Trump: Barron, say hello to the group.
Barron: Haawdow!
Trump: And Barron hopefully some day will be a great entrepreneur. Melania, what do you think?
Melania: [Unintelligible] Vot vant do ven you grau up?
Barron: Beeednees.
[Laughter]
Melania: Beeezneesman. Zats riiiight. Like you daddee?
Trump: That is pretty amazing actually.
Barron: Daddee!
Melania: Daddee's a beezneesman. And vot doz daddee beeldeeng?
Barron: House.
Melani: Chauuuus.
Trump: He's doing well. Just 18 months old...
Carol: Wow.
Trump: ...and he's doing really well.

A Seinfeld sitcom denial! "NBC and Jerry Seinfeld shot down a New York Post report Friday that the comic was in talks with the network about a new sitcom. 'There's nothing to it,' said NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks." Pressed if there was even an outside chance of a special Seinfeld-themed Deal or No Deal, in which Newman, Uncle Leo, Soup Nazi, Susan, and the rest of the supporting players hoisted aluminum briefcases in place of the regular models, Marks simply pressed her lips tightly, turned an imaginary key at the corner of her mouth, and tossed it away. [Yahoo/AP]

Jerry Seinfeld hasn't had a whole lot to do since his seminal sitcom left the airwaves (completely voluntarily, despite what Larry King might have thought); his surfeit of downtime has been primarily filled slandering his wife's plagiarism accuser and shitting CGI honey-pats on the Oscars podium. It turns out, however, that Seinfeld will not sit idle much longer:

So how did NBC's Bravo lose not one but all three founders of the unfettered TV review site, Television Without Pity, it bought a year ago? The cable network disclosed this week, in a blog post, that Sars (Sarah D. Bunting), Wing Chun (Tara Ariano), and Glark (David T. Cole) were all leaving the 10-year-old site "to pursue dreams and ambitions that will take them beyond TWoP."

What does NBC's revolutionary, 52-week programming schedule mean for you, the couchbound summer viewer with no interest in interacting with your children or lowering your cholesterol? Lots of really long, really crappy reality TV! Marketed under the tagline "All-American Summer," many of your TV-wasteland favorites are returning in super-sized, 90-minute episodes (presumably because it was really hard to follow the action of America's Got Talent when it was confined to the hour-format).

Friday Night Lights, that Texas high-school football drama with a surprisingly faggy fan base, has been saved. Usually well-informed blogger, Nikki Finke, says the NBC series will be distributed on Direct TV; that's enough to offset lackluster ratings and bring the critically-acclaimed show back for a third season. Watch this time! The characters, particularly the football coach and his harried wife, have a quality rare on TV, credibility. And even foreign snobs, who know nothing about sports, get into Friday Night Lights. It must be good. After the jump, disabled former football star, Jason, begs a girl he barely knows to have his baby.

While most of America has shown only a passing interest in Semi-Celebrity Apprentice (an interest that continues to fade each week), we have found it to be one of the few great small-screen joys of this strike-ravaged season. Not because the challenges are particularly interesting, mind you; our interest lies mainly in observing this pack of Type-A C-Listers trade on their varying levels of "fame" and hubris like social currency (see: Stephen Baldwin in the clip above). Rarely are the challenges on Donald Trump's resurrected show about who has a better grasp on the four Ps; rather, it's more about watching these fame-hungry jackals tear down their competitors' self-worth while attempting to build theirs up. As close-to-brilliant as the show is in its current incarnation, we can only imagine how subversively stupendous it could be if Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin were steering the ship instead of Mark Burnett. [NBC.com]

· Count the things wrong with this sentence: Bumped, a modern-day version of The Breakfast Club set at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, has been given a greenlight, with McG protege Anna Mastro attached to direct. [THR]
· SAG StrikeWatch threat alert: Honeysuckle! The actors guild won't start negotiating until April at the soonest. Asked for a reason, president Alan Rosenberg paused for a moment, then offered, "Oh, who are we kidding. I'm a slave to the draaaamaaaaa." [Variety]

Quarterlife, the stapled-together-for-prime-time Web-video series about twentynothing artists, flopped so hard that NBC is kicking it off the team. It sucked in a measly 3.1 million viewers during its NBC debut last night — half what programs on ABC and CBS pulled. As penance, "Quarterlife" will be riding the pine on Bravo's minor-league roster. Ben Silverman, cochairman of NBC Entertainment, described the original deal to bring Quarterlife to the airwaves as a "revolutionary step in the creation of television." In retrospect, it's easy to say he should never have bought the show, if only because watching Quarterlife makes me want to punch myself in the face. But would any other Web video have fared better. Perhaps, if NBC had followed this playbook:

NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker told a hall full of future Harvard MBAs yesterday that Steve Jobs booted NBC television from the iTunes store last summer because Zucker merely asked to experiment with show pricing. In fact, Zucker went on, NBC Universal films are now a part of the iTunes movie store only because Jobs bowed to NBC's demand for variable pricing. It's a convenient narrative, but not what actually happened.

· If the concept of the two names Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher (Tyrashton?) melding into a single, reality-TV -producing force for ABC would drive you to incontinence with excitement, well, maybe you should take a bathroom break before reading this story. [THR]
· Quarterlife, the drama from the creators of thirtysomething that started as a pilot at ABC, then got resuscitated for MySpace, and finally was resurrected on NBC, tanked last night, posting a 1.6 rating/4 share. The series about "twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation" was doomed to be outdated before it ever reached a wide audience, already replaced with far more timely takes on the same material, like ABC's mid-season replacement, Tumblr Road. [Variety]

· In case you missed it—and apparently many, many of you did—it was the Oscars last night. "The Awards averaged a 21.9 rating/33 share. That's down a sharp 21% from last year and the lowest on record in at least 20 years." [THR]
· Martin Scorsese and his widow-peaked muse Leonardo DiCaprio have pre-sold their latest collaboration, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane novel Shutter, to foreign markets for record-breaking amounts. Explained one Italian distribution rep, "That Leo. He, how do you say, nails hot models? And we love the little eyebrows-one, and his little movies. Very good!" [THR]

When I was a lot younger, I taped — onto VHS! — all of the original Star Trek episodes when they aired at 3 a.m. on Friday nights, so I could watch them later. If only I had waited 13 years. CBS has put all three seasons of Star Trek online for anyone to view, along with a number of other old shows to the Audience Network, including The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O and MacGyver.

The plight of Friday Night Lights is a familiar one. Everybody likes it, but its ratings have been as handicapped as Jason Street. So, what's a network to do? First NBC tried moving it to Friday, then they tried injecting an off-putting murder subplot, but still no Nielsen love. Then the nice folks at bestweekever.tv got in on the act with their "Save Friday Night Lights Campaign" involving light bulbs and a petition, but even that was kiboshed by the Vh1 brass. Just when things were looking like the show would go the way of the dodo and Arrested Development, a new hope has arisen.

· Hollywood Out of Ideas: Holy Shit, Now They're Raiding the Game Closet Edition. Universal signs a six-year deal with Hasbro to produce "at least four feature films based on branded properties." Among the classic toys and boardgames in their stable: Monopoly, Candy Land, and Ouija. Bay + Candy Land + Giant Fucking Gumdrops + Marshmellow Explosions = Wicked. [Variety]
· The NBC Universal Super-Exec League of Silver Man, The Zucker, and The Phantom Graboff have connected their powerful Peacock Rings and once again produced the impossible: a 52-week programming schedule. You read that right: 52 weeks. They are truly amazing. [Variety]
· Variety sticks fork in this year's Oscar telecast, declares it done. [Variety]

The first thing I notice about Marshall Herskovitz is he's the worst writer to ever appear on Slate. The creator of "My So-Called Life," explaining how he moved from TV to the Internet and back to TV, starts the story of his show Quarterlife with a feudalism metaphor. He then switches to an even poorer sea metaphor: "If, as they say, it's a vast sea of information, the first thing to realize is that this sea is only accessible from certain harbors called browsers, like Internet Explorer or Safari." Also web sites are boats and the sea is invisible! This guy really knows his audience. What makes this so painful is that Marshall successfully left TV, started a popular web show, kept ownership, sold the show to NBC (because while the Internet is the future, TV is still where the money is), still kept creative control setting a positive network TV precedent, and thus changed the future for thousands of indie creators. But in a terrible way, because Marshall Herskovitz hates online video.

NBC will stream old TV shows on NBC.com, just like already does through Hulu. And through NBC Direct. And on the box in your living room. [SAI]

NBC perfect storm/D-girl disdainer/nerd-hating prom king Ben Silverman has long been filthy rich in the kind of programming savvy that's resulted in translated foreign hits like The Office and Ugly Betty and resurrected, nostalgic sensations like Knight Rider and American Gladiators, but following the just-announced sale of his Reveille Productions to a British firm for $125 million, his net worth will finally approach the value of the intimidating treasure-pile of his primetime creativity.

Who could forget that disconsolate look on Carson Daly's face when we caught up with him at CES in Las Vegas, lamenting the absence of the beloved staff of gag writers that make each and every episode of Total Late Night Live a journey worth taking (if you can't afford cable, and CBS comes in really fuzzy regardless of where you point your bunny ears). But news of the strike's resolution isn't likely to do much to raise the spirits of the crestfallen talk show host, as the network has celebrated their return with a hearty round of axings. Deadline Hollywood Daily reports:

Ben Silverman is the hard-partying, 37-year golden boy of NBC's entertainment division, and until this week had only one real blemish on his record: the conflict of interest in his buying for NBC many shows he himself created, though his production company, Reveille. No worries, though, because his "close friend" Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, has taken his production company off his hands and given $125 million in return. The only wrinkle is that Silverman and Murdoch are still considered sufficiently tight that Silverman has to double-check decisions involving the production company the same way he did when he owned the thing. The friends go back 10 years, and Silverman was once Murdoch's agent. Even with the headaches, the deal is still a wise move; Silverman's financial conflict goes away, and he deepens his relationship with a fellow up-and-coming media executive and her dynastic family by becoming one of her major clients. [LA Times via Time]