TVSquad

(S18E14)

Marge [talking to Bart at the psychiatrist's office]: Bart, honey, this is all we can afford for now. If it doesn't work, maybe when you're older you can pay some lady to make you happy for an hour.

Bart: You know, I'm pretty sure I will.

Part of the fun of watching The Simpsons is trying to guess who the guest voice is each week. This episode had five guest voices packed into the episode, some of which were easier to guess since the actors were playing themselves, of course: Steven Sondheim, Meg Ryan, Peter Bogdanavich, Andy Dick and James Patterson.

With slow record sales, many critics are predicting that Taylor Hicks will be the first American Idol to fall short of selling one million albums. And that would make him the least successful Idol winner yet.

Meanwhile, last year's fourth place Idol finisher, Chris Daughtry, has already sold 1.7 million copies of his debut album.

Tom Corson, executive vice president of J Records, is optimistic Taylor will turn things around, telling the Associated Press, "It's a work in progress, and, would we have liked to sell a little bit more? Yeah. But (the album is) still gold and on its way to platinum."

In television, there seems to be a theory that red state humor and humor with a more liberal angle can never exist together. From Hee Haw to Blue Collar TV, the guiding ethos is that cowboy hat-wearin' pig farmers and snarky ironic hipsters are just too different for anyone to create a show both these camps can enjoy.

I say that's nonsense, and The Naked Trucker and T-Bones is my Exhibit A. I've been watching the show since it premiered in January, and with every episode I'm more and more convinced that Dave 'Gruber' Allen and David Koechner (the Naked Trucker and T-Bones, respectively) have found just the right mix of oddball humor and country-fried charm.

I loves myself some Ron Livingston. It's mostly due to his laid back lead role in Office Space, but I'm always impressed by that "everyman" thing he does so well. Alas, I've never seen Relative Strangers, the 2006 comedy starring Livingston, but I and everyone else will have a chance to catch it on Comedy Central on March 17 at 10:00 p.m.

Livingston plays a psychiatrist named Richard Clayton who sets out to find his birth parents, only to find out they're trailer trash with the surname "Manure" (played by Danny DeVito and Kathy Bates). I'm liking this movie already based on the talent alone, and as The Waterboy demonstrated, Bates knows how to play a hick.

UPDATE: An early draft of this post mistakenly identified the movie as a new Comedy Central series. That was my mistake, a result of misreading the press release. Thanks to those who pointed that out. I promise to report with greater care in the future.

Some things get better with age. Try telling that to the producers of American Idol. They believe that singers over the age of 28 are over-the-hill.

But they may be changing their youth-obsessed tunes. At least a tiny bit. There is some talk of increasing the Idol age limit from 28 to 30 next year. In Season Four, the age limit was raised from 26 to 28 paving the way for a dancing silver-haired "old-timer" called Taylor Hicks.

American Idol producer Nigel Lythgoe believes that raising the original age limit, "brought us some more maturity and a little more professionalism in certain areas. We're happy about that. I wouldn't mind extending it even further next year, to be honest."