Anna Kournikova Gets Dumped

By Richard Lawson | The Atlantic Wire

Hot-body tennis pro Anna Kournikova has been let go from her training gig on The Biggest Loser after one measly season, mostly likely because she was difficult to work with. People called her a "nightmare" and said she was super unsympathetic to the losers. The former lady coach, Jillian Michaels, was tough but nice, whereas Kournikova apparently just doesn't suffer fatties gladly. Just won't do it. So she's off the show. Really it was probably just her stern Russian-ness that made her so tough. Sure she probably shouldn't have hurled vodka bottles and fur hats at the contestants, but they really were being whiny capitalist pigs with no sense of duty. A true son or daughter of Russia would totally have done those extra two miles on the treadmill. Sheesh.

Showtime has released a minute-plus teaser trailer for its upcoming show House of Lies, the one that has Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell as hotshot PR people doing dirty things. Kristen Bell, yay! Don Cheadle, yay! This trailer? Not yay. Boo, even. Are we really still hung up on the idea of smart-talkin' sass-mouths playing all sexy with each other at the office? Doesn't it all seem a little tired? Also not a single joke in that clip is funny, not even the ones coming from Jean-Ralphio. And trying to jump on the back of Occupy Wall Street with that voice-over line about the 1% is realllly lame. Obviously there is nothing more in line with the ideology of OWS than a cable television show about sexy publicists who take money from the rich to give to themselves, also the rich, but still. It just doesn't sit right. Don't smell a hit with this one, nosiree.  Poor Veronica Mars.

Uh oh. Did Family Guy go too far?? Apparently they made some sort of 9/11-themed episode and aired it last night and basically it ended with the gay baby and the annoying dog talking about how they should let 9/11 happen again (they'd gone back in time) and then high-fiving about it. It all had to do with an alternate, non-9/11 history where there was a horrible new civil war in America, so 9/11 had to happen to prevent that, but like... What's the point? Was the commentary supposed to be that sometimes bad things happen and we can't change that? Was it all backwards allegory for the war that happened after 9/11? Or was it just another pointless joke meant to shock and earn gasps and titters for no real reason other than trying to seem envelope-pushing to distract from a lack of genuine intelligence? Who knows! Whatever it was, the dang episode isn't on Hulu for another week so it's all moot anyway.

Oh man. Two huge nerd worlds collide. David Yates, who directed all the Harry Potter movies from Order of the Phoenix on (i.e. when they got really good), will be directing a movie based on the cult TV series Doctor Who. Yes, there will be an explosive overlap on the nerd Venn diagram between Harry Potter and Doctor Who and everyone, well every dweeb geek spaz and weirdo at least, is going to go apenuts. Though, don't get too excited, dorks. The movie is going to be its own standalone thing, not a continuation of the series. So there's that. That's one little thing to be a little less than excited about. But otherwise? Yeah, go nuts. This is your Woodstock.

Gross. MTV has set a premiere date, February 2nd, for their new scripted show I Just Want My Pants Back. Remember that wreck? They showed the pilot episode right after the VMAs a couple months ago? Wooftie was that thing terrible. Not just annoying and unfunny, but actually kind of gross? Like "I haven't had sex in six days, it's terrible" gross. One of those shows that thinks it's being all real and gritty and true, but actually makes How to Make It in America look like Hoop Dreams. It's about young assholes in Brooklyn and having sex in refrigerators (yes) and it's so unpleasant. It's really bad. That said, we cannot wait until February 2nd.

Kiernan Shipka, who plays strange mommy-hater Sally Draper on Mad Men, will guest star on an upcoming episode of ABC's Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23, playing herself. Yeah, see, James Van Der Beek is also on the show, also playing himself, or a version of himself at least, and on the show he works on a movie in which he plays Kiernan Shipka's dad. So there she'll be. She is not the Bitch in apartment 23, although that would be kind of great if she was. Or at least if she was maybe the Bitch. It would be fun if that show was kind of like How I Met Your Mother in that you'd spend a lot of guessing trying to figure out who the Bitch is. "Do you think that's the Bitch?" "No, no, she can't be the Bitch. I think the other one's the Bitch." Lots of fun guessing! And then in the end the Bitch turns out to be Grams from Dawson's Creek and nobody's all that surprised. Make that show please, television industry!