Bummer news for those who still watch Fox’s “House,” the medical procedural unofficially and loosely based on Sherlock Holmes, as the show has been canceled, effective at the end of the season. Yes, the show is stale; yes, “House” has been repeating itself for years, and yes it’s almost painfully predictable. But it was once a good show, and it’s still one of Fox’s better dramas, and whether you like the show anymore or not, television is better with Hugh Laurie.

According to the NYTimes:

“After much deliberation, the producers of House MD have decided that this season of the show, the 8th, should be the last.

“By April this year they will have completed 177 episodes, which is about 175 more than anyone expected back in 2004,” the statement said.

“He should never be the last one to leave the party. How much better to disappear before the music stops, while there is still some promise and mystique in the air,” the statement said.

The decision was partly motivated by a desire to preserve the main character, Dr Gregory House, as an “enigmatic creature”.

I don’t expect there will be too much sadness. Even the 10 million viewers or so that continue to hang on are probably just listlessly waiting it out, half-focused on another formulaic plot. Most expected that this would be the last season, anyway.

Laurie has said that he will not do another TV show after “House,” but I suspect there are enough meaty roles in British television to lure him out at some point.

No finale date has been set.

Not pictured: Stage Manager Debbie Williams

After 16-year-old Symone Black finishes a perfectly pleasant performance of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” during last night’s “American Idol,” she begins talking with the judges. Randy asks her why she chose that song. She answers, “I wanted to reach out to an older crowd,” and Dawg E. Dawg begins teasing her, responding with, “You’re saying we’re older?” What a card. Symone then visibly begins to stumble and trip over her words, and, like so many other women who have been within 10 feet of Steven Tyler, she collapses and falls off the stage.

And the episode ends, with a voiceover instructing viewers to tune in tomorrow to see whether Symone Black LIVES or DIES. More or less. It’s a di*k move on “Idol”‘s part, taking advantage of a young woman possibly having a seizure for higher ratings. But if you’re surprised that a Fox show would exploit someone, you clearly haven’t seen “The Littlest Groom” or “Who’s Your Daddy?” or “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé.” I love Fox.

Also in last night’s episode: Jim Carrey’s daughter, Jane, performed Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” but didn’t sing it out her back door. I guess the skill doesn’t run in the family.

(GIF Via)

Continuing the theme of awesome breaking TV news, it was reported last night that FOX has greenlit a pilot from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” creator, and noted temporary big fat guy, Rob McElhenney. From Deadline:

Fox has given the green light to one more pilot, a single-camera comedy from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia creator/star Rob McElhenney and the show’s executive producer Rob Rosell. The project, titled “Living Loaded,” is based on the book of the same name by Dan Dunn. It centers on a loose partying blogger forced to change his career plans when he becomes a radio host.

[record scratch]

Hold on. HOLD ON. A “loose partying blogger” who ends up with a radio show? That’s pretty much my dream life summed up in one sentence. The only thing missing is a phrase like “with the help of his wise sensei” or “and takes down a diabolical criminal syndicate” tacked onto the end. Those are freebies, producers. Here to help.

Truthfully, though, this show sounds like EVERY blogger’s dream life. It could end up being to us what “Sex and the City” was to single, suburban girls who visited New York once and acted like they were the Carrie Bradshaw of Peoria. “THIS IS JUST LIKE OUR LIVES” we will exclaim while watching the main character live out our fantasy as we eat a peanut butter sandwich for dinner for the sixth day in a row. I, for one, can’t wait.

Our buddies over at Kissing Suzy Kolber (HI MATT!) have been fascinated by Cleatus, FOX NFL Sunday’s guitar-thursting, Iron Man-fighting party robot, since before it was cool. He now has an action figure, Twitter account*, and spin-off. But Cleatus, who has been dancing like Ray Lewis next to Bud Light bottles since 2005, was missing one crucial element of fame: fan fiction. Until now.

(* Cleatus’ Twitter wisdom includes: “What’s going on with The Fins? Never trust a man in sunglasses” and “I set my clock for Day Lights savings but I forgot to set it for @timtebow TIME!”)

Recently, in a post for WBEZ, writer/A.V. Club TV critic Claire Zulkey wrote an article entitled, “The Secret Life of Cleatus the FOX Sports Robot.” Like so many others before her, she became fascinated by Cleatus, and noticed that the robot looked more menacing and had been dancing less this season. Was he not computing? Was he not doing other robot things, like gradually becoming more sentient? Naturally, she and a friend wondered if there was any Cleatus fan fiction out there, and when they saw there wasn’t, she asked readers to send their stories to her.

All of the submissions Zulkey received are pretty great, but here are some of my favorite excerpts:

From Kyle:

I imagine he actually grew up as a nerd robot. He once worked in a library as a card catalog system or as an early beta version of Google, but he was eventually marked obsolete and discarded. Now he has hit the gym and ever since he started his job at FOX, he gets all the robot ladies with his big shoulders and piercing blue eyes. I believe he is pointing at all the nay-sayers out there who said he couldn’t do it and there was no way he could reinvent himself.

From Claire:

After graduating high school, Cleatus yearned to attend the University of Iowa to get his degree in poetry, but unfortunately, he was built to promote football, and went straight to the pros. Like Lady Gaga proclaims, he was born (or rather, built) this way, but he cries out in zeros and ones, was he meant to be built this way?…The next time you compose a haiku, dedicate it to poor Cleatus, because while you may not be as famous or invulnerable as he is, at least you have your own free will.

From Sarah:

The team had grown to love Cleatus as a son and was beyond distraught. In order to keep him alive and not sent off to some robot farm up north, they made a few adjustments to his programming and he became the cold, menacing Cleatus you know today.

(Hat tip to The Awl.)

A scornful look, cookies, and alcohol: this show has NAILED women.

I’ve never seen a show hate its own characters more than in the pilot episode of Fox’s “I Hate My Teenage Daughter.” Jaime Pressly and Katie Finneran play two middle-aged moms who, as the title of the show suggests, hate their adolescent daughters, Sophie (Kristi Lauren) and Mackenzie (Aisha Dee).

Basing a show around two thirty-something, previously unpopular moms living vicariously through their younger, hotter offspring isn’t a totally awful idea, and Pressly and Finnernan do their best with the material they were given, but the writing is embarrassingly bad. Pressly’s character was raised in a super religious household and Finneran’s was borderline-obese as a teenager, and the show wrings every last possible joke out of those moldy towels. We’re supposed to find it amusing that one of them doesn’t know what Little House on the Prairie is and that when things get difficult, the other eats pie with her hands, “like a bear,” according to one of the show’s three women-do-be-shoppin’ males, including Cutty from “The Wire.” The women are exaggerated, the men exasperated, and no one looks happy, especially the manipulative, snotty daughters.

The writers seem to think that humor comes from shrill caricatures, hyperbolic facial reactions, and women eating food and drinking to solve their problems, rather than, y’know, interesting characters and well thought-out jokes. “I Hate My Teenage Daughter” is maybe the worst sitcom I’ve ever seen, and this coming from someone who’s watched “Emily’s Reasons Why Not” and every episode of “2 Broke Girls.” Your move, “Work It.”

After the jump, some of the show’s worst out-of-context quotes and most obnoxious facial expressions.

“And then you know what she said to me? ‘You don’t know how to dress.’ Who says that?”
“I’ll tell you who says that: a bitch.”

(That’s our introduction to the show – “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,” it’s not.)

“It’s unfortunate you have to resort to name calling.”
“It’s unfortunate that you’re such a friggin’ dumb ass.”

“I want Mackenzie to go to her first high school dance in a limo, and Gary won’t pay for it.”

“I don’t want to be a working mom. Those women are pathetic. No offense, hun.”
“None taken, you lazy stay-at-home whore.”

“I did not eat my cat!”

“Your daughters locked a boy in the girl’s bathroom. He was in there for two hours before someone found him.”
“That just sounds like typical boy-girl stuff.”
“The boy they locked in the bathroom was Gerard Thompson.”
“The kid in the wheelchair?”
“I’m going to do my very best to keep this on the down-low, but if they serve wine at the PTA meeting, no guarantees.”

“Great news, my band got offered to tour with Sheryl Crow. I know it’s my weekend to take Sophie, but I’m kind of hoping you could cover it for me.”

“She’s up in her room, blogging about how much she hates her mother.”

“I can’t believe what you did to that handicapped boy.”
“Mom, Gerard is the meanest kid in school. He doesn’t like black people.”

That’s it. Once Jaime brings out Serious Face, I’m done.

“Alcatraz,” which debuts on Fox in January, has the pedigree of an outstanding show. It was created by J.J. Abrams, it’s from the producers of “Lost,” and it stars Sam Neill, Jorge Garcia, and Sarah Jones, who’s a positively TERRIFIC actress (*cups hands in front of chest*). And I’m inclined to say nice things about it, because I like Bad Robot (the studio making “Alcatraz”) and I know one of the writers on the show.

That said, I can’t exactly say that this a remarkable promo. I’ve watched it three times, and I think I know LESS about the show than I did when the day started. It’s all, “Conspiracy! Handgun! Lockers! Blurry Sam Neill face!”

Come on, Fox. It’s not that hard to make a great promo for this show. I mean, there has to be at least ONE scene where Sarah Jones is in a tight shirt.

[via Vulture]

Last month, “Arrested Development” creator Mitch Hurwitz announced that there would be a 9- or 10-episode season of the show that would serve as a primer for the long-awaited, forever-germinating “Arrested Development” movie. Late on Friday afternoon, Netflix announced that it would stream the new season in early 2013. (Good call on making the announcement Friday afternoon, by the way. That way it has all weekend to fall out of Monday’s headlines.)

Netflix said on Friday that it had struck a deal for new episodes with the makers of the show, 20th Century Fox Television and Imagine Television. The episodes are to start appearing on the service in 2013. “Bringing a series back from cancellation almost never happens, but then, ‘Arrested’ always was about as unconventional as they get, so it seems totally appropriate that this show that broke the mold is smashing it to pieces once again,” the founders of Imagine, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, said in a statement. Streaming episodes of the critically acclaimed show have remained popular among Netflix subscribers, giving the company the confidence to make more. [NYT]

So it’s really happening. This is fantastic news, if only because it shows that years of fanboy whining has finally paid off. That means we could get a fourth season of “Community” in 2018.

On the heels of MTV’s successful re-launch of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” Fox is teaming up with Keenen Ivory Wayans to produce two “In Living Color” specials next spring. What’s next from the ’90s pipeline, a Nirvana reunion? What? Suicide? Oh bummer. I thought he and Courtney were gonna last forever.

Host Keenen Ivory Wayans will produce two half-hour specials based on his classic sketch comedy series from the early 1990s, which helped launch the careers of his own family as well as those of Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey, among others.

The revival is being billed as a contemporary take on the hit sketch comedy show that will feature a new cast of fresh, young talent as well as musical performances by special guests. The network will air the pairing this spring, with the option to order the show to series for next fall or mid-season. [THR]

The last time Fox dipped its toe in the sketch comedy market, we got “In the Flow with Affion Crockett,” which most viewers missed because of their need to periodically moisturize their eyes by closing them for a fraction of a second. But hey, this could be a huge success. All Wayans needs to do if find a future Oscar winner, someone who will become the most popular comic actor for the next decade, and a dance team led by a singer/actress who can change the way we look at women’s asses. Seems easy enough.

This is a clip from the pilot episode of “Second Chance,” a short-lived Fox sitcom that aired in 1987 (and included Matthew Perry’s first major role). The opening card puts the date at July 29, 2011, and then a bullet-riddled Gaddafi shows up and gets sentenced to hell. Although I gotta say, the bullet-riddled Gaddafi in “Second Chance” looks WAY better than the real bullet-riddled Gaddafi. Did you see the video of him after he’d been shot and just before he died? That ish is DARK. He looks like a zombie from “The Walking Dead.”

Anyway, there’s a longer video of the show’s opening scene below, which should be great if you like sitcoms that are so unfunny they weren’t good enough to last on Fox before “The Simpsons.” It’s a really excellent use of your time.

[Reddit via BuzzFeed]

Yesterday, following the news of “The Walking Dead’s” blockbuster ratings, I said it was only a matter of time until we had more zombie television series. In this case, “a matter of time” means “already in development,” as Vulture reports that the 2009 movie Zombieland is being adapted as a half-hour series by Fox, with original writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick onboard.

We hear talks are well under way with Fox Broadcasting and Columbia’s sister unit, Sony Pictures Television, to put the zom-com into development for the 2012-13 season. If it happens, it will actually be sort of fitting.

As Zombieland producer Gavin Polone noted, “The original plan for this was to make it as a TV show.” Indeed, CBS actually ordered a pilot script for the concept all the way back in 2005, “but they did what networks do, which is to take all the good stuff out.” [...]

One good reason to think a series version of Zombieland could be killer is the fact that the writers have been working on story ideas for a show for years now. As Reese told MTV News last year, “We always thought [it should be a TV series]. If you watch the movie with that in mind, you will see some remnants of the television show. We have the ‘Zombie Kill of the Week,’ which was always intended to happen every week. The movie ends on a cliffhanger; it doesn’t have a real resolution.”

The original cast — Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin — obviously won’t be involved because they’re big famous movie stars, but I’d nonetheless be interested to see what could be done with this. I certainly enjoy “The Walking Dead,” but it’s largely devoid of humor and characters I care about. There’s room in my heart for another zombie show. Especially if it involves a zombie in a penguin suit:

Awww, poor Penguin Zombie. He just wanted to go home.

[Video via BuzzFeed]