"Ah wish ah coult grow a beart. Durr."

NFL Football: Saints at Packers (NBC) – My cable has been going in and out all day because Eastern Pennsylvania is mostly underwater. If my viewing of this game is interrupted, Comcast will feel my wrath. (*shakes fist in general direction of Comcast’s downtown Philadelphia headquarters*)

Rookie Blue (CBS) - Fact: All police shows have been rendered inconsequential now that “Paw & Order” exists. Second fact: This one was already inconsequential.

Louie (FX) – Remember when some jamooks got all pissed because Matt mentioned he had seen screeners of a few episodes? Yeah… if I had screeners of this show, I would brag about it so much the Warming Glow readership would dwindle to just people who came by just to tell me what a putz I was. This is why I should never be in charge of anything.

Burn Notice/Suits (USA) – I covered the main points of the USA drama style guide in an Ask Me Anything post on my Tumblr, but they really, really go back to the same well a lot. Sixty percent of the network’s budget at this point must be sunglasses.

Beyond Scared Straight (A&E) – This has always bugged me, so bear with me. If you have a line that’s bent, and you bend it back “beyond straight,” isn’t it just crooked again? Which means these kids would still be criminals. Jesus, I got a C+ in geometry, and even I know that. GET YO MATH RIGHT, A&E!

LATE NIGHT GUESTS: Khloe Kardashian-Odom on Kimmel; Michael J. Fox on Letterman (with the cast of “Two and a Half Men” doing the Top 10); Tim Meadows on Ferguson; Will Arnett and the fetching Anna Kendrick on Leno; Tom Selleck, Cameron Crowe and Pearl Jam on Fallon (tangent: one of my buddies loves Pearl Jam so much — SO MUCH — and I get endless delight out of making fun of them in front of him. I call Eddie Vedder “Mumbles Larue.” It’s the little things in life, people); Marion Cotillard on Stewart; Charlie Day and the Foo Fighters on Conan.

Charisma Carpenter, the “Buffy” and “Angel” star who awesomely got naked in a history-making Playboy shoot back in 2004, will guest star in an upcoming episode of “Burn Notice.”

The actress will guest-star in this season’s 11th episode as Nicki, a sharp-tongued, high-maintenance trophy wife whose not-so-better half, a bioweapons engineer, is a wanted man in cahoots with the Russians. Increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage, Nicki proves to be a pawn ripe for the manipulating in Michael and Fi’s effort to get to her husband. [TV Line]

Of course, Charisma Carpenter is 40 years old now and no longer looks like the banner picture (although she still looked pretty good in The Expendables — inset). Pretty irresponsible of me to use it, I suppose. I mean, I’d be pretty pissed if I were in the news and people used photographs of me from eight years ago. Unless I was Charisma Carpenter, in which case I would demand that that photo be used for any and all news about me.

Thanks to the impossible sexiness of Sarah Shahi, it was widely assumed that USA would renew “Fairly Legal,” a decision that the cable channel made official yesterday. But that doesn’t mean that the show won’t see some changes:

The renewal decision was made based on the show’s appealing star, Sarah Shahi, and its potential, USA’s co-presidents Jeff Wachtel and Chris McCumber said. “We think there is a creative and audience upside to the show,” Wachtel said. “Not every first season is the best, and we think it is a show that can do better.” He didn’t elaborate, but I hear the network is planning changes in the series’ creative direction for Season 2. [Deadline]

At this point in time, I’d like to direct the USA network to the photo gallery here for some creative ideas for Season 2. There’s some really great material for Shahi’s character development there: Shahi fellating a cucumber, Shahi in her underwear, Shahi working as a stripper, Shahi having lesbian sex, Shahi having heterosexual sex… Really, the options are limitless. I’d even tolerate a story arc where she has both lesbian sex AND straight sex. I’m pretty open-minded like that.

The excess of cast injuries and woeful mismanagement from Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has been well-covered on both Gamma Squad and FilmDrunk, but now the disaster is coming to your TV: “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” will base one of its episodes this season around the troubled musical. The news comes TV Line’s Michael Ausiello, whose write-up is so breathlessly idiotic that it’s barely recognizable as English, so here’s a helpful translation from RoboPanda:

“Law & Order: CI” will have an episode where an actor dies under suspicious circumstances during a failed stunt on the set of a musical called Icarus. The play is directed by a “high-strung and larger-than-life” woman who falls off the wagon, and it’s composed by a bisexual rock-star named “Arno” who is secretly cheating on his wife with a male colleague. So they’re like Julie Taymor and Bono, except with funner vices, probably.

I dunno, I’m just not seeing the parallels — it’s a little too subtle for my tastes. Couldn’t they have called the musical Arachnid-Guy: Turn on the Lights?

Anyway, seeing as how “L&O:CI” is close to cancellation, this seems like a good time for a spinoff: “Law & Order: Broadway Safety Inspectors.” Basically the two main characters go around making sure that the mattresses underneath trap doors are sufficiently soft, and they talk to a lot of gay guys along the way. Don’t laugh, I just described half the shows on Bravo.

“Law & Order: Criminal Intent” has ripped a WINNING story from the headlines: Jay Mohr, owner of the saddest hair this side of Jeremy Piven,  will guest star in an upcoming episode, playing a character based off of Charlie Sheen. Deadline says:

Mohr’s character, Nyle Brite, is from a different area of the arts: he is a a “rockstar” fashion designer whose every creation turns to gold.

“Nyle is so hot right now he could take a crap, wrap it in tinfoil, put a couple fish hooks on it and sell it to Queen Elizabeth as earrings.”

His badboy reputation of cocaine benders and call-girl parties only skyrockets his career and mints him as the “lovable rogue.” … Since L&O:CI is a crime drama, the plot of the episode includes a murder as  a guest at one of Brite’s parties turns up dead.

Actually, that part isn’t fictionalized. Let’s not forget that porn star Chloe Jones died after partying with Sheen. I don’t really have a joke for that, I’m just reminding everyone that Charlie Sheen is like a partially trained circus bear: lovably charming, but prone to random violence. Also, circus bears love cocaine.

The single biggest reason “Burn Notice” has been a success on USA is Bruce Campbell’s awesomeness, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Campbell will star in a prequel for the cable channel, according to buzz from the USA series panel at Comic-Con.

The prequel will be an action-adventure story set before the start of “Burn Notice” that follows Sam [Campbell] on a mission in Latin America. USA and Fox TV Studios will partner on the production, with filming likely to take place in Latin America between “Burn Notice” Seasons 4 and 5. [THR]

I guess this isn’t huge news, and in all likelihood I probably won’t watch a USA original movie. But I like any excuse to remember Army of Darkness, which hands-down has more bad-ass quotable lines than any other movie ever made. If you disagree, you’re wrong and I will fight you. Hail to the king, baby.

"Sorry Bunny, not even I can make Hamsterdam politically tolerable."

I was pleasantly surprised to see Robert Wisdom make an appearance on “Burn Notice” last night.   (Don’t worry, no spoilers ahead.  But if you’re really worried about “Burn Notice” spoilers, you may want to consider reevaluating your recent life choices.)  He played one of my favorite characters on “The Wire,”and I really hadn’t seen him in much else since.

It struck me how a lot of the dramas on USA, TNT, and FX have cast actors who were already identifiable with another role. My beloved Kelly Kapowski is on “White Collar,” Lt. Harris from Police Academy is on “The Closer,” Shane from “The Shield” plays Boyd Cowder on “Justified,” and of course Ash Williams from The Evil Dead plays Michael Weston’s accomplice in “Burn Notice.”  Then last night during USA’s block of original programming, they were running ads for a new show that starred the chick from Coyote Ugly, and featured Sandy Cohen from “The O.C.” and Wilson’s dead ex-girlfriend from “House.”

I think that’s cool.  It’s gotta suck being identifiable enough with a past role that it affects your future employability, especially when that past role wasn’t something you could retire on.  I understand why producers may be hesitant to cast them, though.  Some people just won’t accept them as anything but the role they are most associated with.  These idiots will do things like write blog posts where they refer to the actors only by the names of their past characters.  Or post a video of Kelly Kapowski’s cheerleading clips from “Saved by the Bell” in the same post where they talk about how important it is that people stop associating actors only with the role that made them famous (a video that originally had the embedding turned off, so they downloaded it from YouTube, laid music over it, and re-uploaded in their own YouTube account).  These people are sad, small minded idiots.

Burn Notice (USA) — Season premiere. Apparently, much like “Justified” has done, the fourth season of this underrated show does an excellent job of weaving season-long story lines into the procedural format. Worth watching for Miami and Bruce Campbell.

Real Housewives of New York City (Bravo) — Season finale. Those two that are always fighting — you know, Chipmunk Face and the other one — try to resolve their differences. Although they’re both two wealthy privileged women living in Manhattan, so I’m not really sure what differences there could be.

Mall Cops: Mall of America (TLC) — Throngs of people gather when Sarah Palin shows up, stretching the limits of the mall cops’ abilities. But then, you could say the same thing about shoplifters.

The First 48 (A&E) — Ah, “First 48.” The ONLY television show that reveals exactly how easy it is to get away with murder.

NBA Finals (ABC) — Game 1, Lakers at Celtics. “Honey, can you turn the volume down a little? I can’t hear you when Craig Sager is on-screen.”

Today’s Forgotten Classic is “Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills.” That is the real name of a show that actually existed on USA in 1994, and it sucks more thoroughly than you can possibly believe. The cultural landscape of the early to mid-’90s was particularly barren (see also: Color Me Badd, “Fish Police,” overdeveloped nostalgia for “Saved by the Bell”), but this knock-off of “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” made the Power Rangers look like Kung Fu Shakespeare. From Wikipedia:

The four central characters of the show were teens selected by a blob-like brain alien named Nimbar to fight off the monsters sent by evil Emperor Gorganus… In the first episode Nimbar recruits the four high school students and with a touch by his “finger” gives them each a tattoo, based on a constellation in the celestial sphere. When their tattoos flash, this means Nimbar needs them and a power portal appears that they can pass through to enter his chamber…

The teens could then stand atop platforms called “Transo Discs” and transform into “Galactic Sentinels” with super powers. When they put their hands together in an interlocking square they form the ultimate sentinel called Nitron. However Nitron’s power is “finite,” and they are only to form him as a last resort (for example, in the first episode of the series, when Ninjabot made the teens’ weapons disappear, they had no choice but to form Nitron).

You get the idea. Everything about it is casually ripped off from Power Rangers (with a dash of trying to ride “Beverly Hills 90210′s success), which in turn casually ripped off Voltron. And, much like the third copy of Michael Keaton in Multiplicity, it’s pretty retarded. There’s a seven-minute video clip of it below. I made it through 52 seconds. I challenge you to do better.

We Internet denizens have a lot of fun with Horatio Caine, the “CSI: Miami” investigator played by David Caruso. Anyone who’s ever seen Endless Caruso One-Liners has enjoyed the comedic alchemy that comes from Caruso’s hammy seriousness and Roger Daltrey’s scream.

And it seems that Hollywood is catching on to what’s cool on the Internet. In last night’s episode of “Burn Notice” — which, like Caruso’s “CSI,” takes place in Miami — Sam Axe (played by the legendary Bruce Campbell) awesomely pulled Horatio Caine’s “one-liner + sunglasses” move. And not to pooh-pooh Caruso’s style, but I don’t think there’s anyone in Hollywood who can handle a one-liner as well as Campbell. This might be the coolest thing he’s done since he since he had a chainsaw attached to his severed arm.

“This… is my BOOM STICK!”