I’ve been hesitant to write anything about HBO’s attempt to adapt Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections into a TV series, because the network still hasn’t greenlit a pilot. But with a talented creative team and Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest in negotiations to play Alfred and Enid, it seems likely that it will come to fruition.

HBO is going for some serious acting firepower on the Noah Baumbach/Scott Rudin drama The Corrections. The pay cable network has Oscar winner Chris Cooper in negotiations and two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest set for the two leads in the project based on Jonathan Franzen’s book. The award-wining 2001 novel revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children — roles that are now being cast — as they trace their lives from the mid-20th century to “one last Christmas” together near the turn of the millennium. Baumbach and Franzen co-wrote the adaptation, with Baumbach set to direct the pilot. [Deadline]

This has the potential to be excellent. Whatever complaints you might have about Franzen, he is nothing if not meticulous in his writing. As for Baumbach (director of The Squid and The Whale and the awful Margot at the Wedding; screenwriter of Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), he specializes in the sort of angsty upper-middle-class white-people drama that Franzen unspools for hundreds of pages on end. Throw in Chris Cooper with dementia and a sexy actress to play bi-curious chef Denise, and I’m sold.

Once again, “Archer” lovingly scratched my belly by integrating obscure and highbrow references into its jokes. Last night’s episode (S2E10, “El Secuestro”) delivered key background information on two characters that laid the framework for this week’s Easter eggs. When kidnappers mistakenly grab homely HR director Pam, we learn that she can take a beating because she paid for college by winning underground MMA fights. The payoff for this comes in the final scene, when Pam whips off her shirt to reveal a back tattoo, and the text is the third verse of Lord Byron’s totally badass “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” You can read the whole thing here, but this is the applicable section:

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

If that’s not enough for you, ditzy receptionist Cheryl was revealed to be an heiress to the fictional Tunt railroad fortune, and Archer became enthralled by her pet ocelot, Babou (“You guys, look at his little spots! Look at his tufted ears!”). Incidentally, Babou was also the name of the ocelot that Salvador Dalì kept as a pet.

Why would the writers give Cheryl’s ocelot the same name as Salvador Dalì’s? Well, why would Cheryl have an ocelot at all? Because it’s funny. The jokes aren’t predicated on viewers understanding the extra references to Dalì and Byron; the references just add a layer of depth that you don’t get when you watch, say, “Two and a Half Men.” (Also on FX. Thanks for that one, John Landgraf.)

[Thanks to @edsbs, @XmasApe, and @Tom Fornelli]

As a hardened Internet veteran, there isn’t much out there that surprises me. But this is something truly unique, whip-smart, and brilliantly executed: a pair of writers at Hooded Utilitarian wrote an epic literary criticism about “The Wire,” reimagining the lauded HBO show as a series of fiction pamphlets written in the 1840s by a contemporary of Charles Dickens named “Horatio Ogden.” It truly is remarkable:

The genius of The Wire lies in its sheer size and scope, its slow layering of complexity which could not have been achieved in any other way but the serial format.  Dickens is often praised for his portrayal not merely of a set of characters and their lives, but of the setting as a character: the city itself an antagonist.  Yet in The Wire, Bodymore is a far more intricate and compelling character than London in Dickens’ hands; The Wire portrays society to such a degree of realism and intricacy that A Tale of Two Cities—or any other story—can hardly compare.

That barely scratches the surface of an immense examination: how “The Wire’s” characters were more fully developed than Dickens’s, why Omar Little was a Brontë hero, and “The Wire’s” gothic influence in Victorian literature. But perhaps most impressive is the recreation of the famous “f*ck” scene in 19th century prose:

Full-size images here and here, original “Wire” scene below. Go read the whole thing; Hooded Utilitarian wins the Internet this week.

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I’ll see your Sherlock Holmes bare-knuckle boxing and raise you Edgar Allan Poe as a crime-fighting detective:

ABC has ordered a crime drama where Edger Allen Poe solves mysteries.

I know. It sounds like some kind of dream within a dream. But here’s the official description for Poe: “Crime procedural following Edgar Allan Poe as the world’s very first detective, using unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston.” [Inside TV]

Um, I hate to split hairs when we’re already making gigantic leaps through B.S. to get “depressed alcoholic author solves crimes,” but I think detectives existed before the 1840s. (Update: a commenter confirms this.)

Anyway, if you’re anything like me, you’re thinking, “Hey, wait. Wasn’t Poe from Baltimore?” But no. He was born in Boston and raised in Virginia, and although he was married (to his 13-year-old cousin) and died in Baltimore, he did spend a fair amount of his old life in Beantown. DO NAWT DISRESPECT A MEMBAH OF RED SAWX NATION!

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As if the notion of Snooki writing a novel isn’t already laughable enough — her input was given to ghostwriter Valerie Frankel over conference calls — everyone’s favorite be-poufed Oompa-Loompa is upping the hilarity by taking herself seriously:

The pint-size loudmouth - who, now that she’s an author, prefers to be called Nicole – tells the Daily News that “words can’t even describe” what it means to her to have her book on stands.

“I never knew I would write a book!” she gushes, perhaps echoing the sentiments of even the most devout Snooki lovers. “But I’m so happy I did.” [NYDN]

Note: Snooki did not write a book. Wait, sorry: NICOLE didn’t write a book. Tell us more about your life as an author, NICOLE:

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