Remember 2003?

Sure it was a long time ago – but let us jog your memory. The sky outside was often gray and dreary, flowers refused to bloom and the Internet bed linen industry absolutely boomed because bedridden people were too depressed to drop turd all the way over in the toilet.

Well no more – because Futurama has been un-cancelled. And we’re not talking about four more straight to DVD movies either – we’re talking about 26 new episodes on Comedy Central.

You still don’t believe us?

We don’t blame you. We’re sorry we ever told you we’re half-brothers with Coolio.

Trust restored.

In 2003 a black-faced torch holding mob of Fox executives took every single Futurama character out behind a barn. Once there, they stuffed them chock-full of steel barb and then crushed them beneath a sand roller (a heavy piece of machinery we probably just made up. It’s supposed to sound heavy). It wasn’t pretty.

We imagine the liquids from their animated bodies slowly pooled and scabbed as the execs walked back to their shiny, super long limos. At the time, nobody had any idea the killing wouldn’t be permanent. After all – this was way before Family Guy gloriously emerged from the tomb.

After the cancellation Futurama was swooped up by Cartoon Network, who proudly aired it as an Adult Swim anchor. When the show was contractually up for bid again - Comedy Central knew a good thing when they saw it. They outbid CN.

Then of course the four movies came out – one of which we claimed to be film of the year in ‘08. The whole quadrilogy sold big. And now this from Reuters:

“Taking a page from the “Family Guy” resurrection guidebook, the canceled Fox animated comedy is returning with an order from Comedy Central for 26 new episodes to run over two seasons. “Futurama” creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen already are working on stories for the new batch of episodes of the sci-fi cartoon, slated to premiere on Comedy Central in mid-2010.”

Comedy Central says that if the new episodes draw a big enough crowd, they’ll try their darndest to bring other shows back from the bin too. Like Seinfeld, Cheers and confusingly, I Love Lucy. To make the latter happen we bet they use science.

And now to celebrate their triumphant return, we present a wonderful Futurama segment where in they wax sentimental about global warming.

In Spanish.

De nada.

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Generally speaking there are only a few places we really don’t want to ever see overweight people: Going anywhere we

Anywhere else, though, and we’ll take them. That’s because we love the heavy, and always want to know everything about them. For instance, do they fall in love? Probably not. But if they do we’ll all get to see on Fox’s new show – billed as The Bachelor for fat guys, which we actually find quite rude.

Do you think Elvis‘ full glory wasn’t realised until his sequins started popping off in concert like a heated bag of Orville Redenbacher? Do you think Biggest Loser would be a better show if only they’d ditch those stupid trainers? Would you like reality TV more if they didn’t make it so hard for immature middle-schoolers to hilariously draw clear comparisons between the contestants and marine mammalians?

If so, you may be callous, grating and all around unbearable company. But you’re also the Fox Network’s target audience, so cheer up, you. In order to properly fill your TV platter (no pun intended), they’ve just green-lit what may be the greatest show ever. For lovers of overweight romance. They’re calling it More to Love, and here’s the basic premise according to The Hollywood Reporter:

“The series, titled “More to Love,” is billed as the first “dating show for the rest of us,” throwing open its doors to overweight contestants. “For six years it’s been skinny-minis and good-looking bachelors, and that’s not what the dating world looks like,” Fox president of alternative Mike Darnell said. “Why don’t real women — the women who watch these shows, for the most part — have a chance to find love too?”"

It actually sounds like a descent show, and we, for one, shall tune in. So long as any hot-tub scenes have water clear up to the necks, because really, we’re ear guys anyway.

Really though, it’s sounds like blatant exploitation of people with eating disorders, and that infuriates us.

What’s that you say? It doesn’t sound that bad and you just don’t understand our anger? Well maybe that’s because we haven’t described the show to you in enough detail. The house the girls live in will be a gigantic kitchen, they’ll all be forced to sleep nights in horizontal open-faced refrigerators while dressed like squeeze bottles full of hot-dog condiments, and their show nicknames will will all be directly inspired by Hostess mascots.

Curse you Fox! If that’s true at all we’ll never forgive you!

Word is the Fatchelor really hits it off with Chocodile halfway through the pilot episode.

We’ve got a real feeling about those two.

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Because what would we have to be disappointed about then? The weather? Our jobs? The way we can’t grow a proper beard? No, Fox didn’t want to just block Watchmen – it wanted to block our right to be chronically disappointed by Watchmen, and that wasn’t on.

Luckily, though, the crisis has been averted. Fox and Warner Bros have resolved their legal squabble, and Watchmen is coming out as planned. That means our plan to slag it off before we’ve seen it remains intact! Yay!

Watchmen is undoubtedly one of the must-see movies of the year, provided that you’re a) a virgin, b) a pleb and c) so afraid of going outside that your skin has become the same colour as your bedroom walls.

And, to be fair, you’ve got every reason to be excited about Watchmen’s release – not jut because it’s a Zac Snyder movie so it’s bound to be brimming with so much latent homoeroticism that it’ll make WWE wrestling seem like an episode of The View, but because it almost wasn’t going to be released in the first place.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve had to put up with endless squabbling between Fox and Warner Bros over Watchmen – first Warner Bros made Watchmen, and then Fox said that it actually owned Watchmen and that Warner Bros shouldn’t have made it, and then Warner Bros was all like ’screw you’ and Fox was all like ‘no, screw YOU!’ and then Warner Bros said something about Fox’s mum giving blowjobs to sailors and Fox took Warner Bros to court to block Watchman’s release.

It all got very messy, especially when a judge ruled that Fox had an interest in Watchmen on Christmas Eve. Since then, Fox and Warner Bros have been in a series of protracted negotiations about who owns which part of Watchmen and, more importantly, how many frightened southeast Asian prostitutes they’ll be able to buy with their cut from the movie. Possibly.

But since this is Hollywood we’re talking about, it’s time for the happy ending. People, Fox and Warner Brothers have smoothed things over and Watchmen’s March release date stands firm. Reuters reports:

Terms of the agreement will not be disclosed, but it is said to involve a sizable cash payment to Fox and a percentage of the film’s box office, which Warners plans to release March 6. Fox will not be a co-distributor on the film, nor will it own a piece of the “Watchmen” property going forward. The studios are set to release a joint statement announcing the agreement Friday.

Well, this is good news all round, isn’t it. Warner Bros gets to release a movie that comicbook fans have salivated over for two entire decades, Fox gets a large injection of cash and, best of all, what with Watchmen AND Terminator Salvation coming out in coming months, there’ll be two movies this year that take a painful, slobbery dump in the eye of things we used to like. Hooray for everything!

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Prison Break is no more. Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly has decided that Prison Break’s fourth season will be its last. This will no doubt come as a shock to the solitary homeless man who didn’t think that Prison Break got cancelled in 2006 anyway.

So Prison Break may be dying, but let’s focus on all the positive things it gave us – like Wentworth Miller and that hour a week where nothing good was on TV so we could read books instead.

The problem with most big American dramas these days is that they don’t know how to stretch out for multiple seasons. Lost got around this by becoming so impossibly dense that you can’t follow episodes without the aid of a flipchart and an encyclopedia. 24 just repeats itself exactly every year with only minor changes, like the introduction of a female president who’s got a face that looks like a cake. And Heroes is determined to deliberately lose all of its viewers by progressively getting worse and worse with every passing minute.

And then there’s Prison Break – a show about a man breaking out of prison with the aid of his magical tattoo. Which was all well and good, except that at the end of the first season he broke out of prison, leaving nowhere for the show to go.

That’s why the following three seasons of Prison Break – where tattoo man goes on the lam, gets caught, goes to another prison, breaks out of that prison too and goes on the lam again, all because the president is evil or something – were such hopeless failures. You want examples of how bad the latter seasons of Prison Break were? OK, here’s three:

1) In America, the audience halved between the first season and the fourth season.

2) The Prison Break cast got so bored by the ridiculous plotlines that they actually took to killing boys in drunken accidents to pass the time.

3) In the UK, not even Channel Five thought that seasons three and four of Prison Break were good enough to broadcast. And this is Channel Five – the channel that, in a few hours, is genuinely going to broadcast a documentary about a clever pig.

And these reasons are why Kevin Reilly from Fox has decided to put Prison Break out of its misery. The LA Times reports:

The action series starring Wentworth Miller will return on April 17 for its final run of four to six episodes. The show premiered in 2005 as a hit but has progressively run out of steam. “Creatively, the show’s just played out,” Reilly said. “Creatively, everyone feels enough stories were told. We want to finish strong.”

“Well, alright, maybe not strong,” we then imagine Kevin Reilly went on to say “But mediocre. No, no, mediocre’s not the word either. Alone and ignored. That’s the one! We want to finish alone and ignored!”

But now pilot season is coming up, so let’s just hope that Fox learns from the demise of Prison Break and stops commissioning shows that can’t possibly stretch beyond their quickly-completed premise. Apparently Fox is especially keen on the new high-concept drama Man Jumps Off Log, about a man who wants to jump off a log. He does actually jump off the log within the first six seconds of the first episode, but we’re sure they’ll find away to stretch it out for years after that.

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That’s if Watchmen is released this year, of course. Thanks to a petty squabble between Warner Bros (which made Watchmen) and Fox (which says it owns the rights to Watchmen), nothing looks certain any more. And now one of the movie’s producers, Lloyd Levin, has waded in on the issue by writing a letter calling everyone at Fox big old smellyheads. We’re paraphrasing.

So Watchmen still might not be released this year. That’s OK, we’re sure we’ll be just as disappointed by Terminator Salvation.

It’s hard to know why people are so excited at the prospect of seeing the Watchmen movie this spring. On reflection, we think we’ve boiled it down to three reasons:

1 - They’re gigantic Alan Moore fans.

2 - They can’t believe that the movie has actually been made at all.

3 – They’re stinking, lonely, friendless geeks and their only companion is their crusty ejacu-sock.

But forget the first and last reasons for the time being – much of the excitement about Watchmen comes from the fact that people have been trying to make it for 20 year. Terry Gilliam had a go at making Watchmen and failed. Darren Aronofsky had a go and failed. Paul Greengrass had a go and failed. Jude Law was going to be in it at one point. Simon Pegg was going to be in it at one point. Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be in it at one point. Dig hard enough and you’ll probably discover that you’d been briefly considered for the role of Dollar Bill at some point in the mid-1990s.

Because of the immense amount of time that Watchmen took to get to the screen, it’s spent much of the last two decades being shuttlecocked between movie studios at an astonishing rate. Fox had it for a while, Universal had it for a while, Paramount had it for a while, Revolution had it for a while and finally Warner Bros ended up making it. And that’s where all the confusion lies.

Fox is currently suing Warner Bros with the intention of either cashing in on Watchmen’s release or stopping it completely, claiming that it still owns the rights to the movie. On Christmas Eve a judge ruled in Fox’s favour, and now Watchmen producer Lloyd Levin has been reduced to writing a letter online telling Fox to back off and let him release his film. The LA Times reports:

Lloyd Levin said Fox repeatedly passed on making director Zack Snyder’s epic superhero movie and was now trying to take advantage of Warner Bros.’ willingness to develop and produce it. “Shouldn’t Warner Bros. be entitled to the spoils — if any — of the risk they took in supporting and making ‘Watchmen’? Should Fox have any claim on something they could have had but chose to neither support nor show any interest in?”

With any luck, the coming weeks will see another round of court hearings to decide for good who owns what when it comes to Watchmen. We’d imagine that the worst-case scenario would involve Watchmen’s release being shelved indefinitely. But even that’s not the end of the world.

Look at it this way – if Watchmen doesn’t come out, the geeks will cry. If Watchmen does come out, it’ll probably be fairly awful and the geeks will still cry. Either way there’ll be some crying geeks. It’s a win-win.

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That’s right, we’re talking about Jack Bauer. And fortunately our prayers have been heeded – Fox has announced the exact airdate that the new season of 24 will return to our screens. Following the Africa-set TV movie prequel being broadcast on November 23, the two-day, four-hour 24 season premiere has been scheduled for January 11 and 12.

That genuinely can’t come fast enough for us – 24 has been off our screens for so long now that, and we’re slightly ashamed to admit this, last time we saw a man of Middle Eastern descent, we weren’t immediately gripped by a kneejerk urge to tie him to a chair, submerge his feet into a bucket of water and then electrocute him while screaming at him to tell us the nuclear disarmament codes. Jack Bauer would be so ashamed of us.

24 stands at something of a crossroads ahead of its seventh season. Thanks to the writer’s strike and Kiefer Sutherland’s decision to go on a drunken joyride to jail, there have been no new episodes of 24 since the middle of 2007.

Since then the world has become a slightly different place – and not for the better as far as 24 is concerned. Not only does the trailer for the new 24 prequel movie look slightly rubbish, but 24’s stock in trade – torture – has become so passe that even Christopher Hitchens is happy to have a go at it.

That means that if 24 wants to reverse its slow slide into silly self-parody and still remain the edge-of-your-seat thriller that its capable of being, it really needs to knock its four-hour season premiere out of the park. Will it? We’ll find out on January 11, as E! Online reports:

[Fox] today announced that Kiefer Sutherland and his terrorism-fighting costars will return to kick off their new run with a two-night, four-hour premiere Jan. 11 and 12. The fourth hour of the premiere will mark the series’ milestone 150th episode. The season will run without interruption through to May.

It’s no secret that season seven of 24 will revolve around Jack Bauer’s old colleague Tony Almeida coming back from the dead seeking revenge. Hopefully that’ll be a theme of the new season, because that way we can also bring back Nina, George Mason, the funny fat bloke who got gassed in CTU during season five and Frodo Baggins‘ chum Sam.

But even if 24 did suddenly become a weird zombie nostalgia show, it’d still face two insurmountable challenges. Firstly, since 24 was in its heyday, people aren’t as scared of terrorism as they were. These days it’s the economy that gives everyone nightmares.

Secondly, it looks as if Barack Obama will be less of a hardline president that George Bush was, and as such the ’shoot first, ask questions later’ interrogation style of Jack Bauer runs the risk of looking extremely outdated incredibly soon.

There’s only one way around this – in the seventh season of 24, Jack Bauer will have to abandon fighting threats to national security in order to stand in line at a bank waiting to reapply for a mortgage. But it’d be OK if he did that, because the newly-reengaged UN would be happy to handle terrorist threats in an open, friendly and bureaucratic manner by itself.

Admit it, you’d watch that.

While normally this would be greeted with trepidation and a slight amount of fear, the sheer quality of the source material, combined with the fact that the film is supposed to actually be, y’know – good – has people sweating around the groin, awaiting next year’s release.

That is, unless Fox have their way and ban the film from ever coming out.

Oh, we’re not kidding here – that’s what they’re trying to do in the latest of legal battles that shows just how the company is actually forged from Satan’s testicles themselves. There’s evil, then there’s Fox evil.

This is the company that cancelled Family Guy in its prime – though they did bring it back, they actually ended up becoming more evil by letting the damn thing continue, seeing as it’s turned into utter tripe in recent years. Then there was the cancellation of Firefly, but we won’t go into that – it’s still too painful. They cancel, they block, they ruin and they devour, and they never seem to stop.

Next on their list is Zack Snyder, director of 300, and his adaptation of Watchmen, the classic 80s comic series that ranks amongst the finest books ever written. Apparently. With some nice spoof adverts.

The film is bankrolled and due for release through Warner Bros early next year, but some convoluted and complicated legal wrangling has revealed that Fox are claiming that they own the rights to a film release of the property.

While this came about in February of this year, well before Watchmen fever had truly got a hold of the internets, it has been decided recently by a judge that Warner Bros could not have the case thrown out of court as they had asked.

What this means is that Fox are free to pursue their copyright infringement case against Warner Bros, and are looking to get back either damages for the trouble – sure to be a few quid at the very least – or, in a worst case scenario, ban the movie from being released indefinitely.

And it looks like Fox’s band of lawyers, built as we all know from pure evil, are looking to force a worst case scenario – pushing to kill the project altogether rather than take some of its potentially huge box office. A statement released by Fox read:

“Warner Bros.’ production and anticipated release of ‘The Watchmen’ motion picture violates 20th Century Fox’s long-standing motion picture rights in ‘The Watchmen’ property.”

Which is pretty standard stuff until you realise they seemingly don’t even care enough to get the name of the comic right in the first place. So if they don’t even care about that, do they care about you, the fans – the public? Do they bollocks. It’s idiots in suits playing at running the world again, and it’s getting to be a bit annoying now.

But hey, at least Fox can clear the way for their own films to come out next year, and there’ll be no risk of them being compared side-by-side with Watchmen. That could be viewed as a good point. If you were mental.

The case is far from settled, though Fox are pushing for it to be fast-tracked through the courts. Probably so they can get back to stealing candy from orphanages, or burning down babies or something.

Today’s vitriolic rant brought to you by hunger pains and a lack of coffee. We will resume normal service shortly.

And the latest scrap to break out is between the FCC and Fox. You see, half a decade ago, Fox showed some digitally-obscured boobs on a barely-remembered reality TV show and the FCC has just decided to fine it $91,000 for doing so.  However, Fox is refusing to pay the fine, calling it "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional."

By doing so, Fox has kick-started a hard-fought ideological debate about morals, indecency, ethics, free speech and censorship that could change the shape of American broadcasting forever. Plus it's about boobies. Wheeeee!

We're no experts, but we think that Americans have the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms and the right to sit around masturbating to digitally-obscured breasts until they either a) get cramp or b) realise what they've become and stop in an angry fit of self-loathing. And that's a God-given right that the FCC has been trying to take away from them.

If the FCC had its way then the average American wouldn't be able to masturbate to a sudden glimpse of a 1990s pop star's partially-covered breast or brief shots of naked buttocks or Diane Keaton swearing on live TV. The first two are OK, but the last one is a step too far – show us a man who doesn't find saggy-faced 62-year-olds screeching the word 'fuck' at Diane Sawyer completely erotic and we'll show you a liar – which is why Fox is staging a fightback.

Back in 2003, Fox broadcast an episode of reality show Married By America that showed some digitally-obscured strippers and a woman licking whipped cream off a man's nipple. Enraged that Fox was basically sending everyone who watched it to hell for eternity – a place which, ironically, shows nothing by Married By America reruns all day – the FCC hit Fox with a $1.2 million fine.

After four years of appeals the fine was reduced to just $91,000, but now Fox has decided that it won't pay that either. The Washington Post reports:

Despite the sharp reduction, Fox said it would not pay the fine on principle, calling it "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional" in a statement released yesterday… Fox has asked the five FCC commissioners to reconsider the fine without its having to pay, a move that sets Fox in a two-front indecency war: It is battling the FCC at the agency level on the "Married" fine and in the Supreme Court on other indecency fines levied at about the same time.

Part of the reason why Fox is refusing to pay the fine is apparently because of the nature of the complaints that the FCC received over Married By America. Although it received 90 complaints, they were from only 23 people. And all but two of the complaints were virtually identical, meaning that the fine had basically come from three people who were angry at a pixelised tit.

If this is true, then there's a strong argument for Fox to fight the FCC fine. The FCC's war on indecency is wrongheaded at best and dangerous at worst – it can let entire seasons of 24 pass without blinking once at all the relentless scenes of violent torture pass, but as soon as a digitally-obscured stripper covered in whipped cream flits into view for a couple of seconds, fines get thrown about like nobody's business. The FCC really has no right to enforce such heavyhanded censorship in a modern society.

Unless the FCC is just protecting us from Heather Mills. After all, if we're talking cream-covered strippers then Heather Mills is pretty much the queen of that (NSFW), and the FCC needs to make sure that she's never allowed to commit such terrible atrocities again. Keep up the great work, chaps!

Read more:

Fox Refuses To Pay FCC Indecency Fine – WP 

It's true. OK, admittedly Dog The Bounty Hunter is a 15-foot-tall, bleach-blonde mulleted redneck who makes his living shooting minor criminals in the face with bear mace and very obviously has white skin, so it might be a stretch to see Dog as black, but that's how Dog The Bounty Hunter described himself in his first post-scandal TV interview. But it's OK, because Dog The Bounty Hunter has learnt that he isn't actually black – which is good because if he was then he'd hate himself and have to spray mace at his own eyes, then manhandle himself a bit while shouting 'bra' into his own face over and over again. And that'd just be weird. 

Like Rambo or Jesus Christ, Dog The Bounty Hunter was a hero to many. If the public ever thought that someone in their street was harbouring a wanted criminal then they could call Dog The Bounty Hunter and let him – along with his wife – shout abuse at them, chase them down an alley, spray a form of tear gas at them and take them back to prison, so long as there was some kind of financial reward in it for him.

But now Dog The Bounty Hunter is learning what it feels like to be chased, with the mace of public judgement and the butch squat wife of political correctness. Ever since a tape of Dog The Bounty Hunter calling his son's girlfriend a 'nigger' hit the internet, Dog's prospects have gone from bad to worse. First A&E halted production of Dog The Bounty Hunter and then, after advertisers distanced themselves from Dog, the station dropped him altogether.

People are currently talking about Dog The Bounty Hunter in the same way they'd talk about Don Imus or Michael Richards or that woman from Radio 2 who can only see black people at night if they open their mouths. But Dog The Bounty Hunter knows in his heart that his is a completely different situation. Dog The Bounty Hunter, you see, would never call someone a 'nigger' in anger because Dog The Bounty Hunter thinks that he's black.

In his first interview since the 'nigger' tape made the internet, Dog The Bounty Hunter appeared on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes show to tell the world why he thought he was black and how he now realises that he was probably mistaken in retrospect:

"There's a special connection that I thought I had between me and black America. And I used to say, 'I'm black, too.' In other words, my whole life I've been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that… so when I stood there and said, 'I kind of know what you feel like, because I've been there, too,' that I felt that I could embrace and like, as brothers… say the word. I now learned I'm not black at all, and I never did it out of hate. This sounds so stupid. I always did it out of love. Other white guys would be like, 'Boy, who does Dog think he is? Dog can say that.' And black guys would be with me and walk with me and respect me. So, I went too far with that."

Even though this line is markedly different to when Dog The Bounty Hunter told his son that "If Lyssa was dating a nigger we'd all say 'fuck you' and you know that," it seems as though Dog The Bounty Hunter is genuinely remorseful for the recorded telephone conversation, and not just because he might not be allowed to strut about on TV like a human Biker Mouse From Mars any more either. Maybe education and time will be the rehabilitation that Dog The Bounty Hunter needs to heal himself and those around him.

Just so long as he's not allowed on TV any more. Seriously, that show was cack.