TVSquad

In addition to the recent renewals and new episode orders for TNT's Saving Grace and The Closer, the USA Network has ordered up thirteen new episodes of Burn Notice.

Burn Notice is great summer fare: a series that doesn't exactly break new ground but is still fun to watch. USA's motivation in picking new shows has been to focus on strong characters, and that's exactly what keeps Burn Notice from being just another crime/detective/mystery series (even though it is just another crime/detective/mystery series). It's also what keeps me tuning into Monk after all these years, even though every episode is pretty much the same. The lead players, Jeffrey Donovan, Sharon Gless, Bruce Campbell and Gabrielle Anwar, work well within the sometimes cookie-cutter self-contained plots, elevating the series to something worth checking out each week. It's not the plots so much, it's the people.

At the NBC party for the TCA press tour earlier this month, there was a small contingent of ER cast members floating around, but two of them happened to be my favorites: Linda Cardellini and Parminder Nagra (what, you think I was going to say Shane West?). Both actresses seem to be more prominently involved in the veteran show's storylines this year: Cardellini's Samantha Taggart has already had to deal with killing her fugitive ex-husband and now is trying to figure out how to control a son whose behavior is going south, and Nagra's Neela Rasgotra has been in a torrid affair with John Stamos' character, Tony Gates.

I caught up with both of them and asked them about how they think the year's been going so far and what's in store for each of their characters during the remainder of the season.

If you find yourself at Movie Park Germany in Bottrop-Kirchellen this April, be sure to check out the park's latest attraction, Nickland. An agreement through Nickelodeon gives the theme park intellectual property rights to characters from SpongeBob SquarePants, My Life As a Teenage Robot, Dora the Explorer; Danny Phantom, The Backyardigans and Jimmy Neutron. Costumed characters from the shows will be on hand to greet families, and, if Germany's theme parks are anything like America's, they'll also be punched and kicked by small children.

The Nickland section of the park will include seven new attractions, including Jimmy Neutron's Atomic Flyer and SpongeBob SquarePant's Splash Bash.

The point of this edition of The Five, besides giving me yet another chance to talk about cartoons, is to examine those weird quirks that set certain cartoon characters apart from their constituents. That is to say, something beyond the usual bulging eyes, springing hair, unraveling tongues, mallet-induced head lumps and stars and birdies that twirl about the head whenever they crash through a wall. I'm interested in quirks and traits a character possesses that no other character does. Some of these are easy: Fred Flintstone's "Yabba Dabba Doo!," Bugs Bunny's various catchphrases like "What's up, doc?" and "Of course you know, this means war!," so I tried to delve a little deeper and come up with some oddities only incredible nerds like myself would notice.

Maybe this will make more sense if I just jump right into it:

Conan O'Brien may have added another character to the pantheon of greats that includes the masturbating bear, Carl "Oldie" Olson, Triumph, barfing Kermit and Pimpbot. On Monday night, Conan ran a comedy bit on NCAA mascots. Among the mascots was "FSU's webcam manatee." The gag of a gyrating manatee in front of a computer ended with one of the band members checking out the hot manatee on his laptop. Conan cracked that he must be frequenting "hornymanatee.com."

The next night, Conan appeared explaining that, unbeknownst to him, NBC policy requires that any non-existent web address that is mentioned on the air be bought by NBC for ten years. We'll never really know if this fact was actually "unbeknownst" to the Cone Zone, but it does mean that NBC now has among its stable of web property - HornyManatee.com - which has now become a Conan-related site for fan pics of hot and lusty sea cows in action. There's a solo manatee, manatee on manatee, man on manatee and fetish pages. One of those should satisfy your interspecies cravings.

We've seen what the cast of Battlestar Galactica would look like as Simpsons characters, and now, thanks to this site, you can see what all your favorite characters from the series Lost would look like if they were residents of South Park. Apparently these images are to be used in a parody called "Lost Park," as opposed to "South Lost," "Park Lost," or "Lost South," I suppose ("Raiders of the Lost Park," maybe?). Check out an image of the characters here. Seeing this makes me wonder if Matt and Trey ever plan to spoof Lost themselves. Between that and spoofing World of Warcraft, they'd have at least two episodes based on popular entertainment I know nothing about.

[via CC Insider]

After Aaron Spelling died last week, Keith asked if one of us would come up with some sort of The Five post that reviews the prolific producer's career. I was thinking of doing a "favorite shows" or "favorite moments" post, but there's so many of each to choose from, I didn't think I could do either category justice with only five choices.

So I decided to concentrate on the characters from Spelling's shows. And, yes, there are many to choose from in this category, too. But by choosing five of my favorite characters (and listing a few honorable mentions), it gives me a chance to illustrate how varied Spelling's shows truly were. And, as you can tell by the picture above, everyone could identify with at least one of his characters. So here are my favorite five: