Here at BlackBook, we give you so many other things to do besides watching TV. That being said, it's winter, it's cold, and we like ourselves a night in every now and then. With the announcement that three beloved ABC shows are probably getting the axe -- the charming Pushing Daises, the somewhat charming Dirty Sexy Money, and the totally abysmal, overwrought Eli Stone -- one has to wonder where to get their BoobTube kicks. Entourage, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and Californication are almost finished with their seasons. Gossip Girl can only do so much. What to do? Fortunately, the best season of television isn't actually on television yet: the third season of Friday Night Lights.

How can anyone not love actress Illeana Douglas? For the last decade, her acting chops have been a proven, solid celluloid draw. A wry sidekick with soulful eyes, her characters specialize in lobbing bitter-funny bon mots with no mercy. And Douglas has found success, sure, but she hasn't lost sight of the process and the industry's overlooked underclass. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since there's something so honest about her, on screen or off, that it's hard to imagine her as another studio-owned, publicity-chasing Hollywood coke monkey. In her upcoming film Easy to Assemble, Douglas ditches her Hollywood gig to work at IKEA, but finds her sticky past hard to shake. Gossips, agents, celebs run amok. Last night, we chatted about Hollywood's killing floor, the Screen Actors Guild, and the slow soul suck of studio politics. Tinseltown upstarts, beware.

New York magazine sent readers of all stripes into a fits of hysteria by claiming that both Sarah Palin and Hilary Clinton set women back a few decades by reinforcing reductive stereotypes -- specifically, the ditz and the bitch. But similar pundits are also waxing philosophical on the link between Barack Obama's election and the potential upswing for more diversity on TV. So if television is indeed the window into the American psyche (and let's be honest, who can contest otherwise?), then what sort of change are the ditz/bitch forces of Palin and Lady Clinton supposed to embody?

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.