TVSquad

A busy week for giveaways! If you haven't entered our latest ones yet, here's a reminder that they're ending today. You've got until 5PM Eastern today to enter to win:

24 Season One Special Edition
The Muppet Show Season Three
Drawn Together Season Three
Stargate: Infinity - The Complete Series

Just head on over to the post links above, read through the rules, and make the applicable comment there (not here!). We'll notify the winners next week.

Good luck!

The giveaways continue... Now we've got three copies of Drawn Together Season 3 (Uncensored) on DVD for three lucky, random commenters. The DVD is already available in stores

To enter, simply leave a comment below before 5:00PM Eastern, Friday, May 23 telling us why you'd like to own this DVD set. As always, we'll randomly choose three winners amongst the eligible entries. Some other details:
Click here for complete Official Rules.

• At 8, ABC has a new Ugly Betty, followed by new episodes of Grey's Anatomy and Big Shots.
• CBS has a new Survivor at 8, then a new CSI and the series premiere of Viva Laughlin.
• NBC has new episodes of My Name Is Earl, 30 Rock, The Office, and ER.
• FOX has the Red Sox/Indians game at 8.
• The CW has a new Smallville at 8, then a new Supernatural.
• At 9, Larry King interviews Bill Cosby on CNN.
• At 10, AMC has the season finale of Mad Men.
• At 10:30, Comedy Central has a new Drawn Together.

Nielsen has begun adding college students that live in dorms to its ratings. In practical terms, this means 130 drunk kids will represent about 2 million actual college students, and have an inordinately large influence on the television landscape.

The Wall Street Journal reports that some shows have seen a huge boost due to the inclusion of college student data. Comedy Central's Drawn Together saw a 60% ratings bump, which shouldn't be surprising, as I'm not sure anyone who doesn't live in a dorm watches the show. Of course, Nielsen estimated 163,000 additional people were watching the show based on the fact that 12 of those college kids were tuning in. Yay statistical sampling.

Nielsen gathers data from about 10,000 households and uses that data to extrapolate what the rest of the country is watching. While that system probably worked pretty well thirty years ago when there were only a handful of networks, viewers today can choose from hundreds of different channels.

Nielsen Media Research is making a change to their television ratings. In the past, children of a Nielsen family that were away at college were not factored into the numbers. After doing some research, sponsored by Turner, WB, CBS, MTV, Fox, and ESPN, those college kids will now count in the regular Nielsen ratings.

The NY Times article (possible login) points to America's Next Top Model, Family Guy, Ugly Betty, and [adult swim] as programming that should see a boost in their ratings. Disturbingly, it also mentions that in a test done last November the most popular show among college men was Drawn Together. The audience for the Comedy Central cartoon jumped from 272,000 to 435,000. What are they teaching our youth on these campuses?

This certainly isn't the final answer in the ratings question. There are still plenty of problems and issues with the system, but it is a positive change. Especially so if it gives a much needed boost to the struggling Veronica Mars numbers.

The animated reality series Drawn Together returns for a third season on Comedy Central this Thursday at 10:30 pm. I've never been much of a fan of the show, and always felt like the subversive jokes and gags that make up an episode were delivered with all the subtlety of a machine gun shot directly into your face. I'm fine with humor that pushes the envelope, hell, I like it when the envelope gets torn to shreds, but Drawn Together doesn't allow itself anytime to breathe, to let the jokes sink in. I've also found the voice acting to be too shrill. However, if you're not like me and dig what the show has to offer, consider this your reminder that the show is coming back soon. Also, you can read an interview with the show's creators on the Comic Book Resources site (via Toon Zone).

Of all the shows on TV, the last one I ever expected to see reviewed in the pages of The New Yorker was Family Guy. Not that the show doesn't have any sophisticated humor; it's just that the sophistication is buried so deep under fart jokes and silly flashbacks that I figured it would never enter The New Yorker's radar screens. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my copy of the lastest issue this afternoon and saw this positive review by Nancy Franklin (the review also mentions American Dad, largely in negative terms. Franklin even manages to squeeze in a mention of Drawn Together, which she liked, sort of).

The review mostly summarizes what most Family Guy fans already know about the show: it's cancellation, it's popularity on DVD and Adult Swim, and the show's resurrection. But you have to remember that Franklin needs to go back over this well-tred ground so the readers -- who probably don't overlap too much with the show's fans -- have an idea of what the show's about. Most interesting is the lead paragraph, where Franklin takes a roundabout road to saying how mostly men make cartoons because we were never trained to be Nice and Proper like women were.

Also funny are the fluffy character descriptions, like when Franklin characterizes Stewie as "foppish and maniacal, and creepily pansexual." Really. I kinda had a feeling Stewie was foppish. But I never would have pegged him as pansexual. I think.