Showtime

George Clooney's production company will produce a new half-hour comedy for Showtime called The Fall of Bob. The lead character, Bob (obviously), will narrate his life through flashbacks as he propels himself from a building. Morbid stuff. Variety is reporting that Showtime has been busy courting the big names since greenlighting the Steven Spielberg-produced, Diablo Cody-penned United States of Tara.

The channel also just piloted the darkly comedic "The End of Steve," from Matthew Perry and Peter Tolan .

When news broke that Eliot Spitzer had been patronizing a high-class prostitute, one thing everyone seemed to want to know was what, exactly, he’d asked his call girl to do. It was “unsafe,” in the words of “Kristen,” a.k.a. Ashley Alexandra Dupre—but could that have been an excuse she fabricated in hopes of unloading an undesirable client? Speculation was all over the map, from unprotected sex to anal to dangerous S&M to wearing socks in bed (not unsafe, sure, but certainly annoying). For a few days there, as we marveled over the amount of money earned by the girls at Emperors Club VIP and wondered over their wealthy clients and envied Ms. Dupre’s Flatiron apartment, hookers were on the brain. Are their lives better or worse than ours? At the top end, at least, their jobs actually sounded more like dating than whoring.  read more »

The Smithsonian Channel is getting all historical on us (that's just what they do!) with The True Story. They'll partner with Showtime to produce the five-hour series. It will look at the real-life roots of popular films and characters, including Indiana Jones, Ian Fleming's James Bond, Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame and the Amityville house, according to Broadcasting & Cable. We wonder what they'd have to say about Alvy Singer ...

With the strike on CBS's bank of crime and punishment programming is getting low. CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves announced that the network is looking to its sister channel, Showtime, to fill in the gaps. Will Dexter, the mediocre-written, yet highly addictive show about a forensics cop who moonlights as a serial killer make it to network television?  read more »