Steve Carell will star in another sadsack man comedy. This one is called Dumped and is about a man who is... dumped. [Variety] Kevin Spacey will star in and produce a new indie comedy called Father of Invention, about a crazy inventor's fall from grace and subsequent comeback. A man whose biggest credit is directing a Larry the Cable Guy movie will helm. [Variety]

O.C. and Gossip Girl blunderkind Josh Schwartz will be making his directorial film debut with an adaptation of Jay McInerney's landmark 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City. There was a Michael J. Fox movie based on the book made about twenty years ago, but... oh well. Schwartz's Lt. Riker, Stephanie Savage, will co-produce. [Variety] Pineapple Express buddies James Franco and Danny McBride will team up again for a new comedy, also to be directed by art-house auteur turned sly comedian, David Gordon Green. It's set in medieval times. Its title? Your Highness. Sigh. [Variety]

AMC, flush with successes Mad Men and Breaking Bad, is now turning itself into a regular old TV network. By developing reality programming! They've got a show called True West in the works. No, it's not about a production of the Sam Shepard play. It's about modern-day cowboys navigating the terrain as their industry fades. Sounds like a riot. [Variety] Fox, meanwhile, has rehired Wanda Sykes to host a Saturday night talk show. It'll sort of be a panel series, like the Bill Maher show. Hmm. [Variety]

SAG and AFTRA signed off on a three year commercials contract early this morning. The agreement includes a $36 million increase in wage rates and a $21 increase in contributions toward both guilds' health plans. [THR]

Kevin Rahm, who you'd recognize from a bunch of stuff, Rob Huebel, who you'd recognize from Human Giant, and Alison Brie, who you'd recognize as Pete's wife on Mad Men, have all landed TV pilots. Sadly, none of them sound good. [THR] Veteran CNN producer Kathy O'Hearn will be teaming up with veteran correspondent Christiane Amanpour for a new half-hour news program for the network. [THR]

And The Simpsons will be immortalized in postage stamp form, the Postal Service (the government thing, not the band) announced today. They'll be unveiled next week, timed well with the series' 20th anniversary. Sheesh. [THR]

The Simpsons still has a ways to go before it can surpass the amount of episodes Gunsmoke produced; due to then-longer seasons, the western banked 635 episodes (whereas the current Simpsons renewal would bring it to 493). However, we have full faith that Fox will continue to keep The Simpsons on the air long enough to outlast even that record. How can we be so sure?

· The show still does all right in the ratings. Don't mistake us—The Simpsons is hitting all-time lows this season. Then again, so are many network shows this year. The difference is that The Simpsons is the 8 p.m. linchpin for a night of animation that helps anchor the higher-rated Family Guy, and Fox would never sacrifice such an ideal lead-in. Hell, even King of the Hill managed to stick around for thirteen seasons based on Fox's Sunday night strategy.

· The voice actors may eventually become expendable. In 1998, the show's six main voice actors threatened to quit if their pay wasn't upped from $30,000 per episode. In response, Fox immediately scheduled auditions to replace them, and a deal was reached (subsequent negotiations over the years raised their pay rate to the current $400,000 per episode). In this case, The Simpsons' decades-long ubiquity may work against it—if Fox wants to cut costs and fire the original cast, they'd surely be able to find new actors raised on the show who could closely replicate the voices (the genius comic timing would certainly suffer, but are fans still ardent enough to make a fuss?). The network already enacted such a move in 1999, when minor voice actor Maggie Roswell (who performed characters like Maude Flanders and Helen Lovejoy) was fired after asking for a pay raise, and only hired back after several years' absence. Did anyone notice?

· The Simpsons is a billion-dollar global franchise. Fox has become even more of a corporate behemoth since The Simpsons first premiered in 1989, and it's hard to imagine they'd ever devalue one of their few properties that can keep a comparatively enormous pace. At this point, it almost doesn't matter what ratings the flagship series gets—not when its merchandise continues to sell all over the world, or when a feature-length movie version produced well past the show's peak makes well over $500 million.

Someday, then, when NBC is running ten hours of Today (leading straight into a four-hour block of Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Fallon, and Howie Mandel), you can be certain that The Simpsons will keep on keepin' on. And this is where we would post our favorite Simpsons episode (the Gamblor one, natch), but Hulu has cruelly yanked every old episode off their service, keeping only the latest five instead. If only it aired constantly in syndication or something!

[via NeatoRama]

Once upon a time, we trusted Cartwright when she exhorted us to "do the Bartman," but now that this "Bartman" involves personality tests, invasive auditing, and insistent, late-night girl talk with Leah Remini, we've become a wee bit skeptical. Sure, we agree that Lisa is clearly an SP, but who knew it would come to this? Still, at least we have a definitive answer for why Bart Simpson is so yellow: it's all those niacin purification rituals! [YouTube]

Dexter, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men and The Wire occupy this year's dramatic category, with Lost filling in for 2008 retiree The Sopranos. (Dexter was the only one of the nominees to earn an episode nod as well.) In comedy, 30 Rock, Entourage, The Office, The Simpsons and Weeds earned nods, with the latter two filling in for HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm and Flight of the Conchords, which return to the network next year. Emmy surprise Breaking Bad drew three nominations, including one for Best New Series, for which it'll compete against Fringe, In Treatment, Life on Mars and True Blood.

Pretty much all the late-night shows that get nominated for everything else were recognized today as well, with Conan, Letterman, Real Time, SNL, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show vying for Best Comedy/Variety Series. The awards will be announced Feb. 7; the full listing is available at the WGA's site. Good luck to all, and enjoy it while you can, Weeds.

• 2009 Writers Guild Awards [WGA]

(Probably the place that came up with this ingenious Kwik-E-Mart campaign, replete with a real live Comic Book Guy!) The Halloween episode scored the highest ratings in five years for the animated series. Unfortunately, the Mad Men parodying ended at the title sequence; as much as we wanted to hear Homer say, "It’s not called a wheel, it’s called a donut. Round and a round, and sprinkly delicious. Arhghghllll....dooonuttttt. To a place where we know we are loved," instead we got Homer on a bizarre celebrity killing spree that cost us Prince and George Clooney.

• 'Simpsons' has best night in 5 yrs. [Variety]

· A deal has yet to be signed with The Simpsons's cast, putting the 20th season in jeopardy. Right now, the superstar voice actors make $360,000 per episode; they're asking for $500,000. $11 million for working in sweeeatpannnts....arghghllhghllrlll...
· NBC has picked up Kings—an updated take on the David vs. Goliath story set in "a metropolis under siege," and starring Ian McShane. If it's a hit, expect a whole slew of updated-Bible-story ripoffs, including The CW's short-lived Sam's Son, starring Jesse Metcalfe as the long-tressed hero and Mischa Barton as his wicked seductress. [THR]

While it failed to evoke its majestic, sandy-maned namesake in anything but the most literal terms, the mention still gave us an ever-so-tiny taste of what it must feel like to make the leap from our blandly live-action coil into the glorious, bug-eyed bliss of the animated Springfield universe.

• The Simpsons

• WATCH VIDEO

A fan waved a Simpsons DVD at Michelle Pfeiffer today after her Hollywood Walk of Fame star ceremony. "The Simpsons?" said Pfeiffer.

"Why would I sign that?" "You were in it," said the fan. "Season Five." "I was?"

In fact, Pfeiffer did manage to squeeze in a guest-starring back in 1993, playing a beautiful Springfield nuclear power plant employee who poses a threat to the Simpsons' marriage in an episode entitled "The Last Temptation of Homer." With a career as prolific as Pfeiffer's, however, we can understand how easy it might be to overlook a nearly decade-and-a-half old stint in a Fox lot voiceover booth. We'd thus discourage pranksters and Simpsons purists from giving the actress a hard time for this one oversight, perhaps by excitedly approaching the actress with a DVD copy of the first and only season of Father of the Pride, and insisting up and down that she indeed made a cameo appearance in NBC's failed CGI Siegfried & Roy sitcom.

• Pfeiffer a Dollar [The WOW Report]

1. The Simpsons Movie—$71.850 million
It seems that Fox's clever promotional onslaught—the conversion of selected 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts, the giant Homer rendering in the English countryside poised to assault the genitals of an ancient fertility god with a donut, and the ambitious strategy of teasing the film's opening by running 18 years of half-hour "mini-films" on their television network to create awareness for their feature—has paid off handsomely, as The Simpsons Movie's nearly $72 million opening weekend far surpassed the safe $40-50 million projections the studio had claimed.

Emboldened by this runaway success, Fox is mulling cutting the buzz-building lead time for a sequel in half, which should put The Simpsons Movie II in theaters in the summer of 2016, a window that should allow enough time for the construction of a fully functioning Springfield metropolis, host to the next installment's premiere, to be constructed at the border of Maine, Ohio, Nevada and Kentucky.

2. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry—$19.063 million
We'd take The Simpsons Movie's lone*, tossed off, pitch-perfect gay joke (we won't spoil it for you, but if you've seen the movie, we're sure you know what we're talking about) over 110 minutes of Adam Sandler and Kevin James exploring every way in which it's icky for hetero firefighters to pretend to be lovers.

3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—$17.065 million
A sad thought: With only two books in the Potter franchise left for Warner Bros. to adapt into movies, the studio probably stands to make only about another $1.5 billion or so in worldwide box office receipts. Let's all send them $10 each to lessen the blow of losing their cash cow.

4. Hairspray—$15.550 million
While we've previously mentioned how disturbing we find seeing John Travolta transformed into Edna Turnblad, in truth, it's the only the second-most terrifying thing we've seen him do.

9. I Know Who Killed Me—$3.4 million
No matter how badly a movie performs, there's always a silver lining: at least Lindsay Lohan's reps can claim that she can open a movie stronger than Big Boi and Faizon Love, a fact which may open up a new career in urban comedies for the troubled actress.

[*OK, maybe not so lone! See comments below.]

• WEEKEND BOX OFFICE July 27-29, 2007 [Box Office Mojo]