After the jump: Which Funniest Woman Alive is making a return to series TV?

· Mark Burnett is shooting the pilot for Rouletter—a complicated game show that involves a roulette wheel covered in letters—in South America. They are currently on the hunt for contestants who won't respond to the host's enthusiastic opener, "So, are YOU ready to play Rouletter?!" with a quizzical, "¿Qué?" [Variety]
· Amy Sedaris has signed a deal with 20th Century Fox TV to write and star in a new single-camera sitcom, which she'll co-create with Strangers With Candy's Paul Dinello. Fuck yeah. [THR]
· Comedy Central is producing its first "fantasy comedy" (if you don't count Imaginationland). Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Firea will star Little Britain's Matt Lucas and Meet the Spartans's Sean Maguire. [THR]

· Jamie Foxx and pap-busting Spartan Gerard Butler will star in Law Abiding Citizen, appropriately enough about a regular Joe who takes the law into his own hands. [THR]
· The newly sovereign, India-based DreamWorks has decided to put off its big Wall Street pitch until the market decides to crawl back out of Satan's anus. [THR]
· Mark Burnett will produce an updated version of This Is Your Life, except every week it's going to be Donald Trump's life we're reliving. (And he'll never fail to act surprised.) [TV Week]

Simmons will be joined by an "advisory panel"€ that include Madison Avenue gurus Linda Kaplan Thaler and Julie Roehm. But Simmons will be the final authority on the show who decides which contestants are eliminated each week.

CBS has pushed €œJingles (where contestants vie to compose commercial ad tunes) has been pushed back from its planned premiere date later this month. The show is still moving forward and is expected to join CBS' schedule sometime next season.

Roehm is perhaps definitely best-known for the sex scandal that verrrry publicly cost her her job at Wal-Mart in 2006, which helped make Jingles a must-see (or something) among Madison Avenue folks as well as TCA press tour attendees — the latter of whom got the Simmons news this afternoon in Beverly Hills. Meanwhile, we're just waiting for a premiere date from Burnett, who was last seen traveling in Hell and could not be reached for comment.

• Gene Simmons to judge Burnett's 'Jingles' [The Live Feed]
• Move Over Paula, Make Way For Julie [Ad Age]

"It's very hard to find companies in the nonscripted space that are prolific creators and owners of content and whose last names don't begin with 'S' or 'B'."

Endemol will have a 51% interest in 51 Minds, which will remain independent, in Los Angeles, with its 200 person staff intact. The goal for both companies: expand their exploitation of people, both already famous and desirous of fame, to continued success. We all win in this one, people!

· Though Cloverfield pumped-and-dumped its way a 68-percent second-weekend drop-off after a record-breaking opening, Paramount still expects the movie to be profitable due to the studio's wise strategy of investing in hype-building marketing over needlessly expensive "name" actors. [Variety]
· Paramount establishes Dennis "General Hawk" Quaid and Channing "Duke Hauser" Tatum as the leads for G.I. Joe, the studio's latest attempt at turning a line of action figures into a nine-figure-grossing blockbuster. [Variety]
· Still trying to plug all the primetime programming holes left by the writers strike, NBC slots in unscripted-TV-pusher Mark Burnett's My Dad is Better Than Your Dad (fathers prove their superiority to their children by pummeling each other in front of an instigating Dan Cortese) and Amne$ia (contestants try to answer sure-to-be humiliating questions about their lives for money ) for mid-to-late February debuts [THR]

"It's high adventure that they're on this pirate ship, and there's actual money being discovered in the form of gold every week," as opposed to a single winner-take-all payout, Burnett says.

Using maps, 16 contestants compete in physical challenges in search of hidden coins around Dominica, the Caribbean island where the show was filmed. A "captain," elected by the group, takes half of each week's booty and lives large in a fancier cabin with better food and no deck-scrubbing. But "if he doesn't handle it right, if he (ticks) them off, there can be a mutiny."

In a reversal of Survivor's immunity idol, Pirate's captain marks three crewmembers as potential plank-walkers; one is voted off.

As with all new Burnett productions, the first few weeks always allow for some wiggle-room with regards to exact format: If audiences respond favorably to ritual elements of game play like deck-scrubbing and plank-walking, producers will likely choose to incorporate even more authentic pirate fun into the proceedings, pitting team against team in exciting events like the Chevy Blazer Torch n' Rape Challenge. Still, not enough emphasis can be put on the importance of choosing a suitably charismatic host, and so we'd still like to once again nominate the legendary real estate plunderer (and very available) Cap'n Donnie Trump—better known simply as the fearsome "Combforward"—who'll come outfitted in the classiest lacey shirts and solid gold peg-legs doubloons can buy.

• Burnett sets sail with a TV 'Pirate' [USA Today]

· Winning a record $370 million lottery emboldens Steven Colbert to finally tell semi-mummified Viacom overlord Sumner Redstone what he thinks of him. Unfortunately for Colbert, Redstone doesn't realize this was all done in character for his show, and has already dispatched a goon to stab him in the kidneys while the actor uses the urinal at his office.
· Yet another person is suing Mark Burnett for having the same unoriginal idea for a televised talent competition, this time involving Rock Star.
· This is what would happen if you ran Bill Maher through a computer aging simulation.
· Even Henry Kissinger is trying to get into Angelina Jolie's pants.
· It's a well known fact that Jesus Tortillas are the most delicious kind. [via Eater LA]
· We're number three! We're number three!

Looking for Contestants for FOX "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?" We are looking for people with amazing personalities....looks ...and brains~! Answering a few simple questions could make you a millionaire and change your life!

You must be over 25 yrs old, live in southern california.

Send your name, contact #, picture, Your availability Feb 5th- Feb 10th, what you do for a living, and a brief description of why we should choose you for the show to...

Respond ASAP as we have limited audition times available.

Their urgency is real, as Fox put the series on an "extreme fast track" back in December. Also note that when asked about the similarity between his series and one being developed at CBS, 5th Grader producer Mark Burnett bragged, "Ours, quite frankly, is [about] how dumb are you," so if you're serious about being considered for the show, make sure that your initial communication with their casting personnel at least hints at the kind of diminished intellectual capacity they're hoping to showcase, perhaps by addressing your all-caps e-mail to Santa Claus and mentioning you've recently been fired from your reality TV development job.

• Looking for Contestants for FOX "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader?" [Craigslist]

• The Apprentice 6 Tour Bus Challenge [YouTube via FBLA]

Eye has greenlit production on approximately 13 episodes of the untitled project, which begins casting shortly with an eye on a summer 2007 premiere. Details of the project are being kept under wraps.

What is known is that the action in the skein will take place on both land and at sea, suggesting the presence of ships and islands as central characters in the unscripted drama.

It's also expected the skein will incorporate traditional reality elements such as competitions and elimination ceremonies. (Perhaps losers will have to walk the plank?)

Not yet addressed are the details of the casting process, so it remains to be seen if Burnett will attempt another controversial and headline-grabbing gimmick in the vein of the quickly abandoned racial segregation of teams on this season of Survivor. Burnett is nothing if not a consummate showman, however, with an acute sense of how to best lure eyeballs to TV screens, so we wouldn't be a bit surprised if he divvied up his latest contestants into Team Hook-Hand and Team Peg-Leg, then justified the insensitive feat of handicapped exploitation by describing it as a social experiment intended to see which amputee groups fared best when removed from society and denied modern prosthetics.

• Pirates pegged for CBS [Variety]

At least one of the white people was able to talk about his new tribemates like they were actual human beings with names. Or not. Jonathan told his tribemate Jessica, "I think we can align with a couple of the Asians." [...]

Of course, that new alliance represents the Asian and white tribes; the other group was made up of members from the Latino and black tribes.

If that alliance stays intact for two more visits to Tribal Council, the new Aitutaki tribe will have only white and Asian people.

It's a fascinating development, and one that should give defensive producer Mark Burnett plenty of ammunition against critics who would argue the format was nothing but a cynical ratings ploy quickly abandoned when the melting pot water got a little too hot. Merged tribes or not, this cultural petrie dish experiment will likely continue to provide valuable insights into the genetic advantages of natural selection, until producers are likely left with no choice but to step in with affirmative action measures to ensure their quickly diminishing African American and Latino players are thrown a couple of extra immunity tokens throughout the season.

• Survivor tribes integrate and the race war begins as one tribe forms alliances along racial lines [RealityBlurred]

Whereas on a desert island where economics and social class count for nothing, it's simply your ability to build a fire and catch fish that becomes of paramount importance. Add to this, the political nature of Survivor which is overlaid on the survivalist themes and you need to add in the criteria of "Do I like this person?" or "Can I convince this person to vote with me?" [...]

Were we correct?? Time will tell. All I can say is that the series will pull no punches and will at the very least show that behaving like an asshole isn't the exclusive right of any particular race. It will also show that it's impossible to stereotype people once you meet them and (even vicariously) live with them as they struggle to build a world.

If you find yourself lost in the sea of his gasbag rhetoric, you're not alone: We've read the paragraphs several times now, to no decipherable avail, and our consultation of the unabridged source material has only resulted in a further tumble down the rabbit hole of Realityland's nonsensical, ratings-justifying logic.

• EMAILS TO THE EDITOR: [Cynopsis via FishBowlLA]