No, Chuck. But I wish you were. Because it would be SPLENDID: You’d be like an underage Brian Kinney.

So this week on Gossip Girl: Blair is coming unhinged. Chuck is drinking whiskey at 7 a.m. Jenny is a lame, ungrateful, overweening twerp (so, um, just like every week). Dan needs Awesome Real World Experiences to write his Yale essays about (and someone whose education cost more than mine will have to illuminate me: do Ivy League schools really require fiction in their applications? Because my wee public school, um, did not) and so goes on a drugs and booze bender with Chuck. Lily got naked for Robert Mapplethorpe! And Serena looked like she was playing a zucchini in a Fruit of the Loom commercial.

I suppose it’s evident how much I hate Jenny. If the rumors of a Jenny-centered spinoff are true, I will be oddly delighted because that means this otherwise deliciously soapy show wouldn’t be wasting time on her pedestrian travails. (Maybe the expelling process is leading there?) She’s petulant, obnoxious, and as bland as a glass of milk, and while it was interesting when she was a pawn in Blair’s power games, this Project Runway–meets–All About Eve arc she has going on it just … boring. This show can’t commit a graver sin.

I kind of like Dan’s mean writing adviser (is he supposed to be the editor at the Paris Review?), mostly because he’s mean to Dan. And because he seems to be the only person on this show drunker than Chuck. Whose little-boy-lost routine is kind of endearingly passé (shades of early Doug Ross), but I am enjoying Dan’s attempts to crack through his fey, brooding shell, especially when they include bar fights and jail (OMG, the slash fiction is just writing itself). They should get a spinoff with Nate. Who is absent this episode. Probably knitting iPod cozies with Vanessa somewhere in Brooklyn.

The Fashion Week intrigue only amuses me because it means Blair is going to go supernova at some point in the near future; I can only hope it won’t be by throwing up everything she eats but by destroying everything in her path. Right now she’s being just as petulant as Jenny, and that vexes me. But now that It Is On with Serena, there ought to be some serious violence.

P.S. Does it seem odd to anyone else that the audiences for Gossip Girl and High School Musical 3 overlap? Not just that they do, but that Disney would acknowledge they do by advertising on Gossip Girl, given how there is quite deliberately no making out in HSM1 and GossipGirl.org would be a terrible influence on Troy, Gabriella and the gang. (Just think of what Chuck would do to Ryan.)

Title	Season
Adam-12	Season 2
B.L. Stryker	The Complete Series
Banacek	The Complete Series
Beauty and the Beast	The Complete Series
Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns	Click and Clack’s As the Wrench Turns
Edward the King (mini-series)	Edward the King
Laredo	The Best of Season 2, Part 1
Mr. Bean	The Best of Mr. Bean Vol 2
My Name Is Earl	The Complete 3rd Season
My Three Sons	Season 1, Vol. 1
New Fantastic Four, The	The Impossible Man
Numb3rs (Numbers)	The Complete 4th Season
Popeye	Volume 3: 1941-1943
Root of All Evil	Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil
Sports Night	The 10th Anniversary Edition
Starlost, The	Complete Series
Trial & Retribution	Set 1
Voltron: Defender of the Universe	Collection 6: Air Team (Vehicle Force)
When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions	When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions

• Judge sides with NBC, Project Runway to Lifetime
• Kathy Griffin sues a cybersquatter over
• Time interviews Seth MacFarlane
• Little Britain USA looks like a winner
• Gay TV actors still prefer to stay in the closet
• CBS forgot to blur out Marcus Lehman’s penis on Survivor, now his penis is the 4th most popular search term on Google
• TLC debuts 17 Kids and Counting about that weird hyper conservative family
• RIP: Fox’s Do Not Disturb is Fall’s first casualty
• VH1 creating another dating show, this time starring Omarosa
• Lost tribute band releases an album based on seasons 3 and 4
• Sarah Michelle Gellar to on HBO
• Jon Stewart is kicking ass
• They’re remaking
• This day in lists: The top 20 episodes of The Simpsons

Space, from what I hear, is the place.

As such, the Discovery Channel has created a lovely four disc collection called “When We Left Earth,” which documents the past 50 years of space travel. I’m basing this on nothing, but my hope and expectation is that the documentary is a compilation of dudes who look like Ed Harris talking about how they had to wake the president by calling him on a bright red telephone.

However, the description says that the DVD includes interviews, on-board spacecraft video and dusty NASA archive footage. It’s all narrated by Gary Sinise and has four frickin’ hours of bonus features.  You don’t have to watch it all.

If you’d like to win the DVD, e-mail us at tifaux -at- gmail -dot- com with the subject line “Blast off to nerdery!”  I’ll pick a winner when I darn well please.

So I know he didn’t do a lot of TV, but I loved him. And I will miss Paul Newman a whole damn lot. One time my coworker J and I saw him sitting in the passenger seat of an SUV on Broadway outside our office. And…it was awesome. Because it was Paul Newman. And he just seemed like a splendid human being, in addition to a fine actor and humanitarian.

My favorite Newman, as you can see, is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, although he is spectacular as Butch Cassidy. Paul, I hope you are somewhere with fast cars and delicious salad dressings.

As we move into the final month of the presidential campaign, SNL seems to be ramping up its political content a bit, offering two political sketches in opening half-hour or so. It began with another killer Fey-Poehler Palin sketch, in which Fey again played the VP candidate as a grinning plain-folks yokel whose sunny incompetence flummoxes Poehler, this week playing Katie Couric (the dynamic is a neat reversal of the stars’ chemistry on Weekend Update and in Baby Mama, where Fey typically plays down-to-earth to Poehler’s more outsized personality). The Palin sketches must more or less write themselves, but Fey and company always manage to find the right point to veer into absurdity, as when Fey’s Palin earnestly asked for a lifeline to assist with an interview question. Somehow they made a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? joke work.

The debate sketch fared less well, not only, I imagine, because it had to be created within about twenty-four hours, but because the Obama-McCain debate itself lacked any easy satirical hooks: few goofy turns of phrase and little embarrassing body language to allow Darrell Hammond (McCain) or Fred Armisen (Obama) the opportunity to really focus their caricatures of the candidates. Neither impression ranks among the performers’ finest, and so the debate sketch was essentially just a compendium of mostly-mild campaign-related humor.

• Bored at work? Read Claymates reaction to the gay announcement
• A history of the rise and fall of The Chappelle Show
• The Simpsons are 188 episodes away from beating Gunsmokes’ record for most episodes of a scripted series
• Check out Suede’s hoax collection for fashion week. Also, check out how he managed to get 4 of his designs on “The 100 most hideous looks of fashion week”
• A philosophy professor from York College uses The Office to teach ethics
• MSNBC rounds up the world’s strangest TV shows
• Dylan and Brandon return on Tuesday’s episode of 90210
• Pick up your own Cylon Raider for $949
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: Mock the vote
• Ed McMahon to become gangsta rapper
• Tim Gunn gets interviewed by Time Out New York
• Is this why Nina Garcia of Project Runway?
• This day in lists: 10 ways to watch TV at work without getting fired
• Rapper Shad bases his video for The Old Prince Still Lives On off of the intro from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
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After one of the more frustrating Emmy experiences in memory, Buzz proposed five ways to fix the show. (BuzzSugar)

Plattie explained exactly why she hates British soaps. (Pop Vultures)

Dipping her toes into the podcasting pool, Rae teamed up with Jason the TVahoilic and Amrie from My Take on TV for the inaugural TV times Three podcast “Goodbye Summer, Hello Fall.” (RTVW Online)

Only the boys of The Big Bang Theory could sit through three hours of Heroes and Scooter has thoughts on both season premieres and a few words on How I Met Your Mother. (Scooter McGavin’s 9th Green)

Vance is disappointed with buzzworthy shows 90210 and Heroes so far but is totally charmed by Privileged. (Tapeworthy)

This week, Jace took an advance look at HBO’s pond-skipping new comedy Little Britain USA, from the warped minds of David Walliams and Matt Lucas. Yes, you’ll be talking about Mr. Doggy come Monday. (Televisionary)

She’s easy to hate — the Tim Gunn disrespect, the constant laughing, the hyperconfidence — but Marisa can’t help but like Kenley on Project Runway. (TiFaux)

Raoul talked to Misha Collins about his role on Supernatural (TV Filter)

The words of the prophet Eminem have come true.

I have been watching ER since it started, on and off. Mostly on. Back when it started I wasn’t allowed to stay up late enough to watch Friends, much less ER right after it. Yeah, that was a hundred years ago, when George Clooney had big hair.

And this show has been breaking my damn heart since I was thirteen years old. I’m getting sick of it. They just keep killing people; I don’t know how I can live in a world where Greene, Gallant, Lucy Knight, Sandy Lopez, Gant, Pratt, both of Chen’s parents, and even Romano and that priest James Cromwell played are dead and Izzie Stevens still lives.

I’ve always liked how ER has split the difference between being a procedural and being serialized. I’ve missed big chunks here and there, but it’s always easy to come back in and figure out pretty quickly who is sleeping with whom (usually Dr. Greene/a nurse, Neela/a doctor, or Sam/anyone), whose elderly parents are the AARP-certified sadface storyline of the month, and whose troubled childhood/past is rearing its ugly head (Carter, Abby, Ross, Luka, Kirsten Dunst). And then there’s the Gruesome Case of the Week. This week it was a gross, throbbing neck thing and an impaling; in the past we’ve seen Omar Epps jump in front of a train, Carter perform a field amputation, Romano participate in a field amputation, and enough traumatic childbirth to keep me celibate throughout high school (ER might be the only comprehensive sex ed kids are getting now—oh my God, this show was on before America stopped believing in evolution and condoms! I miss the nineties).

My roommate points out that we’ve thought we were watching the last season of ER since we met each other. Since then John Leguizamo has shown up, I think Lewis came back, Shane West got de-leg-itated, and Linda Cardellini went through like four different combinations of actors playing her babydaddy and kid (one of them was Cole Hauser! Really). I’m fully prepared for this last, we swear, totally the last season to be wrenching and portentous and give me a twitch in my eye the way listening to … you know what, no. I’m not going to admit listening to anything on this list. Except for the Cranberries. They are still on my iPod.