TVSquad

This post is for my brother and fellow Squadder Rich more than anyone else, since he seems to be one of the few people on the planet who is interested in anything and everything having to do with The Monkees:

Out of the four guys who appeared on the Beatles-inspired CBS NBC show (and played in the band the show created) , the one that seems to have managed to stay in the spotlight the most has been Micky Dolenz. Think about it: Peter Tork is nowhere to be found, Mike Nesmith is busy counting his Liquid Paper money, and Davy Jones can only seem to get infomercials for Time-Life oldies collections.

As a Verizon DSL customer, I've been eagerly anticipating to the arrival of their FiOS service to my neighborhood, mainly for the super-fast 15 Mbps download speed on their broadband serivce. But FiOS will also give customers the opportunity to get TV service, even though the jury's still out on whether it provides better value than the "evil" cable providers Verison is trying to defeat. But there's potential that the new service will bring something that neither cable nor satellite can provide: grainy videos of old commercials and teenagers getting hit in the groin.

Thaaat's right, folks: according to Reuters (via our blog cousins at Engadget), the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Verizon and YouTube are discussing an agreement where the recently-Googlified video site will provide content to Verizon via both it's VCAST mobile phone video service and to TVs via FiOS. The videos would be available on the FiOS service on an on-demand basis and likely for only a limited time.

If I were in charge of an American television network, I would be brainstorming ways to get Americans excited about soccer. The ratings for World Cup are out of this world. The average television audience, worldwide, for the month-long tournament was 93 million viewers for each match. 93 MILLION. And more than 5.6 BILLION (yes, that's a 'B') watched matches live in 54 global markets. The final match between Italy and France garnered an estimated 284 million viewers.

Reuters compares those numbers to America's biggest sporting event, the Super Bowl, and determines that World Cup numbers are equivalent to 64 Super Bowls. Mama mia!

I have to give props to Reuters for its headline for this story, ABC Matches Heche with "Men". As Mandy Moore would say, "that's funny."

Heche will play a shrink who moves to Alaska when she learns her husband has been cheating on her, only to discover Alaska is full of single men (it is?). Also cast in the pilot are Derek Richardson, from the movie Hostel, and Emily Bergl, who played Francie Jarvis on Gilmore Girls. We last saw Anne during an arc on Nip/Tuck where she played a woman in the witness protection program.