The folks over at Saturday Night Live have dug through old episodes and organized favorite clips by collection, dubbing it a "SNL Archive." Collections like "Classic Hosts" and "Commercial Parodies." Yeah. Goodbye doing anything productive today.

If you watched Community, Parks & Recreation, and The Office last night, I want to say thank you, because it seems like nearly everyone else in America was busy watching The Big Bang Theory or going to bed really, really early:

No, last night's ratings weren't great for the shows we like to champion around these parts. Community was watched by 3.98 million people; Parks and Rec, 4.11; The Office, 7.63. Whitney actually did OK, with 6.71 million people watching that. But compared to Two and a Half Men (28 million), 2 Broke Girls (19 million), and The Big Bang Theory (14 million), they're all losers. It's those numbers for Community and Parks and Rec that really break my heart; they're both down significantly from last year. The two best comedies on network TV by a wide margin are being pretty much ignored by most people. I'm not sure how they can survive with those numbers.

If you're planning on watching The Office, but not the two really, really great shows that precede it, could you do me and four million other people a favor and just turn on your TV an hour early? You don't even have to watch it, just turn it on and walk out of the room. I'd appreciate it, because like Abed with Cougar Town, I'm not sure I'm mentally ready to lose either Community and Parks and Rec from my life.

On a related note, if you made it through the entire episode of Whitney, let me know how. The laugh track (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) was killing me (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) and I turned it off before the opening credits kicked in.

In late June, I wrote a column about how awesome Louis C.K. was, about how the first season of Louie was inventive and brilliant, and that the first episode of season two portended more greatness. Then, a month ago, I wrote about how Louie was the best of the excellent comedies airing right now.

I knew Louie's second season was great, but I didn't realize how great it would get.

While this commercial would slightly more authentically weird if it weren't the product of a reality show, it's still quite entertaining. If I had a dead animal around that I wanted to remember in the long-term*, Chuck would definitely be the guy I'd call.

* I don't foresee any situation where there is even the remotest of possibilities of that happening, just for the record.

[HT: Reddit]

Here's my idea:

The government sends out an email or a letter or something to every parent of a pageant-aged girl in the country, saying they've been selected to appear on the new season of Toddlers and Tiaras. Everyone who replies that they would love to be on the show, we take away their kids and give them to someone sane and with a sense of decency.

On a civil liberties level, this is an uncomfortable proposition, but sometimes we have to step out from our boundaries for the greater good. I guess you could email the Learning Channel (what do you call it when the name of something reflects an alternate reality from what it describes?) and ask them to take the show off the air for the benefit of society, but I might like my idea better. The show only reflects a disturbing world that will continue to exist without the spotlight of the show. Let's solve the problem at the source.

[HT: Daily What]

I'm already in the crowd of the wildly nostalgic that would be inclined to watch new episodes of Pop Up Video, but even if you don't feel the pangs of oversentimentalism toward pop culture events that I do, the annotated video for Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends" is still fun, if only to read about the extra who was kicked off the set for talking about "poop".

Setting out west across the Mojave last week, our audiobook of choice was Tina Fey's Bossypants, a collection of Fey's autobiographical ruminations on motherhood, aging, angst, and leadership (which essentially amounted to "Hire talented co-workers you wouldn't mind seeing at 3 AM, then get out of their way"). I really can't recommend Bossypants enough, and the audiobook is especially awesome since Fey reads it herself.

Fey's chapters on her rise to the top of the male-dominated comedy writing world are particularly interesting in light of Maureen Ryan's recent column on the startling decline of female television writers. A San Diego State University study recently found the percentage of female writers on broadcast, prime-time television has fallen from 35% in 2006-2007 to 15% in 2010-2011.

I'm in California right now, staying with my in-laws for a few days in the Inland Valley. They're complaining about the heat here, which makes me laugh in the same way it makes Californians laugh to hear about the East Coast earthquake. YOU KNOW NOTHING OF TRUE SUFFERING, CALIFORNIANS.

Anyway, the dual televisions at my in-laws' house are always on, and the volume on those televisions is always parked somewhere between "Revved Harley Davidson" and "Please, sweet heavens, my ears are bleeding". Also, they only watch two stations: Fox News and the Horse Channel.

While the weatherman is probably over-reacting a bit, his co-workers are kind of big jerks. And who loses? The people of the city, just wanting to know what the weather will be like. It's sad, really.

[NYMag]

Oh, September 22nd, you can't get here soon enough. I miss my friends at Greendale.