New Line is the latest studio to prove that any pitch in the form of "Will Ferrell is a(n) [occupation for which Will Ferrell seems hilariously ill-suited] is an instant greenlight, signing up the actor for Semi-Pro, in which Ferrell will put on the ball-huggingest pair of shorts ever conceived by a wardrobe department while portraying "Jackie Moon, the flamboyant owner-player-coach of the fictional Flint, Mich., Tropics in the final year of the American Basketball Assn." Woody Harrelson will co-star, though it's not clear if he's playing the complimentarily dim-witted sidekick or Ferrell's cocky rival. [Variety]
Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and Arrested Development writer Richard Day are adapting the BBC series The Thick of It for American television, apparently hoping to find some way to translate the wholly foreign concept of "bureaucratic ineptitude" in British governance to the flawless law-making processes of Congress. [THR]
The Weinstein Co. claims that NBC and The CW are refusing to air commercials for the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing because they criticize the president, a burgeoning censorship controversy that should cripple Harvey Weinstein's efforts to raise public awareness of their free-speech-centered film. [Variety]
ABC orders four more scripts from Help Me Help You, The Nine, and Men in Trees, while NBC orders three more from Studio 60; we'll leave it to you to figure out which series the networks actually want to nurture with a show of faith, and which ones they're hoping will write themselves out of a full-season episode order with further sketch-comedy musings on Nancy Grace's inadequacies as a cable news journalist. [THR]
Hollywood Out Of Ideas, Faux Snuff Films Edition: Rogue Pictures is remaking Faces of Death, the cult horror flick supposedly depicting the actual deaths of its accidental "stars," promising enough gore and shock value for a YouTube-desensitized generation no longer stirred by endless replays of "trampoline basketball." [Variety]

· The Coen Brothers and George Clooney—the inspired pairing to which we attribute our ongoing addiction to huffing Brylcreem—reteam for Burn After Reading, "a spy caper about a CIA agent who loses the disc of the book he is writing." Yes, he plays the CIA agent. No, he doesn't lose any fingernails. [THR]
· ABC has won the 18-49 demo for the first five weeks of the season, thanks to returning powerhouses like Grey's Anatomy and Lost, and new, breakout hit Ugly Betty. NBC points to Powerpoint projection reading, "Heroes: #1 with America's men!" emits faintly audible fart, slinks back to chair. [Variety]
· David Cunningham, director of ABC's controversial The Path to 9/11, is shifting gears to direct The Dark Is Rising, a fantasy film based on a series of children's books in which a lazy, horny Warlock-in-Chief named Klinton allows unimaginable atrocities to beset a peace-loving people. [Variety]
· Sarah Jessica Parker replaces Rachel Weisz in Smart People, playing widower Dennis Quaid's love interest. Dennis Quaid's best acting in years comes when he feigns excitement at news of the recasting. [Variety]
· Bravo picks up six more episodes of Work Out, the gripping reality drama in which we follow lesbian trainer extraordinaire Jackie Warner dodge whatever flying stemware her latest de-institutionalized girlfriend happens to launch at her head at any given moment. [THR]

Realizing that Borat's imminent opening effectively ends his "innocent Kazakh documentarian who doesn't understand why he can't purchase sex from shopgirls at The Gap" ruse, Sacha Baron Cohen is already working on the next character (fat suit? age make-up? differently colored nut-sling?) he'll inhabit for a top-secret movie he's expected to shoot next summer. [Variety]
In arguments that the FCC must relax their rules on large media conglomerates, CBS manages to get a dig in on NBC: "Four years ago, when the FCC last reviewed its broadcast-ownership rules, the YouTube.com domain name had not even been registered, the first Windows version of the audio iPod was just rolling out, Google was only a search engine, cable companies sold primarily video packages, and telephone companies sold primarily voice service....and NBC was the most popular broadcast network thanks to its high-rated sitcom 'Friends' airing in the first hour of primetime." Ouch. We'll spare you the punchline, where they mention NBC's layoffs. You get the point already. [THR
Charlize Theron helps out boyfriend Stuart Townsend by lending her star power to The Battle in Seattle, his directing debut. Cute! [Variety]
Is it pre-Oscar awards season already? The Independent Film Project announces the nominees for its Gotham Awards, which include Half Nelson, Babel, and Little Miss Sunshine. [THR]
The placement of TV episodes online by networks and studios hardly seems like news anymore, but Fox will show the first two episodes of the new season of The OC on MySpace and their station sites before they air, and Warner Bros, TV hopes to entice people to start watching The Nine by streaming its pilot episode. [Variety]

• SIZZLER: The View vs. Law & Order! It's On! [BestWeekEver.TV]

Believe it or not, we take no pleasure in Studio 60's consistently anemic ratings—should NBC eventually cut its losses and send to Cancellation Valhalla the show the network once believed would deliver it to a Nielsen Viking orgy, it will probably just push new hit Heroes back to 10 p.m. and offer it a two-hour lead-in of people shouting at briefcases, robbing us of our enjoyable Tuesday morning debates about how an episode we thought was going to be about Matthew Perry trying to get laid by bimbos who din't know what "writing" is could instead get clogged with stories about senile blacklist victims, resentful parents from Columbus who've been locked in an underground bunker with no access to the pop culture of the past half-century, and black comics getting plucked from obscurity and staffed on the show based on a poorly articulated joke about his barber's insufficient profit margins on high-quality marijuana sales. In any case, the overnight ratings for last night's installment don't look good, especially when framed as a "momentum stopper." THR runs the numbers:

[Note: UPDATE about the misguidedness of the above graphic follows after the jump] Today's NY Post reports that Friday Night Lights will "quietly" be taking over Studio 60's spot on the schedule this Monday night, a once-off shift that can be read as a) an attempt to expose S60's scarce-but-rich viewers to the compelling, and even lower-rated, world of Texas high school football, b) a chance to give S60 a one-week breather from the crushing expectations the network once placed on it as their primetime savior, or c) the precise rearrangement of deck-top furniture on the doomed ocean liner of NBC's 10 p.m. timeslot. The network is publicly and firmly on the side of Option A, telling the Post:

When NBC Universal announced significant layoffs and a $750 million slashing of its operating expenses yesterday, it was clear they meant business, but we imagined it would take the lurching corporate behemoth quite some time to implement its various plans to save money. An operative within the rapidly depopulating NBC Uni empire reports that the company is much more organizationally nimble that we could have imagined:

More on NBC's Layoffs 2.0: Corporate hatchetman Jeff Zucker says that the 700 pinkslips they're expected to hand out aren't some kind of punishment for Aaron Sorkin's inability to singlehandedly save their primetime schedule from fourth place. OK, he didn't mention Sorkin specifically, but we know what he was getting at. [Variety]
The Academy releases its list of the 61 countries that successfully submitted work for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, including first time entrant Kazakhstan—which will require its representative filmmakers to spend any acceptance speech time decrying the cultural inaccuracies contained in Borat. [THR]
Still more on Layoffs 2.0: NBC president Kevin Reilly thinks that the company's bold decision to fire a bunch of people may look "fairly drastic right now," but will seem "forward-thinking" once all of his competitors catch Downsizing Fever. [Variety]
· The Project Runway finale sets a Bravo ratings record "by a huge margin," topping the previous marks set by Runway's season premiere and a very special 2004 episode of Queer Eye in which Kian nearly came to blows with a homophobic fraternity brother who misunderstood what the makeover-specialist meant when he said, "Take off your shirt, it's time for your manscaping." [THR]
The Jim Henson company hires Ahmet Zappa to write a treatment for a Fraggle Rock feature film. We refuse to get excited until we hear that Dweezil is doing the music. [Variety]

• You ever get so incapacitated by the incredible number of jokes that you could possibly do about a story that you just bury it in a linkdump? Because sometimes we do. [FBW]
• The dog ate the Times' and the Trib's homework. [NYT]
• Network television as we know it is apparently dead. This is what happens when you put Jeff Zucker in charge of things. [WSJ]
• Mean Dan Abrams won't answer sweetie Rachel Sklar's questions concerning long overdue canning of Crosby, Carlson. [ETP]
• Jesus Christ, Crown will buy anything. [NYP]
• Did you know that the magazine industry is starting to embrace the Web? Of course you did. But confirmation from Jon Friedman always makes it seem a little more legitimate. [Marketwatch]
• Sheryl Stolberg is gay for Tony Snow. [NJ]

· Retiring, media-shy actor James Woods on the current state of Hollywood cinema: "I look at movies and they're all so f@&^ing terrible. People ask, 'Why aren't movies more successful?' It's really a simple answer: It's because they stink. Three simple words: Because they f@&^ing stink. That's four words, but you can't write the f@&^ing word. They stink, they stink, they stink, what's wrong with you? They stink. Do better movies. ... Finally, I saw a good movie - 'The Departed." And look what it took: It took Marty Scorsese, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, (screenwriter) Bill Monahan - and it's based on another movie."
· Haley Joel Osment today pleaded no contest to drunk driving and drug possession charges stemming from the involuntary carslaughter of his 1995 Saturn, thus completing his long journey from adorably creepy "I see dead people" kid to former child actor clich .
Arrested Development fans with too much disposable income still have another four days to bid on GOB's segway. Bid now, and bid high—this irreplaceable piece of AD history will get you crazy, crazy laid.
America's Next Top Porn Model's director on Tyra Banks' hypocritical judgment of how adult-film doppleganger Tyra Banxxx makes her living: "I find it funny that a beautiful girl like Tyra Banks who made her career by walking the runways showing off her tits and ass would criticize a girl for making her living showing off her tits and ass. I really don't see the two career choices being polar opposites."
Necktastic Project Runway winner Jeffrey Sebelia becomes possibly the first reality show contestant in the history of the form not to blame seeming like a dick on malicious editing.
· Those NBC layoffs really could have been a lot worse.

In every outpost of the NBC Universal empire, just a little while ago anxious employees were huddled around closed-circuit broadcasts of their fearless leaders' "town hall" meeting explaining the corporation's new, streamlined, and more cost-conscious push into the digital media age enabled by the immediate, selfless sacrifice of 700 or so of their jobs. We asked one LA-based operative stationed inside the rapidly shrinking NBCU 2.0 family to briefly describe what was covered in Jeff Zucker's you're-all-firedside chat:

As we speak nervous NBC employees are gathering for a townhall meeting where television head Jeff Zucker a number of them that they're free to pursue other interests and not to let the door hit them on the ass on the way out. While the exact number of fired employees is in some dispute by credulous Times reporters, the general consensus seems to be that 700 people will be let go. England's Guardian, however, sees a much direr situation:

The media world is still awaiting NBC Universal executioner Jeff Zucker's "town hall" meeting with his employees, in which he will calmly bar the doors to the "hall," step up to the podium, and then announce that 700 or so (or 5%, for you percentage junkies) of his beloved underlings aren't getting out of their meeting alive. But once the blood is mopped from the floors and the guillotine baskets are cleared of severed heads, how does this affect you, the person who doesn't particularly care about corporate streamlining enabling a faceless multimedia conglomerate to take bold, more cost-efficient steps (cutely named NBCU 2.0) into the brave new digital world? The WSJ reports on the revised mandate given to NBC Uni's fourth-place TV division (sub. req'd.):

• NBC Cuts: Approximately 700 jobs axed, MSNBC moved from Secaucus, news budget slashed, expensive dramas abandoned. [Bloomberg]
• Of course, if you believe the Times, the layoffs will not be extensive. [NYT]
• Also, the network now plans to buy more of its crappy programming from its in-house studio. Insert your own "And such small portions" joke here. [WSJ]
• And MSNBC "stars" like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews may be moved to CNBC, which means we might actually start watching MSNBC. [B&C]
• In non-NBC news, you'll soon be able to see the Wall Street Journal's repellent editorials in full color. The rest of the paper, too. [AdAge]

In the interest of paying some attention, warranted or not, to various rumors about NBC layoffs both "massive" and very targeted circulating on these internets, we present this very special round-up for discussion on your afternoon commute:

It's that time again where we float a rumor currently making the rounds and ask you to do our work for us: We're hearing that NBC is about to get a lot lighter, employee-wise. Some of what we've been told involves massive layoffs at MSNBC, with the remaining crew moving from Secaucus to 30 Rock (which means, at least, that MSNBC head Dan Ambrams will be able to have lunch with his pal Dave Zinczenko a bit more often). Fishbowl DC reports that Jeff Zucker (who will surely keep his job, what with the excellent work he's been doing lately) will announce the firings tomorrow; let's see if we can't get a little more information before then. Confidential memos or scurrilous gossip here.

With a background in advertising and roughly sixty-eight versions of his Law & Order franchise currently on the air, cops-and-lawyers-procedural brandmaster Dick Wolf is uniquely qualified to declare that anyone who thinks they know how commerce, emerging platforms, and traditional programming will intersect in the future is quite obviously hitting the pipe. Reports the WSJ:

The Weinstein Co.'s Genius Products makes a deal with the WWE to distribute home videos, collaborate on straight-to-video movies, and potentially use the wrestling league's stars to intimidate any filmmakers who stubbornly resist Harvey Weinstein's gentle suggestions about helpful edits. [Variety]
At an address to the Media Institute, outraged Viacom executive Sumner Redstone shook a fist at the FCC over its crackdown on indecent speech, claiming that the commission's heavy fines based on a small number of petitions have created "a world where entertainment and news executives, musicians and artists are living in a great deal of fear," a reign of terror that rivals even the one in which his underlings currently toil. [THR]
House creator David Shore and writer Peter Blake are writing a "light procedural drama" script for NBC, about a brilliant female cop who concocts unlikely crime-scene scenarios that are initially dismissed as crazy by her reflexively skeptical co-workers, but which are ultimately proven correct at the end of each episode. [Variety]
The Fox News Channel reaches a new carriage agreement with Cablevision, ensuring that the officially approved messages of the Bush Administration will reach the cable provider's subscribers without interruption. [THR]
Studio 60 NielsenWatch: Showing extended, behind-the-scenes footage of a bafflingly unfunny Nancy Grace sketch drops NBC's onetime presumed savior to its lowest numbers yet, off 15% from last week's ratings. [Variety]

Back in August, news emerged that Rachel Dratch was being, er, shifted ("demoted" is a bummer word, as you'll soon see) from her lead role on 30 Rock into one where she'd play a "wide variety" of parts after producers decided to "scrap her character." A couple of days after the initial announcement, we learned that her original character wasn't so much "scrapped" as "given to Jane Krakowski." Dratch spoke to NY Mag's Intelligencer column about how the unfortunate demoting/recasting thing went down:

Gawker points us to this fan edit of The Office, in which the lovelorn Jim, obviously taken aback by frustratingly coy Pam's sudden, explicit come-ons, foolishly turns down the filthy supply closet romp he not-so-secretly pined for over the show's first two seasons. [Warning: Audio very NSFW, unless you work in a sitcom writers' room.] Enjoy.