TVSquad

The ratings for the first Monday of the fall TV season are in, and it's not looking good at all for Heroes.

The NBC show dropped 46% from last season's one hour season opener. Which reminds me, Heroes should never be two hours long. Last night's first hour was boring as hell, and then the second hour was more interesting but still muddy, frustrating, and all over the place.

In other ratings news, House did really well, CBS came in second, and Dancing with the Stars didn't do as well as people thought it would (or it usually does).

I thought last night was tough, with The Emmys joining new episodes of Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the series premiere of Bored To Death, but it was nothing compared to tonight. We have the season premieres of How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, CSI: Miami, Dancing with the Stars, Castle, Heroes, and House, along with new episodes of Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and The Jay Leno Show and the series premiere of Accidentally on Purpose. Whew.

I think all of our DVRs are going to explode around 8:59 PM.

What are you watching? Are you going to give Heroes another chance? Are you anxiously awaiting Jenna Elfman's new show? Does Nathan Fillion make you all tingly?

I know people complained about this when the nominations came out, but for some reason, it just irked the hell out of me when Jon Cryer won the award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy.

Not that I don't think Cryer deserved an Emmy. No, he does a great job as the uptight Alan Harper on Two and a Half Men. And, after all the failed shows and pilots, the man once known as Duckie deserves recognition for the fine actor his is... just not as a supporting actor.

At the same NBC TCA party where I spoke to Joel McHale, I also ran into Community creator Dan Harmon. Suffice to say, he's a chatty fellow. I started off by asking him how a first-time show runner like him prepares to be in front of a ballroom full of reporters, as he had been earlier in the day. His answer was pretty interesting: they get briefed and told we're a bitter lot.

Harmon's claim to fame before Community was that he helped create The Sarah Silverman Program for Comedy Central, and he was one of the few people who thinks that the network creative process has been as smooth, if not smoother, than the process for basic cable.

He also got extremely effusive about having Chevy Chase on his show; I was going to edit his epic response to my question about Chevy, but it's so loopy that I figured I'd just let it stand as is. Interview after the jump.

Disneyland hosted its own Disney Convention, called D23, in the style of Comic Con this past weekend. The name comes from the year Walt Disney moved to Hollywood and the event was held at the Anaheim Convention Center across the street from Disneyland . Among other announcements was that of a new Muppet movie called The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made (hopefully it's a working title). There was also a live performance by Miley Cyrus, whom Disney owns the soul of.

Admittedly, it's a pretty good idea which caters to the real Disney enthusiasts out there (having met a few, I know they certainly exist). Disney is one of the few companies that is large enough to have its own version of Comic Con. While the convention had announcements for most of its franchises, I noted the absence of any mention of the recently-acquired Marvel Comics.

On the other hand, the company already has a Disney convention open all year round. It's called Disneyland (or Disneyworld for the East Coast). What do you think of this development?

All of you David Cassidy fans* out there are out of luck.

ABC has canceled his new show Ruby & The Rockits. It seems like the show just started ... well, that's because that's pretty much true. The show will be axed after only one season.

Anyone who wants to see the show renewed for a second season will have to start a campaign like the nut campaign that saved Jericho for another season. I don't watch the show, so I'm not sure what you could mail to ABC Family to get their attention. Maybe rubies? Rockets?

Much like the Disney acquisition of Marvel Entertainment, television is only a part of what this change represents. However, it does affect the television industry and should be mentioned on this blog. DC Comics has changed its name to DC Entertainment to encompass more forms of media, such as television and movies. Also the president of DC, Paul Levitz, has been replaced by a Time Warner officer named Diane Nelson.

While there are those that might disagree with me, this move looks like it's a response to Marvel's success with its movie franchises. Even though DC has done better on television (Smallville, plus various cartoons like The Brave and the Bold), movies are where the big bucks are. Granted, DC and Warner Brothers have had major success with its Batman movies, but it hasn't built any other franchises.

And as with the Marvel acquisition, we'll have to wait and see what the long-term effects of this corporate change will be. DC also loses the rights to Superman in 2013, so exciting things are afoot.

Entertainment Weekly Subscribers in New York and Los Angeles were treated to 40 minutes of video promoting the CBS fall lineup right in the pages of the magazine's Fall Preview this week, as Bob reported last month. But this groundbreaking movie got me thinking about how this technology could be used.

It's a potentially great development for the print medium. The player in EW is interactive, meaning that as you press on the page it's embedded in it responds. Click on The Big Bang Theory and you'll see the preview of the new season on that show. All those people who abandoned print for the interactive experience online can now get that in their favorite magazines as well.

The technology is a brilliant way for an advertisement to reach out to an even wider audience. These little players can be stuck just about anywhere, and loaded with 40 minutes or so of playback. Imagine picking up that DVD set of a TV show you've heard about and being able to watch clips of it right there.

The new series of Doctor Who comes closer and closer, and the list of involved talent is really starting to build up. It's been confirmed that Richard Curtis will write an episode. With some of his more popular work being Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually and Bridget Jones's Diary, Curtis seems like a rather unusual contributor. Of course, he also did Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley for television, but neither of those things are very sci-fi-related or timey-wimey.

Curtis's films seem to have the most luck when working with ensemble casts, so maybe he can work this same magic on the small screen and introduce some new characters worthy of sticking around. We haven't really had that since Sally Sparrow (and maybe Nightingale, if only to complete the duo) from "Blink". Also, the new Doctor and the new companion are both young and attractive, a combination poised to perfectly fit into Curtis's romantic-comedy specialty.

As most people who follow our Press Kits Unwrapped series know, one of the most interesting perks to what we do is the free stuff the networks send us, usually along with their preview screeners. However, in the last year, the number of elaborate press kits have dwindled. Networks are starting to realize that sending a DVD in a sleeve is much cheaper than sending one with a water bottle or a t-shirt, and the show will get just as much coverage. Heck, ABC doesn't even send the DVDs anymore; they ask us to view screeners on their ABC Medianet website, which sometimes work and sometimes don't.

But FOX and its cable sibling FX are still plugging away, sending expensive-looking press kits to promote their shows. While FX is content with sending elaborately-packaged folders with DVDs and a glossy press guide, their broadcast cousins are still sending tchotchke-laden packages, like the one I got for the new season of House. An explanation, and more pics, after the jump.

Today marks 30 years since the premiere of ESPN. Happy birthday, ESPN! Hard to believe there was actually a time when there wasn't a cable channel devoted completely to sports. In fact, the idea of a cable network that just covered sports was considered as ridiculous as one that only reported the news. Don't even get me started on the radical notion of an all-food channel or one that specialized in weather!

Yes, once upon a time, all those concepts were deemed losers. Back in 1979, if you wanted to know the score of a game in progress, you had to hope it was playing on the radio or TV to tune in. Or, more often than not, wait till the local news broadcast at six o'clock for the score. How did we ever get by?

Normally, TV press kits come with more useless junk than an IKEA furniture kit. They usually come with T-shirts that are too small for the average TV critic's billowy build, toys that can turn the brightest human beings into easily-amused cats, and other assorted paraphernalia.

FX's press kit for the forthcoming second season of Sons of Anarchy has none of these things. There are no bloody brass knuckle sets, fake handlebar mustaches or even a lousy T-shirt that reads "The bitch fell off" on the back, perfect for that upcoming christening or bar-mitzvah.

That doesn't mean it's bad. In fact, it's one of the most bitching press kits to ever grace my cold, ink-stained hands.

After being suspended by both CBS Radio and MSNBC two years ago over some derogatory on air comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus will once again enjoy a television presence (having already regained a radio presence) on the Fox Business Network.

Granted, the whole controversy around his statements from two years ago was a little overblown. Other shock jocks have made far worse statements on the air with much less in the way of media attention. That sort of language is business as usual for them.

The question is this; what does Don Imus have to do with business? He's not exactly Warren Buffett. He's not even Jim Cramer. Mind you, his previous television show was on MSNBC, which is also a business network [update: MSNBC is not a business network. I confused it for CNBC. My apologies]. At most this can be taken as a switch of political affiliation.

So what do you think? Will you be watching Don Imus on his new show?

In the latest issue of Time (hits newsstands tomorrow) the mag's resident critic James Poniewozik has a great article on the upcoming prime-time premiere of The Jay Leno Show. Poniewozik makes the argument (an ubiquitous one at this point) that as a result of Leno's move to 10 p.m., your TV is shrinking.

As he puts it, in a TV viewing world where the attention span of potential eyeballs is so segmented because of cable, DVRs, and Hulu, NBC is throwing all their eggs in one basket with "America's most successful purveyor of vanilla."

However, a lot of people really like vanilla. Good sign? Hard to say.

Highlights and a look the issue's cover after the jump.

If you ask J.J. Abrams about his master plan for Fringe, he'll tell you the plan went out the window a while ago.

The creators and cast of Fox's top new series from last year's fall season gathered with press in Vancouver Monday to celebrate the release of the show's first season on DVD and to look ahead at the upcoming second season.

When Fringe left the airwaves last spring, J.J. Abrams, Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman introduced fans to a parallel universe -- setting up a war between our world and that new Earth on the edge of the fringe.

According to Abrams, a long-range plan for the show had him, Orci, Kurtzman and their writing staff revealing the other Earth as the source of Fringe's anomalies maybe three or four seasons into the show's run.