"Park and Rec's" Ron Swanson explains his "glorious mustache"
"100 percent real," says Nick Offerman. "It takes about a month to get it good and thick. I've always been a Lon Chaney-style whiskers-and-hair actor. When Mike and I started talking about Ron Swanson back in inception, the first thing we said was, 'This guy's got a big f–king mustache.'"
"The Office" isn't getting enough credit for tackling the financial crisis
Recent "Office" episodes have been "remarkable and profound," says Alex Strachan, adding: "Quietly, with no hype, chest-thumping or press publicity, The Office has become a ferocious and incisive commentary on the financial crisis as witnessed through the eyes of the middle-class wage slaves who are bearing the brunt of the economic recession. This season, 'The Office' has been all about wage freezes, job cuts and financial ruin — but it has remembered to bring the funny."
Rainn Wilson begs Comcast to give him a new trailer, "like Steve's"
"Dear Comcast, Congrats on Buying NBC & being my new employer. Now, can I have a trailer like Steve's? Jacuzzi?, holograms, bidet, etc…"
Check out Courteney Cox & Lisa Kudrow reunited on "Cougar Town"
"They didn’t want to play friends," Bill Lawrence says of the mini-"Friends" reunion, adding that Kudrow "plays a dermatologist who is a horrible, horrible person…"
"I Get That a Lot" returns with Rachael Ray, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, Julie Chen
Check out Snoop Dogg as a parking lot attendant, Rachael Ray as a dry cleaner, Gene Simmons as a psychic guru, Paris Hilton as a gas station attendant, Tony Hawk as an obnoxious salesman and Julie Chen as a yogurt shop worker.
The "Idol" runner-up was scheduled to appear on ABC twice this month — on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" on Dec. 17 and Ryan Seacrest's "New Year's Rockin' Eve." Lambert broke the news on Twitter: "Yes, sadly friends, ABC has cancelled my appearances on Kimmel and NYE. : ( don't blame them. It's the FCC heat," adding that "I AM doing Leno though. And lookin into something for NYE." Asked to respond, an ABC spokesperson would only say, "
Byron Velvick and Mary Delgado, who set a "Bachelor" record for being together, have called it quits five years after appearing on the show. Delgado, of course, made headlines in 2007 when she was arrested for assaulting Velvick.
Ron is the NBC comedy's secret weapon, says Jonah Weiner. "Unlike his Office-family forebears Michael Scott and David Brent, Ron doesn't try to hide his laziness or unpleasantness beneath bad jokes and feigned capability; he regards laziness and unpleasantness as political statements," says Weiner. "Throughout the series, Ron has regularly stolen his scenes, and this season the writers have taken notice, working him more centrally into scripts."
There are at least three novel elements "Glee" injected into the "HSM" formula, says James Wolcott. 1) Sue Sylvester, 2) Courting many demographics and 3) Respecting its borrowed offerings. Of Sylvester, he says: "'Glee’s' genius coup is to give us a villain figure of seething hostility and cunning antagonism—a Taser in a tracksuit who fuses the raw pessimism of Hobbes (life is 'nasty, brutish, and short') and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche (the 'will to power') into one malevolent, fun-loving gal."
Season 3 will happen, "but it's a matter of finalizing all the other deals," says Kurt Sutter, who also explains "the Half-Sack thing." His plans for next season? "To take them into a world that is outside their own, where they don't have control, where they are subject to other people's laws and beliefs and perameters. Where they aren't quite the big fish in the small pond."
The "Family Ties" mom, who's now 62, came out this morning on "Today," revealing she has been in a four-year relationship with a woman. "I am a lesbian and it was a later-in-life recognition," she told Matt Lauer. “Some people would say, well, you’re living a lie and, you know, the truth is — not at all. This has only been for the past seven years."
Cowell and his billionaire partner Philip Green are in talks to permanently place the American "X factor" in a Las Vegas hotel, which would host the competition twice a week live on the Internet. "It'll all be online. You have 20, 30, 40 million people tuning in twice a week," Green says in an interview with GQ. "You bring two or three hundred million viewers to a venue. It's turning it up a peg." PLUS: 
As the Wall Street Journal notes, "Sons" has yet to break into the mainstream like cable sensations "Mad Men" and Kurt Sutter's former series "The Shield." "I don’t want to do a show that nobody sees," says Sutter. "It’s a lot more fun performing for a full house. But I learned this on “The Shield.” We realized no matter how good it is, because of the nature of the show and the tone of violence, it could never make that leap to the next level. I understand that shows that are this dark in tone are hard for people to pencil time in to watch. Quite honestly, I’m amazed by the numbers we have."
The new characters have actually revived "Scrubs," at least to "some degree," says Matthew Gilbert. But he adds: "Warning: I’m not saying the show has recaptured its early glory. Not by a long shot … At this point, 'Scrubs' has turned its original style into a formula; the fantasy sequences are more predictable, the earnest denouements are automatic. It’s a good formula, but one that’s no longer vibrant."
