Happy to derive its laughs from aspiring actors devouring the genitalia of dead animals on Fear Factor and from hopeless nerds trying to lay third-place beauty pageant contestants on Average Joe, NBC's fall schedule will go light on the sitcoms. The only new comedies will be the animated, Siegfried and Roy-inspired (and, disappointingly, mauling-free) Father of the Pride, and Friends spinoff Joey. NBC head Jeff Zucker is banking on Joey to deliver big ratings numbers in the Friends timeslot; if it falters, expect Matt LeBlanc to ingest a yak labia just before each commercial break.

Fresh off its first-to-press victory in the Graydon Carter sweepstakes, the NYT delivers another huge scoop: Out of work screenwriters infest LA's coffee shops.

Former Disney president/"Gay Mafia" paranoiac Michael Ovitz claims in a court deposition that he earned every penny of his $140 million severance because he had to use his magical superagent powers to keep CEO Michael Eisner from running the company into the ground. Among these special abilities seems to be a gift for raiding an incredibly generous expense account, which he used to buy extravagant presents to keep Disney executives and talent (like future president Bob Iger and Home Improvement star Tim Allen) from quitting. Of course, "Breguet Aeronavale watches" and "Lichtenstein prints" may just be expense report translations for "hookers."

Wallow in the numbers that make the existential dread of another Monday morning seem a little less Kierkegaard-y:

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin of Coldplay are now proud parents, as Paltrow gave birth to their first child this weekend. Obviously still addled from a central nervous system full of Demerol, Paltrow named the baby girl Apple (full name: Apple Blythe Alison Martin). Our hearts go out to yet another celebrity offspring burdened by their famous parents' "creativity." As always, things could have been worse; we hear the proud couple wanted to go with "Mango Toaster Paltrow-Martin," but someone in the Screen Actors Guild had already registered under that name. Better luck with the next kid, Gwynnie.

Yesterday, we reported on Drudge's report on Jimmy Kimmel's Wednesday on-air collapse. In the great spirit of reporting on reporting, today we update by linking to E!'s story about Kimmel's near-fatal, totally controversial overdose on...Advil? What the fuck? You take too many Advil and your head puffs up like an hydroencephalitic Charlie Brown? We've never really heeded those warnings on the label, especially the ones about not taking Advil after a bender. Wow. Our liver probably looks like the inside of Courtney Love's nose by now.

For information on advertising on Defamer, whose readers are all sexy, influential, and insatiable consumers, send an email here. Thanks to this week's sponsors, who make it possible that no rumor about Lindsay Lohan goes undiscussed:

The Gossiplist blog has a pic of box office darling Lindsay Lohan engaging in some adult partying. (Click the picture at left to see the whole thing.) We know it's less than two months before she turns 18, but is our little girl on the wrong path? Note the troubling presence of a cigarette in her right hand. Last time we checked, cigarette smoking is prohibited by those under the age of 18. Also note the troubling presence of skanky celebutante/night-vision cabaret act Paris Hilton in the foreground. Last time we checked, Paris was performing sexual acts in a little window on our computer. [Ed.note—There is a button that will make the little window fill the entire screen so you don't miss anything.] Lindsay, cut out the smoking before it's too late!

New Yorkish thinks that NBC's spinoff mania won't end with Friends spawn Joey. Looks like the highly derivative Fall schedule at the Peacock is going to be a little confusing. How are we supposed to remember which show is about the character so dumb that he eats his own feces and which one has the dog?

Unfortunately, our powers of projection are useless for any lucrative, practical applications such as betting the horses or reading juries at celebrity rape trials.

Blogger Standing Room Only was underwhelmed by the NYT piece on GraydonGate. He wrote to Defamer to break down the last paragraph of the article, noting obvious reporter fatigue. [Ed.note—In LA, we substitute "cocaine" for "No-Doze."]

Hollywood's famous for allowing people to fail upwards, but Disney makes you a rich man for getting fired. Former Disney President/erstwhile superagent Michael Ovitz testified that he should be able to keep his $140 million severance package because he saved the company more than that by "fixing" CEO Michael Eisner's projects during his tenure. Meanwhile, Eisner will keep his entire $1 million base salary (no doubt just a drop in the bucket compared to money earned in bonuses and incentives), even though he was recently stripped of his chairman title.

Good Plastic Surgery takes a very close look at the Olsen Twins' noses and concludes that they used a bit of their tween fortune to have a little nip n' tuck performed. Normally, we'd speculate on how long it would take before they went the (supposed) Lindsay Lohan route, but the girls are so skinny that if they got their chests done someone would have to push them around in wheelchairs. Fun fact totally unrelated to this post: Last weekend, Mean Girls earned $14 million, while New York Minute pulled in just $6.2 million.

Did you ever have the sneaking feeling that behind the face of your favorite actress was a matrix of circuitry and a tangle of wires? Worth1000.com has a gallery of celebrities Photoshopped into cyborgs. Chilling. And, disturbingly, kind of hot. We're overtaken with an urge to proposition our blender.

Both the NYT's and LAT's stories on Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's cozy relationship with Hollywood have hit the street. Carter received a $100,000 "finder's fee" for suggesting to Imagine producer Brain Grazer that the book a A Beautiful Mind should be made into a movie. We would have scraped up $100,001 for Carter to keep his mouth shut and spare the world from the cloying piece of Oscar-baiting garbage that the movie eventually became. The LAT also casts a dubious glance at Carter's ties to Mirmax's Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who paid Carter and two others $1 million for a Spy retrospective book.

Fox recently issued a press release announcing it's new "wildly twisted" reality show, Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay (hosted by The Swan's Amanda Byram), in which two straight guys have to convince their friends they're finally coming out of the closet. Then, just hours later, Fox sent out another press release after gay activist group GLAAD protested some of the original's release's content. TV Barn has both the original release and the reissued one with an apology for their "failed," "ill-chosen" and "inappropriate" attempt at humor. The rereleased memo excised the phrase "It’s a heterosexual male’s worst nightmare: turning gay overnight" and a reference to a "jury of their queers."

The L.A.Weekly's Nikki Finke offers Defamer this update on her report about the LAT's and NYT's upcoming coverage of the Graydon Carter story:

· Remember all of the buzz over the Friends finale last week? Spoilers flying left and right, hand-wringing pronouncements on What Friends Meant. Frasier ends tonight, and largely no one gives an eff. It did win a record 31 Emmys, but that's sort of like the kid who's just really bad at math and has rosy cheeks winning the Triple Jump at the Special Olympics every year. Anyway, Slate's Dana Stevens manages to use the word "jejune" while kissing Frasier goodbye and declaring the end of the "adult" sitcom.
· Harvey Weinstein is writing his memoirs. He'll probably leave out the part about all the money he probably owes Kevin Smith and Tarantino.
· The Smoking Gun has an old Friends test audience report that should have saved the world eleven years of watching Matthew Perry's head go from tiny to engorged to really engorged to sort of skinny.
· Lindsay Lohan is hosting the MTV Movie Awards. Her agent says they're real, by the way.
· Number of people in Hawaii, according to the Census Bureau: 1.2 million. Number of phone calls from Hawaii ostensibly voting for Hawaiian Jasmine Trias on American Idol last night: 1.3 million.
· No, it's not Hooters. E3: Nerds concoct entire industry just to hold a convention where they can have their pictures taken with scantily-clad women pretending not to be repulsed.

And now some Kabbalah news so hot it seems to have come from THE FUTURE! According to a story with a Friday, May 14th timestamp at Big News Network (okay, we'll admit, we have no idea who they are), Madonna and Guy Ritchie have shaved off son Rocco's hair in accordance with some Kabbalah custom. A tip from a Defamer reader seems to corroborate the GOSSIP FROM THE FUTURE! (Cue whooshing sound effect.) Says the tipster:

Motion Picture Association of America topper Jack Valenti was again in action on Capitol Hill Wednesday, this time to discuss a bill that would allow consumers to make backup copies of movies on DVD, according to Variety. Valenti opposes changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which would allow for the copying of DVDs, claiming that it would "devastate" the market. He further commented, "There are not nearly enough tiny people to hide in the duplicating machinery to enforce our copyrights, and even if there were, these anti-piracy munchkins would have no idea whether someone was making a copy for home use or for nefarious purposes. It's just not feasible. The tinies can't spend their entire days conducting investigations inside set-top boxes, they have gold to hide and teeth to collect."