Historical reimaginings are always a fun way to compare modern society to historical society (look at basically any Baz Luhrmann travesty where period pieces are shoved into a contemporary box or given modern flavors, for example), and this experiment by the folks behind British biography series "Secret Life of..." looks at historical Brits through a present-day lens — complete with plastic surgery and bad haircuts!

• Modern-day Shakespeare is, not shockingly, a terrible hipster.

Yep, that's Shakespeare, as a hipstery actor/playwright/maker of terrible hair decisions (though I will say that the shirt and vest combo kinda works, surprisingly). From the Telegraph:

Daring and forward thinking hipster Shakespeare has been fashioned as a 'modern day playwright' with his edgy Shoreditch shirt and waistcoat look.
He has been given piercings on both ears, leaving questions about his sexuality unanswered.
An actor as well as a playwright, Shakespeare might have taken advantage of modern-day hair transplanting techniques to sport a full head of hair like numerous celebrity actors.

Check out more, including my personal favorite, Admiral Lord Nelson, at the Telegraph (via Laughing Squid).

In honor of the fact that May is Masturbation Month, we give you something that was found a week or so ago and didn't share for reasons such as "it is so damn weird" and "it's porn related" — then, we remembered that this is the same publication that ran fiction featuring its writers in compromising positions only a few months ago, and said "eh, to hell with it."

So without further ado, I present the terrible porn parody that took inspiration from (and paid homage to) the Parks and Recreation episode "Bailout" from the most recent season, which featured a clip from a fictional porno "featuring" members of the main cast. It's just so damn meta.

The Porks and Recreation (yep, that's its name) safe-for-work video is below. But I still probably wouldn't watch it at work if I were you.

Happy Masturbation May, everyone!

Original Video- More videos at TinyPic

This is probably an indicator that I am old and didn't get out much when I was younger, but Saturday Night Live is a big deal to me. Yes, when I had a DVR and watched episodes on Sunday at some point waiting for something funny to happen, I was generally let down (I don't stay home on Saturdays to watch new episodes at least, which is at least a somewhat positive sign) and now I generally skim through the highlights on Hulu (if there are any).

But, on numerous occasions, something will remind me of an older sketch and I'll run to Hulu and/or YouTube to see that clip again. An example, the Russell and Tate law firm sketch above, which is seemingly unavailable in any form other than a likely-illegal video hosted on Tinypic. Not the greatest sketch, but when you want to see something in this hyper-digital age, you want to see it now.

So, I was really excited to see that Yahoo (which still exists for purposes other than for fantasy sports, apparently) and the SNL powers that be are teaming up to put the entire digital archive online. Some sketches will likely still be lost to time due to rights issues, but I feel better knowing that in the near future when I want to figure out whether "Jackie Rogers Jr.'s $100,000 Jackpot Wad" was as hilarious as I once thought, I won't have to rely on a choppy Dailymotion clip.

• Amazon.com
• Izabela Vidovic, Kirk Ward, Maiara Walsh and Tyler Ross take the leads in Zombieland: The Series.

Last week, Amazon released pilots for the new, original sitcoms that they're testing for their streaming video service, Amazon Instant Video, hoping to draw customers away from Netflix's booming streaming video service and into the warm embrace of Amazon Prime subscriptions.

I was able to catch four of the eight comedies that they've released for viewer consumption during one particularly sleepless night over the weekend — and I'm glad to say that only ONE of them was mostly terrible!

So let's do our best to compress those four pilots into encapsulated reviews. First off...

Alpha House:

This show, based around the idea of four Senators sharing a house in Washington D.C. has a few big names attached to it: notably, John Goodman is the biggest name in the ensemble. Unfortunately, it has the misfortune of coming into existence fairly near the launch of Netflix's highly-touted political drama House of Cards (which was a bit of a mess in its own right).

Alpha House is...disjointed, playing off of tired stereotypes: the young-and-oversexed politician; the struggling-to-remain-closeted gay Conservative; the long-time congressman who can't be bothered to give a shit anymore; and the competent black guy in a room full of dumb white folk...and that's just the main cast.

Honestly, the show is fine—but that's all it is. It's a single-camera, half-hour bowl of comedic oatmeal that isn't sure if it wants to be political satire or a wacky ensemble comedy that has two things going for it: the leads turn in strong performances that make me interested in seeing them work together over a longer period; and it features a cameo by Bill Murray, which is a terrific segue into...

• AMC
• For Tom, watching Mad Men might occupy a circle of his personal Hell.

I don’t get it. They’re all a bunch of unlikable people in an unlikable profession doing unlikable things to each other and sometimes to themselves.

Mad Men is the critics’ favorite, which, as we have all learned over the years, doesn’t automatically make it either great or sucko. It just means that a few people who get paid to watch TV and write about it like it. It might also mean that one or two really influential people who write about TV like it and then everybody falls into lockstep.

I hacked my way through the entire first season of Mad Men and kept telling myself that I would get it sooner or later. I’m still waiting. (I have a friend who watches every episode in the hopes that he’ll be able to see Christina Hendricks’ breasts someday. I explained to him that it’s basic cable, but he’s keeping hope alive.)

The main character, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), isn’t even Don Draper. He’s really Richard “Dick” Whitman. During the Korean War, Sergeant Don Draper was killed right in front of Whitman, who swapped dog tags with the dead guy because the dead guy was about to finish his tour and be sent back to the States. This guy is the perfect ad salesman.

This may sound incredibly juvenile, but one of the things that I hate the most about the show is the smoking. I know that people smoked a lot back in those days (the first few seasons take place before the Surgeon General’s warning came into being). Having grown up in a house with two smoking parents, I have a visceral dislike for smoking, which pretty much gives me a visceral dislike for Mad Men. However, after some soul-searching, I’ve come to the realization that I would hate Mad Men if they chewed gum instead of smoking or if they blew pretty bubbles out of their noses instead of chewing gum.

It goes way beyond that. Every freakin’ person on the show is either cheating on a spouse, stabbing a business partner in the back, or trying to blackmail somebody. I find some of the characters on The Walking Dead to be more life-affirming, including one or two that are munching on somebody else’s quadriceps.

Outside, in the real world, the Vietnam War is raging and American society is in complete upheaval. So how does Don Draper evolve? He puts down his omnipresent cigarette long enough to smoke some marijuana. Yeah, that makes me want to watch this show more.

The rest of the episode involved an ad campaign for ketchup. It’s gripping.

How long until Breaking Bad comes back?

Something tells us today's Senate filibuster on background checks will not be anything like Patton Oswalt's geek-crazed "citizen's filibuster" that will be seen on Parks and Recreation tomorrow night. A minor quibble: The X-Men don't have a quinjet.

I'm torn regarding Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. I think he, personally, is a hilarious talent — a great comic writer, actor, singer, etc. He loves what he does, and it shows. I appreciate the hell out of that.

At the same time, he gets lazy, such as his constant lowering to the basest jokes possible, even in higher-concept episodes (say, the "Road to..." episodes of Family Guy).

Well, one of MacFarlane's similarly lazy properties, The Cleveland Show (following the same casting structure as his other shows, but with more black folk!), is reportedly going away, according to sources for animation blog Cartoon Brew, citing talk from The Animation Guild, and looking at ratings numbers for Cleveland.

Whether or not Cleveland is cancelled, MacFarlane will be fine — he's got a live-action TV show and a comedy-western movie in the works — plus, his shows American Dad and Family Guy are still humming right along.

From blastr.com:

Firefly fans are coming out of the woodwork, and they are hopping mad. Why? Turns out in the last few weeks many of them have received cease-and-desist letters or have simply been banned from Etsy for producing DIY Jayne Hats. This communal endeavor, it seems, is coming to a close, and fans of the show are asking themselves why. Isn't the whole point of the Jayne hat that it be homemade? Doesn't it mean anything that the hats are often auctioned off at charity events? After 10 years of nothing, isn't it unfair for Fox to suddenly force lifelong fans to cease production of something they love?

And the answer, for now, is that Fox owns the license and that's that. The fans who are mad that the hat was licensed for mass production are the ones who are closest to hitting the nail on the head. The fact is, Fox now has a legal obligation to its shareholders — they have to chase down anyone producing and selling a licensed product without permission. Ripple Junction holds the license [to produce the hat], the fans do not.

ThinkGeek, to their credit, has been cool about the situation:

We just wanted you to know that ThinkGeek has nothing to do with the C&D notices. The hat is licensed by a vendor with whom we have a relationship and while the hat is not an exclusive to ThinkGeek, we did have a hand in its development and answered the difficult questions like, "Are the earflaps long enough?" and "Is that man afraid of anything?" (Yes and no, respectively.)

Would the C&D have happened if we did not carry the hat on our site? We're not sure; we'll leave that question to sharper legal minds than ours. We're here to carry the shiniest of goods from 'round the 'verse, even maybe makin' them ourselves. We just want y'all to know that while we might not always aim to misbehave, we'll always be sure to get you the best stuff this side of the Eavesdown Docks.

They've also added that they'll be donating all profits from the sales of the hat to charities supporting Equality Now — at least 'til they run out of stock.

As for the rest of the fan-made hats, Firefly and Castle star Nathan Fillion has got fans' backs:

“@pirateknits:Captain, looking to unload illegal hats. twitter.com/PirateKnits/st…”You got a job? We'll do it. Don't much care what it is.

— Nathan Fillion (@NathanFillion) April 11, 2013

[h/t: TechDirt]

Sorry this is late, but I had to watch the season-ending episodes of The Walking Dead and Justified to see which one was better. It was Justified, but The Walking Dead continues to amaze despite the idiotic game of musical chairs that AMC insists on playing with the people running the show.

I suppose I have to issue a SPOILER ALERT here, just in case you haven’t seen the respective season enders. In the slim chance that you don’t watch The Walking Dead, shame on you. There are zombies out there! If, by some chance, you don’t watch Justified, double shame on you. It’s the best-written show on TV. I hope the zombies get you.

This entire season of Dead had been leading up to an armed showdown between Rick, the put-upon leader of the good humans, and The Governor, the incredibly evil leader of the sheep humans who had been lulled into a false sense of security by the Governor and his ruthless henchmen.

The Governor is a low mutha’, indeed. He kept his zombie-fied daughter in a closet and had his nerd assistant run experiments to try to determine the source of the zombie virus. Meanwhile, Rick, who somehow survived the initial zombie apocalypse while locked inside a hospital room, escapes, only to find that his wife has been sleeping with—and is probably pregnant by—Rick’s former partner and best friend. Rick has to kill the best friend and then deal with the zombie that the former best friend becomes. Then, the wife has the baby but (shall we say) dies after complications during childbirth. What bothers me is that Rick then starts seeing his dead wife everywhere, as though he doesn’t have enough real crap to worry about.

Anyway, Andrea, who was one of the initial band of Good Humans, gets separated from the group and is saved by Michonne, this badass woman with a badass sword. The two women happen upon Woodbury and are taken in by The Governor. Michonne wants to split but Andrea wants to stick around and play some mattress hockey with the charismatic Governor.

In ensuing episodes, both Rick and Andrea have the opportunity to kill the Governor, but neither does. Let’s just say they should have.

In the season finale, the Governor has captured Andrea and is holding her, chained to a chair, in his Rape Room. He stabs Milton and leaves him to die a slow, painful death, after which Milton will become a zombie and dine on Andrea, who will, in turn, become a zombie. Did I mention that the Governor is low?

After a crazy shootout, the Governor snaps and kills most of his followers because they don’t want to keep fighting against the Good Humans. Andrea is bitten by zombie Milton, so Rick (who arrived too late to help her) gives Andrea a gun with which she can blow her own brains out.

That’s what passes for a happy ending on that show.

Meanwhile, on Justified, Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) solidified his position as the baddest dude on TV. Early on in the episode, he dispatches three bad guys in spectacular fashion, then later sees to it that a mob boss is shuffled off this mortal coil in a double-cross no one saw coming.

In the mean time, Raylan’s buddy/nemesis, Boyd Crowder, makes one increasingly desperate move after another to keep himself and his fiancée, Eva, out of prison. It doesn’t end well, setting up next season quite nicely.

Walton Goggins’ portrayal of Boyd Crowder is a tour de force. When he’s on the screen, you can’t take your eyes off him with his crazy, spiked hairdo and what looks to be an extra row of teeth. Then comes that Harlan County drawl, just as likely to be quoting Shakespeare as Clyde Barrow. If he doesn’t win the Emmy next fall for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, there should be a federal investigation.

So now two of my favorite shows are gone for a while and I am diminished. I have the final seasons of Breaking Bad and Dexter to look forward to this summer, but that’s cold comfort.

Multimedia interweb goliath Amazon has confirmed that it has greenlit the pilot for a TV adaptation of the 2009 zombie-filled action-horror-comedy Zombieland to be part of its streaming video service in what is probably a terrible, terrible idea.

From cnet.com:

"Zombieland" is the 13th and latest original series to bite off a pilot on Amazon's Prime video service. Six other comedy pilots and six children's pilots will also air on Prime Instant Video and Lovefilm UK exclusively for paying subscribers. Viewers will be able to watch and review each pilot, helping decide which of them will score a full season's worth of episodes.

Amazon told CNET that the pilots are "coming soon" but it has yet to announce an official date. The company didn't reveal how many spots will be available in the lineup. But obviously not all of the pilots will make the cut to a full series.

"'Zombieland' is a fan favorite, and we can't wait to see where this story line goes in a serialized format," Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios, said in a statement. "We've been announcing a lot of exciting exclusive content for Prime Instant Video, like "Downton Abbey," "Under the Dome," and "Justified," and we think adding original shows to that lineup is going to make Prime even more enticing for customers."

Of course, one might have to consider that the zombie craze appears to be crashing down after having reached its zenith a few years ago, when seemingly everything that could have the undead slapped into it did have the undead slapped into it.

There's also the little matter of whether or not you attempt to entice Zombieland's stars (Mark Zuckerberg Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin) back — though considering the movie careers of all four, that might be a tough sell.

But really, the big concern should probably whether or not you can get Bill Fucking Murray to reappear from time to time, considering the best moments in that film involved either him, Twinkies, or Woody Harrelson acting like a lunatic.

Yeah. I don't have high hopes for this one.