Shiri Appleby in Girls? Hmmmm.....my cock is tingling like mad right now. One of the ultimate nudity-dodgers is now 34 - about the right age (just like Kelly Overton) to bare the gazongas. Don't know about you guys but second half of 2012 has been great in way of nudity with 2013 poised to be even better. I'm reaching with Miss Apple-bi but keeping my fingers crossed anyway.
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Leaked Blake Lively Savages Audition!
Check out Blake Lively's only audition for the film Savages that made producers know, she was born to be O!
* she plays Maggie Grace groupie friend in new season of Californication and will be doing her first topless scene.
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FHM meet America's sexiest new actress :
Katrina Bowden
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Showtime retooling for the future
Showtime is in a "period of renewal and reinvention," the premium channel's president told the Television Critics Association on Monday morning, and the goal for the rest of this year and into the next is to grow its subscriber base beyond its current level of nearly 22 million.David Nevins said 2012 "has been a transformative year," and that was borne out by the valedictory panels for longtime hits "Weeds," ending Sept. 16 after eight seasons, and "Dexter," filming its penultimate seventh season this year. Nevins also announced the end of "The Big C" next season with four one-hour episodes about a woman with stage-four cancer, played brilliantly by Laura Linney.
The transformative tone of the times was also reflected in the announcement of several new ventures for the channel, two very promising series for 2013, "Masters of Sex," based on Thomas Maier's book about pioneering sex researchers Masters and Johnson, and "Ray Donovan," a sleek action series about the ultimate L.A. fixer, played by Liev Schreiber. In addition, Showtime is branding a renewed focus on documentaries with the banner "Close Up" and will air new films about Dick Cheney, Tommy Mottola, Suge Knight and Richard Pryor.
At times, the panels for "Weeds" and "Dexter" took on an almost funereal air, but television lives by the principle of reforestation: Old trees, no matter how grand, need to burn to make room for new growth.
However, like virtually every channel and network, measuring viewers has become increasingly difficult, a fact that was the focus earlier in the day when Mark Pedowitz, president of Showtime's corporate sibling, the CW, tried to quantify how many eyeballs are on his channel.
Pedowitz said the channel is "realistic of where the audience" is for its programs, which this fall will include the new series "Arrow," based on the Green Arrow comic books, a dark-toned "Beauty and the Beast," and the drama "Emily Owens MD," starring Mamie Gummer as a brilliant young doctor with a messy personal life.
Pedowitz said the original, real-time broadcast of a show is at the center of a more complicated structure that includes availability on Hulu or CWTV.com, not to mention the almost old-fashioned notion of recording the show on a DVR for later viewing.
"Shows tend to play at any time, any place," Pedowitz said. "We want people to come there, and if they cannot view (a show) within the live piece, then we want them to come eight hours later because that's when we'll make it available."
Viewing platforms
Similarly, Nevins responded to the rapid changes in how and when we watch TV during the Showtime panel when he said that while the channel doesn't want to "give our programming away to nonsubscribers," it is working to make it available on a number of platforms. "On Demand is increasingly robust," he said, adding that "the vast majority of viewership comes watching (a show) linearly or On Demand (and on) DVR ... and I'm happy however you want to watch us."He added that between 65 and 70 percent of the viewing of "Weeds," for example, doesn't happen when the show first airs on Sunday night, but later, through repeat broadcasts, On Demand and through Showtime Anytime.
In the old days, which weren't all that long ago, Nielsen counted the number of people watching TV at a certain time and came up with ratings and audience shares. It's harder to count eyeballs now with the addition of so many other ways to access shows, at any time or place. And then there's the whole different issue of original content being developed by Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo and how to count that in a way that makes it what FX President John Landgraf called an "apples to apples" comparison when he spoke to the critics' group on Saturday.
While saying he welcomed the new competition, he threw down a challenge to journalists to require the new content providers to "develop and release measurement for their shows," which allows viewership to be realistically assessed in ways that enable an accurate comparison to cable and broadcast TV.
"With all due respect, to say, for example, that 20 million unique users sampled a show's 10 episodes over a 13-week time span is a virtually meaningless basis for comparison," he argued. "Television is measured by the average number of people who watch an entire episode of a program or by the number of people who watch a show in its entirety on a weekly basis. And I would humbly suggest that hits and misses in our business need to be judged in some context which allows fair benchmarking and would suggest that the members of the TCA might want to begin asking this new set of competitors to release data in a form that allows for such comparison."
Landgraf went on to claim that it's actually easier for the new content providers to share accurate and comparable information since they already have the data, whereas TV networks have to rely on Nielsen and other measuring devices.
All of this points up just how complicated it has already become, and how complicated it will continue to become, to determine who's watching what when.
Informed consumers
So how does this affect the TV viewer? It's a matter of "consumer information," Landgraf said. If you're going to a supermarket in search of laundry detergent, you want to be able to know which brand is most popular. You might still go for the bargain brand, but it's all a part of being an informed consumer.The same thing is not only true of TV viewers, but increasingly vital as we are confronted with more and more choices of what to watch. If we're going to commit our time to watching a show, we want to know what it's about, who's in it, maybe what the bonehead critics think and whether it's resonated with a significant number of viewers.
If we're getting aggregated numbers from the CW, Nielsen numbers for, say, an ABC show and a claim from Netflix that 20 million people viewed "Lilyhammer," we need to know that the numbers can be compared on all those different platforms, whether they represent viewers who watched an entire episode or just two minutes while they were channel surfing.
No, it won't make bad shows better - there is, alas, no numerical formula for that - but it would make TV viewers better informed.
David Wiegand is The San Francisco Chronicle's TV critic.
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link courtesy of Spyral :
"Here are some fake (fan created) Youtube movie trailers for 50 shades of grey. They are fun".
http://thestir.cafemom.com/
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Ron Howard To Direct Aztec Drama 'Conquest' For Showtime
by
While we presume Ron Howard's epic take on Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" -- which was to span both the big and small screen -- isn't happening anytime soon, it seems the helmer isn't giving up on television as a place to tell an epic story. And now he's planning to go behind the camera for a period drama tackling an era that, we have to say, hasn't really been explored in recent memory.Our only reservation with this is the same one we've had about "The Dark Tower" -- that Ron Howard, doesn't seem to be the right fit for the material. His films generally tend to be well made, at times exceptionally so, but often eschew edgier elements. Could this be an opportunity to exercise new muscles? We'll see.
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Costa Rica suspends minister over raunchy YouTube video
Costa Rica has suspended a junior-level minister after she appeared in a video posted online wearing only her underwear and delivering flirtatious messages.
Deputy Minister for Youth Karina Bolanos lost her job after a video showed her lying in bed, pointing at her chest and inviting a man she refers to as "little one" to join her. Bolanos told cable TV network CNN en Espanol the video was made years ago and was put onto the internet by a computer engineer who stole it and was trying to extort her. Uploaded onto YouTube over the weekend, the clip quickly went viral.
Costa Rica's Ministry of Culture and Youth said in a statement on Tuesday the video and related legal issues made her position untenable.
The incident is an embarrassment to President Laura Chinchilla, whose Cabinet has suffered a string of resignations since she took power two years ago.
Local media said she declined to comment on the Bolanos scandal on Tuesday.
"I will not address the issue. Any more questions?", newspaper La Nation reported her saying after a public event.
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"I will not address the issue. Any more questions?", newspaper La Nation reported her saying after a public event.
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