The Golden Globes Award ceremony has officially been canceled. The gala show has been replaced by an hour-long press conference to announce the winners, broadcast exclusively on NBC on Sunday night. I’m not sure why anyone but the press would watch the press conference since there will be no stars in attendance, and the results will be available online as soon as the broadcast ends.

The Hulkster’s daughter, Brooke Hogan, has apparently auditioned for Dancing with the Stars producers.

Tennis player and star of the horrendous Age of Love, Mark Philippoussis, is also jockeying for a spot on DwtS. Mercifully, it’s just the Australian version of the show, and not the U.S. edition.

TV Guide’s Matt Roush posted his thoughts on the return of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report last night. Of the two shows, I thought The Colbert Report fared better without a script than The Daily Show did.

Another late night talk show, Real Time with Bill Maher, returns this weekend.

To fill the void left by the writers strike, CBS is editing the first season of the Showtime show Dexter for network primetime. The first episode of the series premieres on CBS on February 17.

After several seasons off the air, ABC plans to bring back reality competition show The Mole this summer. Unfortunately, the show’s original host, Anderson Cooper, won’t be back.

American Gladiators’ Sunday night ratings victory over a preview of new scripted series Cashmere Mafia prompted Variety’s Kathy Lyford to wonder what motivation the studios have to make a deal with writers when reality series do better in the ratings. She does have a point.

Dance War may be good when the competition actually starts, but I’m not sure if viewers will stick around to find out.

The premiere focused solely on the audition process, and the fourteen finalists were revealed at the end of the episode. But it wasn’t announced which team the singer-dancers were on, so the "Bruno vs. Carrie Ann" aspect of the show played no part in the first episode.

Further, host Drew Lachey never explained how performers would be eliminated in the coming weeks, or how a winning team would be decided. Unless you fell in love with one of the contestants — which I didn’t — there isn’t much incentive to keep watching.

But the show’s biggest turn off was the singing. Most of the contestants were dancers first, singers second, so large portions of the episode were like the worst moments of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance combined. I kept my TV muted for much of the two-hour long program.

Dance War would’ve been better had they gotten right to the war. By spending the whole premiere on the tryouts, and not even revealing Bruno’s and Carrie Ann’s teams, the show lost me before it even got started.

NBC and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are scheduled to announce today whether they will go ahead with a televised broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, even though the Screen Actors Guild has announced that none of the award nominees will attend.

Due to the limited pool of guests they have to choose from, Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno will appear as guests on each others’ shows on Thursday night.

The fourth season of Anthony Bourdain’s quirky travel journal No Reservations premieres tonight on the Travel Channel, and TV Guide interviewed the intrepid chef. As usual, Bourdain aired his thoughts on the declining culinary credibility of the Food Network — which, after dumping Emeril and Mario Batali, was at least smart enough to sign Alton Brown to a new three-year contract.

Starting on January 28, Gossip Girl moves from Wednesdays to Mondays in the hopes of attracting new fans when the show goes into reruns.

TV Guide features a road report from Dancing with the Stars Tour participants Joey Lawrence & Edyta Sliwinska. Fellow dancer Sabrina Bryan chatted with the Chicago Sun-Times when the tour stopped in Chicago last Friday night.

DwtS co-host Samantha Harris gushed to Us Weekly about being a new mom.

And DwtS judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba return to the airwaves tonight with the premiere of their new show, Dance War. Zap2It has an interview with the choreographers.

Some readers have asked if we’ll be running a live chat during Dance War episodes. Unfortunately, we won’t. Tonight is the only episode of Dance War that I’ll be able to watch live, as I have an eight-week class starting next Monday night. But we will post a comment thread before the start of the show, and I invite you to join me in posting thoughts there throughout (and after) the program.

If you are (or someone you know is) running a chat during the show, let me know, and I’ll be happy to add a link on our homepage.

Teams got a longer rest period than usual, and it resulted in my favorite episode of the The Amazing Race 12 thus far.

Instead of the 12-hour break that teams usually get between legs, teams started this leg after a full 24 hours off. The benefits of the extra rest showed, as everyone seemed more positive and relaxed than they have in weeks.

The extra sleep kept Ron from arguing with Christina, and even Nate & Jen got along for over half the show — until Nate gently nudged Jen into a cab and she blew up at him.

Teams left the Pit Stop in Mumbai, India for Osaka, Japan at the start of the leg. TK & Rachel took a circuitous route to Japan, yet seemed unfazed by the fact that they didn’t see another team for the entire leg. Maybe it was the extra rest. Or maybe they just found some good weed in Osaka.

While Don was in good spirits, he had more trouble than usual keeping up with Nick. That led Don to nominate his grandson for a Roadblock task for which the directionally challenged Nick was uniquely unsuited.

One team member had to act as a cabbie and drive a Japanese couple to a destination, receiving their instructions only in written Japanese, and without being able to ask the couple for help or follow a local to lead them to the destination.

Time and again this season, Nick has proven that he is terrible with directions, and equally terrible at asking people for help.

After dropping off their charges, Nick’s competitors, Jen and Christina, had little trouble getting back to the taxi stand. But Nick at one point wound up perpendicularly blocking an entire lane of traffic, and he finished 10 minutes behind the girls.

To his credit, though, Nick did suggest that his team partake in one of my favorite Detours ever: robot soccer. While Nate & Jen and Ron & Christina went to sniff out real flowers in a shop that sold only fake flowers, Nick & Don used cell phones to control foot-tall robots in a game against a pair of menacing but clumsy goalie-bots.

I plan on spending a good chunk of time tomorrow finding a YouTube video of the soccer match and watching the little robots topple over again and again and again.

Over at the fake flower shop, Nate & Jen were the first team to find one of the real flowers. But because one of this season’s themes is Nate & Jen’s inability to finish in first place, they had trouble finding a cab, enabling Ron & Christina to beat them to the Pit Stop. Nick & Don finished in third place.

TK & Rachel finally arrived in Osaka as it was getting dark, and because the clues instructed them to complete the tasks — instead of sending them directly to the Pit Stop to get the boot — it was obvious that this was a non-elimination leg.

Next week, the hippies will have to complete a special Speed Bump task. Seeing how little the Speed Bump seemed to waylay Kynt & Vyxsin last week, TK & Rachel are by no means out of the race.

This leg’s 24-hour rest period made this the most enjoyable episode of this season of The Amazing Race for me. Bickering between teammates has its place; I admit to loving a good meltdown now and then. But, ultimately, it should be the tasks that create the tension and make the show interesting.

Instead, this week I wanted to cheer for everyone. I was impressed by how well Jen and Christina did driving taxis in Osaka, which would’ve been immensely frustrating if they’d tried to do it on little sleep and empty stomachs.

And the extended rest period seemed to make Nate funnier than usual, whether intentionally or not. As they rode in a cab, Jen tried to tell to Nate about her experience during the Roadblock. Nate interrupted her, nodded at their driver, and said, "It’s hard for me to pay attention right now when he’s driving. Sorry."

When Jen looked confused, Nate explained, "No, I’m listening to everything you’re saying. It’s just hard to…you know what I’m saying."

Speaking for all of us, Jen replied, "No, I don’t."

In a post-leg interview, Nate gave his take on his team’s inability to finish in first place: "The best team is going to finish in last, and that’s going to be Jen and I!"

TAR’s sound editor inserted the sound of a needle scratching a record as Jen looked at Nate and asked, "Gonna finish last?"

Nate blurted, "I mean finish…the last leg first."

Next week, Christina smiles kindly and instructs a ticket agent to withhold information from the other teams.

The WGA is trying to put the brakes on Jay Leno’s self-written monologues, claiming that he’s violating guild rules by writing anything for NBC. This should make things interesting on Monday when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report return with new episodes, as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are in the same position as Leno.

I’m glad I didn’t bother to watch last night’s debut of The Apprentice 7, as every review of the show seems to be negative. Reality Blurred described the celebrity edition "a half-assed knock-off of itself."

If you’ve ever dreamed of dancing with Cameron Mathison, here’s your chance: the soap star is auctioning off a private dance lesson with himself and his Dancing with the Stars pro partner, Edyta Sliwinska, for charity.

To fuel excitement for one of the few new shows debuting this winter, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fox is posting the show’s pilot episode on Yahoo! tonight for a 24-hour special preview.

People has interviews with a few recent reality show castoffs: Project Runway’s flaky Elisa and The Amazing Race’s goth couple, Kynt & Vyxsin.

The staff at TV Guide is pumped for Sunday night’s premiere of The Wire. TV Guide’s website features an interview with Clarke Peters, who plays Det. Lester Freamon. The site also has a post in their new Strike Survival Guide titled "The Wire: Why You Should Tap into It."

For a lengthier read, The Believer posted an interview with Wire creator David Simon, conducted by author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy). Simon describes The Wire as "a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason."

Business Week has an article featuring highlights from last night’s return of the late night talk shows. Jay Leno beat David Letterman in the ratings, despite the fact that Letterman had writers and Leno didn’t.

TV Guide features another interview with cast members of the Dancing with the Stars Tour, this time with lovebirds Sabrina Bryan & Mark Ballas.

For some reason, I was fascinated by this in-depth article about Heather Mills’ declining mental well-being, fueled by her public divorce and the unexpected lack of offers following her appearance on the fourth season of DwtS.

Entertainment Weekly has the definitive cast list of Survivor: Micronesia. Jeff Probst gave his take on each of the contestants, all-stars and "super fans" alike.

Fox has revised its midseason schedule yet again.

The Golden Globes fail to strike a deal with the WGA, and Variety has an interesting article about all of the people, from celebrities to party planners, still unsure about what they’ll be doing on January 13.

At long last, the release date for the Battlestar Galactica Season 3 DVD has been revealed: March 25th.

TV Shows On DVD reviewed The Wire Season 4 DVD, and the reviewer made the excellent point that the show is really a live-action novel. It’s especially satisfying when watched straight through, as Greg and I did this past weekend.

Every other series that I love, such as Battlestar Galactica, has at least a few episodes that are so bad they interrupt the flow of the story. But in all four seasons, The Wire manages to avoid that trap. Every episode has a purpose in the larger scheme of things; there’s never a "throwaway" episode that only exists to fill a gap between plot points.

Like a book that takes a few chapters to get rolling, it may take a few episodes for a particular season of The Wire to hook you. But I don’t think any other series provides conclusions as satisfying.

A word of warning to anyone thinking about jumping into the series when the fifth season premieres on HBO this Sunday: don’t. Just as you wouldn’t bypass the first two books in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have to start The Wire at the beginning. Fortunately, the first four seasons total only 50 episodes, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly 50 episodes go by when you’re completely engrossed by the material.

While some of us took a break for the holidays, the Dancing with the Stars Tour rolled on. TV Guide has two interviews from the road, with Monique Coleman & Alec Mazo and Cheryl Burke & Wayne Newton.

You can catch a rare glimpse of DwtS 1 pro Charlotte Jorgensen in Manila at the inaugural Philippine Star Ball on February 16, where she’ll serve as a judge.

Reality Blurred compiled a seemingly official list of all-star cast members from the forthcoming Survivor: Micronesia. The site also found snippets from some New York City ads for a new reality show based on Gossip Girl. The new show is seeking teens to star.

David Letterman and Craig Ferguson return to TV tonight, with the assistance of their writing staffs. Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel are also back tonight with new episodes, sans writers and possibly without any big celebrity guests.

Another show returning to TV in the near future is High School Reunion, only this time the contestants will reunite after 20 years, instead of ten. I’m not sure if watching a bunch of near-40 year olds get drunk and make fools of themselves will make this season of HSR any more or less palatable than seeing the same behavior from the near-30s of the first three seasons.

MSN features a slideshow of upcoming shows in 2008. And, with a plethora of "Best TV Shows of 2007" lists from which to choose, I’m taking the buttkissing approach and linking to the one written by Wendy Fox Weber, one of my editors at the Naperville Sun.

Finally, MTV has renewed A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, which must mean that things didn’t work out between her and the winner of the first season. Perhaps the network wanted to capitalize on the buzz generated by Tila being named The Soup’s Entertainer of the Year:

It was a dark day for The Amazing Race’s resident goths, as Kynt & Vyxsin were eliminated — thanks largely to a poor execution of the right strategy.

The couple entered this leg with a disadvantage looming. At some point, they’d have to complete an additional task (called a Speed Bump), as a penalty for finishing last on the previous, non-elimination episode.

But things started off well, as Kynt & Vyxsin wound up alone on the first flight to arrive in Mumbai, India from Florence, Italy. However, all five of the remaining teams bunched up when they had to wait overnight to retrieve the next clue from a newsstand.

The newsstand clue directed most of the teams to their Detour clue. But when Kynt & Vyxsin arrived there, they had an additional cluebox waiting: the Speed Bump. The goths had to learn and execute a number of progressively more difficult yoga moves before they could move on.

They finished that task quickly, so quickly in fact that they reached the a flower-stringing Detour to find Nate & Jen bickering their way through the task.

By that time, TK & Rachel (but mostly Rachel) had already finished stringing flowers and had moved on to find their next clue. And elsewhere, Nick & Don beat Ronald & Christina at the other Detour task: properly pasting a large, 6-panel movie poster onto a wall. The detail oriented task brought out the worst in Ron — who whined at his daughter and the task’s judge — and it was up to Christina to finish the task by herself.

Nate & Jen finished stringing flowers moments before Kynt & Vyxsin, but the goths were able to reach the next clue box first. There they found an unused U-Turn, which was their best chance to make sure they stayed in the game. The U-Turn allows one couple to force another couple (who must be behind them at this point) to go back and complete the Detour they chose not to do.

At this point, Kynt & Vyxsin correctly deduced that using the U-Turn could be essential to keeping them in the race. Standing on the U-Turn mat, Vyxsin said, "Well, we don’t know who’s behind us, except maybe Nate & Jen are behind us. We could try to U-Turn them in case they’re behind us."

It was the right plan. Even if they couldn’t be sure that Nate & Jen were behind them (and they were), that was the only other team the goths had seen since their Speed Bump.

But then Kynt made a fatal, faulty assumption: "But we could U-Turn somebody and make sure we sink ’em. Someone we know is behind us, like Gramps [Don] & Nick."

Unfortunately, Don & Nick were well ahead of the goths by this point. In fact TK & Rachel, Nick & Don, and Ron & Christina were all at (or on their way to) the Pit Stop by this time.

But Vyxsin didn’t fight Kynt as he stuck Nick & Don’s picture to the U-Turn sign, effectively sealing their doom. Nate and Jen soon arrived at the U-Turn clue, and were then off to the Roadblock.

It was neck and neck as Kynt and Jen completed the Roadblock for their respective teams. And it seemed as though the goths might have a chance when Jen delivered propane tanks to her second apartment, only to realize that she hadn’t gotten a receipt from her first delivery.

But then Kynt left receipts behind at both delivery locations, and, despite Jen’s near hysterics in the taxi on the way to the Pit Stop, there was no doubt that the goths were out.

At the Pit Stop, Phil Keoghan paid Kynt & Vyxsin a compliment that appeared to soften their elimination somewhat: "I would have to give you the award for the most fashionable couple ever on The Amazing Race." Kynt looked overjoyed as he high-fived Vyxsin and said, "See, we won something!"

With my favorite team now gone, I’m getting a bad feeling about the rest of the season. It’s sad to see Ronald revert back to demeaning his daughter, Christina, and it makes them hard to watch. And, in the preview for next week’s episode, Don looks like he’s having trouble coping with the physical demands of the race, making the other underdog team a longshot to win.

TK & Rachel’s strong performance this week makes me fear that they could be this season’s ultimate winners, and I would hate that. TK’s laid back hippie exterior masks an intense and totally un-fun core, and I’d rather not hear him give a b.s. victory speech about how they won by keeping things mellow and staying relaxed.

My last, best hope for a satisfying conclusion to the season lies on the unstable shoulders of Nate & Jen. Their hyperbolic expressions of hatred for one another are things of beauty, especially since the negative feelings seem to disappear as soon as the couple has a chance to calm down.

I like Nate & Jen because I don’t believe they mean what they say when they get stressed and become bickering idiots, so it’s easy to laugh them off. TK has been mean and condescending to Rachel on a few occasions, and I believe that he’s meant every word of it. For that reason alone, I’d rather see Nate & Jen take home the $1 million.

Just about everything went wrong for TK & Rachel on this leg of The Amazing Race, but they still managed to avoid finishing last. It may not have mattered much, anyway, since this week’s episode was a non-elimination leg.

Teams left Croatia for Ancona, Italy, where they had two choices as to how to drive to the town of Empoli: via Rome or through Firenze.

Nick & Don, Ron & Christina, and Kynt & Vyxsin took the latter route. When the three teams reached the highway exit for Firenze, they found the road blocked for construction, forcing them to either take a circuitous detour or wait for the road to open in the morning.

Jen & Nate had taken the alternate route through Rome, and they got to the next clue several hours before 7am, when the next location opened up for the day. TK & Rachel would’ve been right behind them, had they not had to double back after leaving their clue at a cafe.

But the hippies made it to Empoli just before the grounds opened up. The two lead teams ignored the Fast Forward (the only one on the race) and set out to complete the Roadblock: flying in an ultralight to look for the location of their next clue, which was written somewhere in a field.

Nick & Don just as Nate and TK were taking to the air. The grandfather & grandson decided to complete the Fast Forward, and they drove to a nearby town to get tattooed with the initials FF on their arms, before heading to the leg’s Pit Stop.

Nick & Don showed their inked guns to Phil Keoghan at the Boboli Gardens Pit Stop in Florence. For finishing in first place, they won a vacation to a spa in Cancun. Romantic!

Meanwhile, Nate soon succeeded in finding the name of the town where their next clue was: Vinci. TK returned after 30 minutes to refuel, then headed back up into the air as Ron & Christina arrived. Christina found the clue quickly, as TK failed and had to refuel again.

Even Vyxsin, who’d gotten herself and Kynt lost for hours before arriving at the airfield, was able to find the word "Vinci" in the field before TK did — but only by a few minutes.

In Vinci, teams had the Detour options of recreating a crane designed by Leonardo da Vinci or learning a traditional flag waving/tossing routine. Jen & Nate went for the flags, and they were able to complete it relatively easily. The dating duo finished in second place, followed by Ron & Christina, who’d also chosen the flags.

In Vinci, Kynt & Vyxsin got lost again. Kynt tried to take control of the situation by taking over driving duties, even though Vyxsin had more experience driving a manual transmission car. Consequently, Kynt wore out the clutch, and the goths had to run to the site of the flag Detour, while a new car was brought to replace their broken one.

This gave TK & Rachel enough time to catch up. The hippies chose to build the crane, and they finished before the goths had even arrived at the flag Detour. Despite getting a flat tire on the way to the Pit Stop, TK & Rachel finished in fourth.

Kynt & Vyxsin reached the Pit Stop and learned that this was one of two non-elimination legs on the race — meaning Nick & Don tattoos gave them a temporary lead and a trip to Cancun, but little else (like, say, another team getting eliminated) in the grand scheme of the Race.

At some point during the next leg of the race, Kynt & Vyxsin will encounter a Speed Bump, which is a task only they will have to complete, in addition to any Detours and Roadblocks. The Speed Bump could cost them enough time to knock them out of the race permanently.

Next week, it looks like Ron reverts to his old ways and starts yelling at Christina again.

As strike activities wind down for the holidays, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announced that they will begin producing new episodes for Comedy Central on January 7. Working without writers should be especially challenging for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, given that each show typically devotes only one segment of each episode to interviews.

ABC shifted the air date of its final original episode of Grey’s Anatomy to January 10, and NBC almost immediately moved the premiere of The Celebrity Apprentice back to January 3.

USA Today talked with Dancing with the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy about the show he’s choreographing in Las Vegas.

On the topic of DwtS, I think NBC White House correspondent and occasional Today Show host David Gregory would make a fine contestant for Season 6.

Yahoo! has a slide show of the Top 10 DVR’d TV Shows of 2007. Number 4 on the list is Heroes, and Cracked.com examined the 10 Worst Powers to Have on Heroes. Here’s their take on Super Hearing: "Who wouldn’t want to hear everything so sensitively that the sound of a pin dropping is the aural equivalent of the International Space Station falling out of orbit and crash landing 2 feet away from your ear drum?"

I’ll be posting sporadically for the rest of 2007, as Greg and I use our vacation time for some marathon video gaming sessions (First up is Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 on the PS2, if you were wondering).

To get you in a holiday mood, here’s a link to 30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards. Merry Christmas!