [Variety] · Lonelygirl15 is returning for LG15: The Resistance. Could someone be a doll and fill Aaron Sorkin in on what's happened in the plot until now? [Variety] · ABC is hot for a comedy pilot from Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd that would follow three families as their lives are documented by a Dutch filmmaker. None of the families are Caveman-American, to our knowledge. [THR] · George Clooney is in negotiations to star in Jason Reitman's adaptation of Walter Kirn's frequent-flyer-mile-addiction novel, Up in the Air, effectively bumping this project up to First Class. (Feel free to use that, THR.) [THR]

Now that Heroes has resumed shooting after a strike-truncated, poorly received second season, star Milo Ventimiglia has less time for nachos ("uh-oh!") and more publicity rounds to make. The latest stop on his Heroes redemption tour is gay magazine The Advocate, where Ventimiglia sat down and dished to writer Brandon Voss about his frequent on-screen shirtlessness ("You do start to wonder..."), his friend John Krasinski, and a certain gossip blogger's habit of defacing his paparazzi pictures:

"Phelps will host the sketch comedy series when it premieres Sept. 13, along with musical guest Lil Wayne." A trainwreck worth watching! [Live Feed]

Going for the Bronze: Though NBC's Olympic coverage provided the network with television's most watched event anywhere, ever, in the history of the universe, that massive audience hasn't translated into major spikes of interest for NBC's fall shows like Kath & Kim and My Own Worst Enemy. The network spent 65% of its promo time on returning shows (like Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle) but failed to perk awareness for anything but the 80's retread Knight Rider. Still, before NBC shoehorns Michael Phelps into Selma Blair's thong, they've got this bit of recent history to add perspective: the Athens Olympics were used to tout quickly flushed shows like Joey and LAX. Perhaps Kath & Kim will stand on its own merits — that is, as long as they didn't advertise it during the rebellion-inducing beach volleyball marathon. [Variety]

· The Humanitas Prize has announced its short list: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Juno, and Lars and the Real Girl have all been singled out for having explored "the human condition in a way which affirms the dignity of the human person and reveals common humanity." We love those three movies so much, we wish we could just smush them together into one movie: The Diving Lars and the Junofly, a tender story about an alienated youth with "locked-in" syndrome who accidentally impregnates his teenage physical therapist, who's actually a Resusci Annie doll. OK, we'll stop now. [Variety] · ABC has gone on a pickup feeding frenzy. Ordered to series: Castle, about a horror novelist who solves crimes, The Unusuals, an NYPD cop dramedy starring Amber Tamblyn, Cupid, and—we're sorry, did we just say "an NYPD cop dramedy starring Amber Tamblyn?" We believe we did! And we're damned if we know how we're supposed to feel about that. Oh, what the hell. We're jazzed! [THR]· The Olympics gives NBC its biggest ratings in years, winning all 17 nights and earning the network an incontinence-inducing $1 billion in advertising revenues. Anyone with a medal gets a show! Just call Jeff Zucker. [Variety] · Movie download site Jaman.com closed a deal with Lionsgate that would give users access to 100 of their titles for a rental charge, though expect to pay through the nose if you expect to watch 90-minute living painting The Christmas Cottage anywhere around the holidays. [Variety] ·National Lampoon's The Legend of Awesomest Maximus will spoof movies like Gladiator, 300, and Troy. We're not jazzed. [THR] · Woody Harrelson has signed on for Zombieland, a horror comedy from the guys who brought you cult-classic reality hoax The Joe Schmo Show. We're jazzed again! [THR]

I'm sure many of you remember Matthew Mitcham, the blonde, two-hand-waving Olympic platform diver who came out (heh) of nowhere to usurp the mighty Chinese team and win a gold medal. I "heh" because Mitcham was also the only publicly out athlete at the Beijing games—he hauled himself up into the stands to give his partner a kiss after he won, though we didn't see it. Mitcham's is actually a pretty interesting story, so, yeah, why didn't it air? Because of a vast conspiracy After Elton shrieks!Well, OK, not so much shrieks as insinuates, but still AE's got the bloodhounds out, sniffing around for plots most foul. They call up a rep for NBC Sports—which broadcast Mitcham's medal ceremony online, but not on the television:

"NBC News’ strategy in hiring young Luke Russert is now clear: whenever anything happens, Brian Williams can ask Luke what his dead father thinks about it." [Wonkette]

• NBC says 211 million Americans tuned in to the Beijing Olympics, making it the most widely-viewed Games in television history. And merchandise sales were way up, too. [TV Decoder, TV Week]

Set aside the money NBC minted broadcasting the Olympics to American TV sets. The network is hinting it wants to give internet video a bigger role in its coverage — and advertising sales — around the 2012 games in London, where the time differential makes it awkward to broadcast live events in the U.S. So how did NBC do Webcasting the 2008 games? The network bragged to the Times about doubling its 2004-2006 Olympic traffic. But somehow Yahoo, with none of NBC's exclusive footage or capital outlay, managed to draw even more people to its Olympics section than NBC, according to Nielsen. And NBC made a pathetic $6 million in video ad revenue from the Olympics — a quarter of what CBS Sports made streaming a college basketball tournament earlier this year. The problem? NBC saved all the good stuff for television. Writes the Journal:

The number eight is considered lucky in China, and so everyone assumed that's why the Beijing Olympics opened on August 8, aka 08/08/08. This little chestnut gave the media a mildly exotic (but easy to understand!) piece of Chinese culture to talk about in their inevitable stories on the Olympic host country, and also something interesting to say about the opening ceremonies before they happened. But NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol explodes the myth of 8-8-08 in the Times today, saying superstition is "not really why the Olympics started then." The real reason? Money. (Duh.)

According to an eMarketer estimate, NBC's Olympics videos online would have generated only $5.75 million if paid for on a CPM basis. That number is likely low; the network may have signed flat-rate contracts for brand exposure tied into larger sponsorship deals, rather than bother with cost-per-impression deals. Still, low views on the Olympics will make it harder for NBC to charge more for video ads down the road. And why pay for online ads when sponsors get buzz for free through social networks? [TV Week] (Original photo by AP/Greg Baker)

Currently enmeshed in a terrible global conspiracy involving 17-year-old girls, U.S. District Judges, a shadowy cabal of vampires (and most likely the Stonemasons), Girls Gone Wild proprietor Joe Francis is on the hunt for a way to restore his good name — and there's no one more willing to help than Donald Trump. Already the crown prince of magnanimity thanks to his selfless (some might say tear-inducing) bail-out of the beleaguered Ed McMahon, Hollyscoop says that the billionaire and the porn purveyor are set to team up:

As we take stock of the winding-down Summer Olympics, not every story emerging from Beijing can deal with an upbeat panoply of would-be stars and swimmer abs. There's plenty to improve on for 2012, starting with women's beach volleyball — an athletic travesty so grave that readers of one TV blog have mounted sort of an accidental revolt against its continuation four years from now in London:

· Ben Affleck will star in Mike Judge's Extract, about the trials and tribulations of "a flower extract factory owner." We know the punchline is "Ow My Essence of Citrus Blossom!" We're just not sure how the rest goes. [Variety] · The Zurich Film Festival will bestow their highest honor, The Golden Herring, upon the franchise-defibrillating achievements of aging action mercenary, Sylvester Stallone. [Variety] · NBC Universal has acquired U.K.'s Carnival Film & Television, the first step in their ruddily cherubic child-king's seven-year plan towards world domination. [THR] · The House Bunny and Legally Blonde writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith have sold ABC Studios a script for a potential series based on their "champagne-and-therapy-fueled" creative process. Working title: Set-Ups and the City. (Now who wants a show about our malt-beverage-and-hackery-fueled creative process?) [THR] · Lifetime ordered six episodes of Blonde Charity Mafia, a documentary series about young fundraising socialites in D.C. Couldn't they have squeezed the word "Sluts" in the title somewhere? That would have really sold it. [Variety]

Gemini Division is NBC's new online-only science fiction series consisting of five-minute episodes starring Rosario Dawson as a New York detective trying to find her fiance's murderer. Instead of disruptive traditional ads, producers Electric Farm Entertinament incorporated blatant product placements right into the show! Genius, right? "Terrible," sums up one of the fourteen nearly all-negative comments posted to Gemini Division's Hulu page. "Take the worst elements of Cloverfield (shaky camera and retarded talking) and throw in blatant ads plus a hot girl stifled with sh1tty lines," agrees another. The one positive reaction has, of course, been bubbled up to the top of the list: "I enjoyed this a lot ... exceeded expectations."