Sacha Baron Cohen's true skill lies not in acting chops or a knack for satire, but rather for penetrating the impenetrable. This comes on the exclusive heels of EW.com's breaking news that his gay Austrian style reporter was just booted off the set of Medium, that Patricia Arquette show that should've been canceled in its first season. We, like much of the rest of the web, have been tracking, and tracking, and tracking Bruno's whereabouts as he pranks enough people to stitch together 80 minutes of footage for delicious journeys through America, all just to make heterosexual males visibly uncomfortable in the presence of a gay foreigner in a mesh T-shirt. That's also the rumored subtitle of his movie.

One potential bright spot in America's fiscal tragedy -- our arts and culture now forcibly skews closer to reality. Consider MoMA's assortment of modular homes, which have suffered the same fate as the real-life housing market. Alas, there are worse woes ahead -- such as the recent cancellation of Lipstick Jungle or confusion over a Sex & the City sequel. To most people, this sort of news heralds the end of a crapulent spate of television brought on earlier this year by yet another SATC clone.

The Brooklyn edition of MTV's long-running Real World has been in the works for some time now, and for the last few months, they've been spotted ruining hipster-laden dancefloors all over the borough. Now the trailer is out, and it's as dramatic as real world of real Brooklyn. Transferring from the L train to the G in the early morning hours, not being able to find a yellow cab -- ever, paying less money for alcohol, trudging through discarded Gatorade cups, sickeningly long lines for pizza, machete-wielding gangs, Hasidic vigilantes, and smelling like shit. Yep, it's all right there in the trailer.

Unless you're John McCain and you've resigned from the presidential race after realizing you shot yourself in the foot with a loose-cannon "rogue" of a VP pick, you're probably trying to rack up some of those crucial 11th-hour celebrity endorsements. Fortunately for America's future, Oprah's already in the tank for Barack Obama. But another deified TV magnate, Tyra Banks, has also announced her support for the Democratic candidate. Always the political pundit, Banks says, "Throughout this historic presidential campaign, I have been inspired by Senator Barack Obama and his message of change -- I believe he will uplift all Americans during these critical times. I will be voting for Obama because I feel America is not only ready for this change, we are in need of it." And here I was thinking she'd be casting a ballot just so she can claim that free scoop at Ben and Jerry's.

On Dirt, Courteney Cox's turn as a ruthless tabloid editrix was always a bit empty in its delivery -- no matter how much high-profile girl-on-girl lip-lock she did in the line of duty. So although FX execs saw fit to bury the drama after two seasons (just another casualty of that TV writers' strike that most people would be hard-pressed to recall), it seems Cox is drawing on the strength of her character Lucy Spiller's trademark sleaze for her next role.

MTV Music is the network's new attempt to outsource the very M of its namesake entirely to the web. It's a searchable database of music videos for people who are unaware that YouTube exists (if such people also exist). Given its slim pickings and mediocre video quality, the whole thing's seems like a half-assed attempt on MTV's part to acknowledge the void left in the wake of its recent kibosh on the last thing associating it with music.

Recently slipping into the Gossip Girl cast as Agnes, a model who befriends Jenny Humphrey (Taylor Momsen) and has designs on a major role in Eleanor Waldorf’s fashion empire, Willa Holland, onetime model for Guess? and Burberry, plays a doe-eyed climber to corroded perfection. “Agnes is a little corrupt and manipulative,” says the 17-year-old Bardot-esque beauty, who for two seasons on The O.C. inhabited Kaitlin Cooper, the wild, seductive, shoplifting little sister of Mischa Barton’s Marissa Cooper. Holland understands vampy provocateurs so naturally, it makes one wonder about the inner demons she wrestles with. “I don’t have the energy to rebel myself. I never really went through that stage,” Holland protests.

Humanizing Hitler is a delicate matter, so I tread with caution. Roland Misch, a phone operator in Hitler's bunker, once said this about the man: "He is presented and built up by others in such a way and depicted in a way that he wasn't. So much is written. But he wasn't a monster. When you were close to him, he basically was a very simple person." Right, Roland. And when you weren't close to him, he was just the simple man who simply brought the world to its knees. A Belgian cooking show called Favorite Dish is also interested in showing us the simple Adolf by examining his favorite meal. The show does episodes on the favorite meals of historical figures, including Salvador Dali and Freddie Mercury, but apparently a whole episode devoted to the Führer's favorite nosh was deemed too risqué, for fear it would "humanize" or "glorify" the man, aka render him simple. It has been pulled by Belgian broadcaster VRT.

No, not a revival of the short-lived soap opera which featured a predictably scrappy Morgan Fairchild, but a replacement for the bitterly-departed Project Runway. The network posted a casting call to all aspiring fashion designers with a deadline of late November for all applications. And with Runway tied up indefinitely in legal limbo and its prospects of Fashion Week synergy unraveling, the copycat could sate the appetites of those hankering for taffeta, tulle, and talented egotists.

My junior year at the University of Michigan, I lived in one of those artsy dorms bursting with wannabe intelligentsia -- a veritable cavalcade of tiny little Regina Spektor and Kurt Cobain lookalikes. But even the imminent arrival of a certain gold medal-winning merman was buzzworthy enough to pry them away -- if temporarily -- from whatever cause of the week they were advocating. And now that Michael Phelps has more than minted his status as a legendary Olympian, reality show entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher wants a piece of Phelps' financial tailfin.