If you've got twenty-two minutes to kill, we suggest checking out the series premiere of Kath & Kim. Although the NBC show doesn't make its official debut until Thursday night, the network was kind enough to post the premiere episode online a few days early. Actually, after watching Kath & Kim, we can definitely say it wasn't that kind of them at all. The show kinda stinks.

Based on the hit Australian show of the same name, Kath & Kim stars Molly Shannon and Selma Blair as mother-daughter dullards who snipe and gripe. NBC is hoping the remake slides effortlessly into their Thursday night comedy lineup, but we have our doubts about the show's staying power.  read more »

Is NBC finally embracing the web? Lipstick Jungle, Chuck, Life, Knight Rider and 30 Rock will all premiere on their video site Hulu (which they co-founded with News Corp.) a week before their TV broadcast.

Hulu has its own Fall Lineup page, with new premiere episodes on all networks for seven straight weeks beginning Sept. 2. Tonight you can watch Fox's Prison Break (mmm, Wentworth Miller) if you can't get to the TV by 8 p.m.

As Michael Learmonth at Silicon Valley Insider points out, giving the internet a head start over the broadcast episodes isn't a major risk for NBC.  read more »

After watching the pilot last year, we didn't figure Chuck would become one of our favorite shows: it looked like a cheap episode of 24, filled with cringe-worthy humor, and it featured one of the most annoying supporting performances in the history of television (Joshua Gomez as Chuck's irritating sidekick Morgan.)

But by the end of whatever truncated first season Chuck was allowed to accomplish (thanks WGA!), we were totally in love. It's not the plotting, a predictable mix of True Lies, Mr. & Mrs. Smith and The 40-Year-Old Virgin; it's the chemistry between Chuck and Sarah (played admirably by Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski.  read more »

Did you see the New York Times' positive coverage about web viewership of the Olympics "soaring"? Well, we beg to differ.

NBC was going for the gold (forgive us) with all their online coverage of the Olympics. They launched a brand new cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in website to cover the Olympics and unleashed more than 2,000 hours of online video. But they didn't even qualify to compete, according to recent numbers. Techcrunch tells us that Yahoo Sports beat NBCOlympics.com with an average of 4.7 million visitors a day versus 4.3 million, according to Nieisen Online. Yahoo didn’t even have video. Worse, NBC’s Olympics video ad revenues came to only $5.  read more »

Candace Bushnell's NBC show Lipstick Jungle has set up shop in the Flatiron district-right outside the Observer offices!--for the day, occupying two blocks of Broadway between 19th and 21st streets. Some helpful production assistants told us they were filming a "club scene" featuring stars Lindsay Price (dressed in what another Observer reporter likened to a "blue medieval beer wench" costume) and Andrew McCarthy inside Strata, a multilevel nightspot under whose awning we like to smoke.

"It's like a Halloween dream sequence thing," one of them added. Indeed, the sidewalk was mostly occupied by a line of costumed extras (masqueraders and witches, mostly). Lipstick Jungle star Brooke Shields was reportedly not around, but we were told that she is expected on set at Franklin and Varick streets tomorrow (just saying!).  read more »

Even as Candace Bushnell's NBC dramedy about powerful New York women Lipstick Jungle will return for a second season, Bergdorf Blondes author Plum Sykes is working on a new show called Mogulettes, about a group of women click-clacking their way onto airplanes instead of New York City streets. Variety reports:

"Mogulettes," which Sykes is penning with scribe Amy Harris ("The Comeback"), will center on jet-setting twentysomething women who have already become captains of industry. Show revolves around Eva, the beautiful and brilliant leader of a cosmetics empire.

Ms. Sykes originally brought a show based on her Bergdorf Blondes book to the WB a few years ago. But they passed. NBC seems to love it: "I think Plum has a unique insight into social dynamics in a way that she’s able to find these characters that are at once sympathetic and aspirational," producer Charlie Corwin told Variety.

Can you guess which ragingly hot chest belongs to which swimmer? It sounds like a game you might play on Queerty or something, but you can just do it on, you know, NBC's Olympics Web site.

Stare at the chest, think of the swimmer, click a button, and there's the face. It's like online shopping.

Apparently NBC isn't above link-baiting.

More Landmania for you Friday afternoon!

As we wrote this week, NBC and The New York Times are going into the Olympics with different goals: NBC is covering the sports, The Times is waiting for a big news story.

Well, Jonathan Landman, The Times' deputy managing editor, laid out his own distinctions between NBC and the paper of record in his weekly memo. Even though Jeff Zucker believes NBC's coverage over the next two weeks is "the most ambitious broadcasting event ever attempted," with a planned 3,600 hours of coverage, including 2,200 hours live on the Internet, Mr. Landman isn't so impressed:

The formula for a great news and information Web site: Be interesting and useful.

 read more »

Over the weekend, Allison Romano of Broadcasting & Cable took an in-depth look at NBC's plans for broadcasting the upcoming Olympic games in China.

According to Ms. Romano, this year's coverage of the games by NBC represents a "radical shift reflecting a more technologically savvy era," that will result in more sports than ever before being covered on a variety of NBC owned platforms, including Telemundo, "five of seven major NBC Universal-owned cable channels," and NBC's Olympic Web site.

More from the article:

After being criticized in the past for limited and delayed Olympic coverage—not to mention for its ill-fated Triplecast pay-per-view deal for the 1992 Barcelona Games—NBC is now going to an unprecedented extreme.

 read more »

With help from Romenesko, we now know that Gary Schwitzer at the University of Minnesota health news blog is shocked—shocked!—that NBC gave up so much time to the mouse-pill story. (A recap: A lazy mouse took two pills and showed increased endurance and fitness without doing any exercise.)

"It devoted more than 2 minutes out of its total of 22 minutes or so of news time to this story. We are at war. The economy is in the tank. No one can afford gas in the tank. But 2 minutes was given to this mouse research...With limited airtime, why was that an important nugget? Unless one's goal is to make drug company sponsors happy.  read more »