TVSquad

We have a new feature here at TV Squad, where we show you a picture of something and you have to guess what the heck it is.

This one is from a TV show that debuted many, many years ago. I actually had a model of this when I was a kid, and I wish I still had it. Answer later this afternoon!

A new feature here at TV Squad, where we show you a picture of something and you have to guess what the heck it is.

The only clue we'll give you is that it has something to do with a current TV show (there's another clue in this post too, but I won't reveal what it is). Answer later this afternoon.

I'm going to assume that one of the big reasons why you can now watch full episodes of various TV shows on YouTube is because of the success of sites like Hulu and AOL Video. There have been a lot of TV shows and movies uploaded to YouTube, often in hard-to-navigate "parts," with bad sound. But YouTube has made deals with several networks/studios, including Sony, CBS, Showtime, and Discovery to show full length, legal copies of many TV shows.

It's a fair collection, including current shows like Harper's Island, Jimmy Kimmel Live, As The World Turns, Man vs. Wild, Mythbusters, along with classic shows like Bewitched, MacGyver, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Barney Miller, I Spy, I Dream of Jeannie, and many others. It's not the selection you'll find on Hulu, but it's OK (and I'm sure the list will grow). I just wonder if it's enough to get people to drift away from other video sites.

It's not glitch-free, however. Take a look at this and this and tell me what the heck they have to do with The Dick Van Dyke Show. Only five episodes of the show on there and two of them aren't even from the show.

I don't watch anything on The CW, but I know that there are a lot of people who do. Gossip Girl, Supernatural, Smallville, 90210, One Tree Hill, Privileged. It's always the last channel in the ratings of the big five networks (including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC), but these shows have their fans. So it's a little odd that TV Guide would drop the network from its grid (scroll down).

Yup, the long-running magazine says that there just isn't enough room to list all of the channels now, so they've gotten rid of The CW and other channels recently, including MTV and their own TV Guide Network (though that was just sold to Lionsgate).

We all know that studios go ga-ga for big screen movies based on TV shows. Even if they tank, there seems to be an unending appetite to bring a beloved (or even semi-beloved) TV show to a theater near you: The Fugitive, Charlie's Angels, Transformers, The Beverly Hillbillies, Serenity (Firefly), The Simpsons, South Park, The Flintstones, The Jetsons...the list is endless. Now Den of Geek has a list of 23 shows that studios are planning to bring to the big screen.

But this list is really incomplete in so many ways. We've all heard that Magnum, P.I. might get the movie treatment, but this list only says that Matthew McConaughey might star and doesn't mention other people who have been rumored to have been attached to it in the past, including Ben Affleck and George Clooney.

This is getting serious.

Both sides are still far from agreement on a new deal, and a strike by the Writers Guild of America could start in a couple of weeks (the last offer was rejected by writers). That means that scripted shows (Lost and House, for example) and late night talk shows would suffer the most. Some shows have a schedule that means they won't be affected that much, like The Simpsons, but most other scripted shows will be hurt in some way. As for daytime, Martha Stewart wouldn't be affected at all, but The View uses union writers so that should could be hit. (The View uses writers? So that means a writer actually puts those words into Elisabeth Hasselbeck's mouth?)

Well, this is a rather cool feature for a TV fan: IMDb pages for TV and movie characters.

Now, it's one thing to have a page for a character that has only been seen on one TV show. But what about characters that have appeared on several TV shows? I decided to test IMDb and see how thorough it is. I typed in "Mike Bauer," a character that used to be on Guiding Light. The character has not only been played by a bunch of characters over the decades, he also appeared on another soap, Another World (on another network!), and damn, the IMDb caught that too.

Judd Apatow, who will forever be a hero to many TV viewers who loved the too short-lived NBC series Freaks and Geeks, is saying goodbye to television. But not before one final shot with the soon-to-be-released feature film The TV Set.

The movie stars David Duchovny as a series creator who butts heads with various studio executives (including Sigourney Weaver) who just don't get what he's trying to do with his TV show. And, yes, it's a version of what Apatow and The TV Set director Jake Kasdan went through when they worked on Freaks and Geeks.

The YouTube phenomenon is certainly making for some interesting business arrangements. It seems like every "old guard" media company is either striking deals with YT to make sure their content is legally shown on the service. But now that Google is in the picture, it seems like companies are banding together to fight the online behemoth and create their own product. Some companies have done both.

Take NBC, for example. Last year they struck a deal with YT to create a channel for them to place legal clips of their shows on the service. But now, they've decided to join forces with News Corp., the owner of the FOX network, to create an online video site to show TV shows and movies from both companies. The networks will leverage their content partnership deals with Yahoo, MySpace (owned by News Corp.) and our corporate benefactors at AOL to distribute and link to the videos. This LA Times article goes into the details.

It looks like the Emmy Awards are turning into the SATs.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has made several changes to the way Emmy nominations are chosen. For one, series and acting category nominations will be chosen by a mix of a regular vote and voting by a blue-ribbon panel of voters. Second, there's a new "Ellen Burystyn" rule. An actor can only be nominated if he or she was in at least 5% of an episode (Burstyn won a Supporting award last time, even though she was only on screen for 14 seconds). Third, public performances on TV will no longer compete in the music/variety category. They're adding a new special category where more than one performance could win an award.

Oh, and there's one more change: actors and producers will have to submit an essay of 250 words or less as to what their character/show is about and why they think they should be nominated. This wiill come in handy when Jim Belushi has to explain the complexity of his According To Jim character.

I used to play this game with myself when I was bored where I would try to create "chains" by linking names and phrases together. For example, I might morph "I'm A Little Teapot" and the "Teapot Dome Scandal" into "I'm A Little Teapot Dome Scandal."

Now, someone needs to jog my memory because I know there's an actual game that also became a short-lived game show based on this same idea. While I wait for someone to remind me what that was called*, I've created another game for y'all to play. Just like my last two games, you won't win anything, but I think this one is a little more challenging that my last two.

I've written plot descriptions for twenty-one series below. Here's an example:

Okay, so I was in the mood to create another fun TV game for y'all like I did with my "TV opposites" game, so here it is.

Below you will find altered lyric samples from TV themes that more or less mean the same thing as the original lyrics. For example, if I wrote:

One takes that which is affirmative, and also that which is negative
and puts these two opposing forces together
in conclusion, the result is the truth of all existence

TV Shows on DVD has long been my favorite site for finding information on both recent and upcoming DVD releases of television series, and I've linked to it on numerous occasions. After five years of providing quality content, the site has been acquired by TV Guide. In a message on the site, co-founder Gord Lacey explained that not much will change with the site itself, other than some integration between the site and TVGuide.com.

I always thought the site did pretty well on its own, but as Lacey points out, being part of TV Guide will hopefully give the site even more visibility and access to studios, resulting in even better coverage.

If the acquisition helps to raise the profile of TV Shows On DVD, I say "cheers" to my fellow TV-centric blog. It will remain my preferred choice for TV on DVD news and new releases.

If you're a Netflix subscriber but can't stand waiting for those DVDs to arrive in the mail, I have some good news for you: over the next six months, the company will be rolling out a new feature that will allow subscribers to stream movies and TV shows directly to their computer. Initially, subscribers will be able to choose from about 1,000 movies and TV shows out of the over 70,000 offered through the company's mail service. Users will have to download a browser application in order to take advantage of the new service.

The service will be included as part of the subscription plan at no extra cost. As a Netflix customer, I'm thrilled to have another way of viewing these shows, though I have a feeling the majority of my rentals will still be done through ye olde postal service. I don't really have any desire to watch movies on my computer, at least not until I get a more comfortable computer chair.

This is a variation of a word game I sometimes play with my friends. Below I've listed a bunch of television shows, but instead of writing the actual name of the show, I've written the show's "opposite." I put "opposite" in quotations because obviously not all words have exact opposites, so I have to be clever sometimes and just come up with something that kind of fits. This makes it fun. Here are some examples:

The "opposite" of Taxi might be Bus.

The "opposite" of Everybody Hates Chris might be Nobody Loves Christie.

The "opposite" of General Hospital might be Specific Clinic.

The list is after the jump. See how many you can guess. You won't win anything, just bragging rights and a cameo appearance in my next sexual fantasy. Onward:

UPDATE: Congrats to everyone who has guessed correctly so far. There are still a few left, so crank up your brains, puzzle masters.

SECOND UPDATE: One more left.

THIRD UPDATE: They've all been guessed. Good job, everyone.