The CW

Rumors of The CW's demise have been slightly exaggerated. While the network is still on shaky ground, they were happy to announce last night that the incredibly hyped and hypnotically mediocre 90210 has been picked up for a full-season order. Despite losing nearly thirty-percent of its record series premiere audience, 90210 has held strong over the last two weeks, especially in the desirable 18-34 demographic.

Also helping 90210's cause: the fact that the show has immediately ingratiated itself into the cultural zeitgeist, with nearly the same gusto that sister program Gossip Girl did last year. We're not even out of September and there have been countless stories and clips on the web and newsstands about the show, ranging from  read more »

We were never the biggest 90210 fans. It always seemed too melodramatic and overly serious; as the years have passed on, it's faded in our memory to blurry fragments from a time when Aaron Spelling ruled the earth--the theme song, the pastels, the awful opening credits and the crush we had on Shannen Doherty (we've always preferred brunettes to blondes-sorry Kelly!) 90210, we barely remember thee!

We actually latched onto The O.C. in a much more visceral way, which probably speaks more to our arrested development than anything else (we were already into our 20s when Josh Schwartz's first hit premiered.  read more »

Jennie Garth, who played blonde cutie Kelly Taylor on the original 90210, will join the cast of the new spinoff on the CW channel. Ms. Garth will play a guidance counselor to the (probably) much more at-risk new West Beverly High kids, according to the Associated Press. On 90210, Ms. Garth became a diet pill abuser, was trapped in a fire, became involved in a cult, used cocaine, was raped, shot, got amnesia and had a miscarriage, according to her career review. She'll apparently have a lot of advice to give, but she might be a bit rusty since her roles on What I Like About You with Amanda Bynes and Dancing With the Stars have been so squeaky clean.

We just spoke with Shanna Moakler, the 32-year-old actress and former Miss U.S.A. Earlier this week, we were pleasantly flabbergasted by her new fabulously bizarre CW reality show, Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants. Ms. Moakler—whose rocky-road relationship with her husband, the Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, was the subject of an MTV show called Meet the Barkers—called The Daily Transom from her bed, where she was “all cozied up.”

Crowned, the second episode of which aired on Wednesday night, features 11 mother-daughter teams competing for a joint pageant title and a $100,000 cash prize. Ms. Moakler judges these self-titled teams, ranging from “Blonde Bombshells” to “Tomboy Queens,” alongside Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley and “television personality” Cynthia Garrett.

To be sure, Mr. Kressley’s witty off-the-cuff remarks, an odd mix of Michael Kors on Project Runway and Miss J. Alexander on America’s Next Top Model, keep the show watchable—if not downright addicting. Another asset arguably comes from the sense one gets that the three judges are definitely in on the joke.

“Oh, my god! He’s so fun,” Ms. Moakler said of Mr. Kressley. “It was so much fun to go to work. We would literally just go in and laugh for hours. Carson is so witty and he’d have these great one-liners,” she continued, “The producers had to tell us to stop laughing and tell us to take it more seriously, because we were having such a great time.”

Continue reading after the jump.  read more »

Christina Applegate’s Samantha Who? (9:30 PM, ABC) debuts tonight, sandwiched in between Dancing With the Stars and The Bachelor. She plays a woman who wakes from an eight-day coma with retrograde amnesia only to slowly come to the realization that she was a total bitch. Perhaps a little amnesia is necessary on the part of viewers, who will need to forget Surviving Christmas in order to give this show a shot. (Who am I kidding?  read more »

What television network does Satan want you to spend your time watching? On Thursday May 17, around noon, the Prince of Darkness wandered onto stage at the Theater at Madison Square Garden and confirmed what theologians have long suspected. He wants you to watch the CW  read more »