Looks like there’s no desperation setting in for the stars of Bravo TV show The Real Housewives of New York City.The show has been picked up for a third season, ensuring the housewives continue their domination of Bravo, picking up fans right, left and center. Alongside the other ‘Real Housewives’ outings – Jersey, Atlanta and Orange County, the housewives have continued to entertain and be interest enough for most of us to stick with them.Rumors abound that this season Bethany finally gets a ring and no doubt there will be lots more drama and infighting to keep us all amused. Production is set to begin in the fall and casting is underway at the moment.

If you missed out on the six seasons of The L Word, you’ve probably been wondering where the heck Jennifer Beals has been for the last decade or so. Well wonder no more, she’s about to become a regular on your screen again with a recurring role on the upcoming series of Lie to Me.Beals appeared in the show last season for two episodes and will be back this season playing Assistant U.S. Attorney Zoe Landau. Zoe is the ex-wife of Cal Lightman and mother to his teenage daughter.The show will be back on Sept 28 and will also feature appearances from Mekhi Phifer as FBI Agent Reynolds. Looks like this could be about to get all the more interesting!

There’s been rumors floating around for some time that Heroes cheerleader Claire Bennet might take a walk on the Sapphic side at some point during the Heroes run, but until now there’s been little confirmation of it. Recently however, the Hollywood Reporter suggested that Claire would “share sleeping quarters (and maybe more)” with her new college roommate and since then fans of the show have been scrambling for answers.Michael Ausiello has done his best to track down the truth and has revealed that it’s true Claire (played by Hayden Panettiere) will have a little experimentation with her new roommate who is played by Rachel Melvin. Apparently it is unlikely to be a full-blown relationship, but more a ‘phase’ which of course every girl goes through in college – yawn!Now, I know that Heroes is struggling with viewers at the moment, but does it really need to throw in pseudo-lesbianism to try and get some interest back? I’m all for having well thought out, rounded characters in TV shows that truly depict diversity in sexuality, but a foray into lesbianism just to add some spark is just slightly offensive. Guess we’ll need to wait until the next season to find out how it all turns out.

Great news for Law & Order: SVU fans, the rather talented Christine Lahti is joining the show as the new A.D.A., replacing Stephanie March for a few episodes. Fans of A.D.A. Alexandra Cabot don’t fret, she’ll be back a few episodes into the new season. Lahti is only peened in to appear in the first 4 or so at this point.on a side note for Law & Order: SVU fans, the 11th season of the show starts shooting (so to speak) ths month and Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay are both returning. They signed on the dotted line for a further two seasons, odd since only one more season is presently on the cards. Given it’s popularity though, we don’t think there’ll be an issue.

The UK version of The View (well essentially) is in trouble for being racist. Talk show queen Trisha Goddard has blasted the show for being like “driven snow”. Goddard was speaking to Bang Showbiz when she allegedly stated “Driven snow means it is very white, middle-class,” she said. “If your staff come from a predominantly under-privileged area and socio-economic group, you are going to reflect that.”She continued by stating the show would probably be better if the panelists were a better mix of people from “non-Anglo backgrounds”. Sounds like Trisha is trying to get a job, given her own show The Trisha Goddard Show was cancelled by Channel 5 earlier this year. Lame Trisha, very lame.

Head of Sky1 Drama Elaine Pyke has been going on about its next adaptation of another of Terry Pratchett’s work, Going Postal. Pyke stated “Following the Sky1 HD successes of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, we’re thrilled to now be bringing Going Postal to life,”The lead characters of Moist Von Lipwig and Adore Belle Dearheart have been cast as Richard Coyle and Claire Foy respectively. Foy was most recently seen in the role of Amy Dorrit in TV series Little Dorrit.

This sounds dubious at best, but given the rumors of recent times, the drop in viewing firgures and Australia’s TV stations ability to axe in an arbitrary fashion, here with are. A few media sources are reporting Channel Seven Australia has cancelled medical drama All Saints. Those fans of the show who were furious over the change from the All Saints format to the new All Saints: Medical Response Unit may have set off a chain reaction that loses them the series altogether.

The revamp on the show that saw it go all outdoorsy and action oriented seems to have turned off a lot of the viewing public. That said Channel Seven hasn’t stated for sure the show is in the axed pile, but all the signs are there.

Jodi Gordon - Martha on hit Australian soap Home and Away - continues to get more and more interesting to the gossip world. A few months ago, she seemed like a nice quiet starlet who was dating Channel 7 heir Ryan Stokes, getting on with her job and generally being an all round approachable lovely girl.

When word of her apparent drug binge with biker Mark Judge started streaming out a few weeks ago, complete with information on them calling the cops to help save them from masked gunmen (who were never there), it looks like Jodi might have a few issues to work out. Since then, she’s been under scrutiny from the press constantly, something that she’s generally managed to avoid throughout her career. Her boyfriend Stokes dumped her, she’s struggling to cope with the pressure and now it seems she’s got a bit of a thing for getting private lapdances from strippers.

Yup, you just read it right. Sources at the Bada Bing strip club in Kings Cross, Sydney, have stated that Jodi has been frequenting the bar there for months, paying for private dances and lapdances from the strippers who work there. Looks like there’s more to Jodi’s life than we all realised and hopefully she isn’t on a downward spiral. For someone who lost her ’soul mate’ to cancer so young, yet managed to keep it together in the public eye, this could be Jodi’s moment of unravelling. Here’s hoping she’s got good people around her to keep her sane – plus, is it weird I think it’s kind of amusing that she likes lapdances from strippers?…

Rumer Willis, daughter of Bruce and Demi, will be making an appearance as a “punky cute lesbian” in some upcoming episodes of 90210.

Willis will play the character of Gia (nice throwback to Angelina Jolie’s lesbian model character Gia Carangi) in at least one episode of the show. She’ll work at the school newspaper alongside Adrianna, Silver and Navid.

This is actually a pretty decent role for Willis. She’s made a few appearances lately in movies, but she looks like she could pull off punky lesbian easily, so it’ll be interesting to see who her love interest is and whether she’ll stick around.

A while back we reported on the possibility of a Veronica Mars movie and fans of the quirky show rejoiced at the thought of seeing what happened to Veronica after the show finished. Looks like the big screen outing for Veronica is never going to happen however, since Joel Silver is decidedly uninterested.

Kristin Bell and Rob Thomas pitched the idea of a Veronica Mars movie to Joel Silver who basically put a big rubber stamped ‘NO’ across it. Bell is even begging fans to get on board and start a letter writing campaign to gather up some momentum for the idea.

It seems like a bit of a loss if this one doesn’t go ahead. Veronica Mars is a recognizable TV brand has relatively decent DVD sales. Similar to Firefly before it, the DVD sales could have possibly helped push this towards a movie outing, so keep buying them people and write letters to Warner Bros to show them you’re interested. It’d be nice to see Kristin Bell back as the character she epitomized so beautifully.

This week I’ve spent some time catching up with a series that plenty of people had raved to me about, that show is The Secret Life of the American Teen. The series follows the character of Amy Juergens, a 15 year old girl who finds herself pregnant after her first and only sexual experience with the schools bad boy.

The series is your typical high school drama. There’s the usual cast of genre filling characters, the bad boy, the good boy, the bad girl, the good girl and all those in between. It hasn’t stood out to me in any way as being special, though I have to admit, I can’t stop watching.

It feels as though they’re handling the issue of teen pregnancy in a way that perhaps belittles the issue. It also feels as though all the girls in the cast are sniffling morons, all vying for the affections of men, be it daddy issues or boyfriend issues. By the time you reach midway through season one you’ll be cringing that the ’smart’ friend wants to be seduced by the bad boy to prove to the other friend she’s ‘hotter’ and that there is not one redeeming female character in the show, as they all pander to the many male douchbags in the series (Ben and Leo aside)… gag me with a spoon. If this show is aimed at young girls, the message here is all terribly skewed.

Teen star Molly Ringwald stars as the main characters mom, which just makes me feel old, I mean when did Molly Ringwald become a mom! To add to this aging pain, one of the other moms is Josie Bissett of Melrose Place fame. The characters are almost one dimensional, which makes watching painful at times. Amy’s dad – played by Mark Dermin – is a complete tool who belays blame onto his wife for being a cheat and liar. Amy’s mom – Molly Ringwald – is the doting mom with the cheating husband, pregnant daughter and younger child who dislikes her because she made her dad cheat and leave home. Oh please.

Another issue with the characterizations is there seems to be little continuity both in story and at times character subplots. This makes the characters feel shallow as they become caricatures of type (the loving mom, the cheating dad, the tortured teen, the boy whore, the jock, the bible basher etc).

Would I suggest you go out and watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager? No, though that is wholly dependent on your own personal likes and dislikes. If you’re a fan of shallow teen drama with fairly one dimensional characters, you’re probably going to love this show. As stated I usually like my series with more depth, both in story and characters, but I can’t stop watching, it’s like some sort of addictive guilty non pleasure.

If you love teen ‘drama’, who knows, why not give the first two episodes a try and if you’re not liking it by then, or – like me – find yourself hitting play in a zombie like fashion on the next episode, go rent My So Called Life for some real teen angst.

Neil Patrick Harris looks set to host the Emmy Awards. The 36 year old star of How I Met Your Mother host the Tony Awards this year and it helped the ratings based on last years figures. Seems the Emmy Awards liked that and are going with Harris as host of their show too.

You may recall hosting for the Emmy Awards last year fell to a roster of stars including Ryan Seacrest, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel and Jeff Probst. The awards came off as a bit sloppy with this multi host deal and so it now falls to NPH to bring them back and I personally think he can do a good job. The 61st Primetime Emmy Awards will air September 20 on CBS.

New Lifetime comedy / drama series Drop Dead Diva just got its own dancing diva to guest spot for them. Paula Abdul will appear in the show long with a list of other celebs set to appear. Paula Abduls appearance will air some time in September.

Other celebs lined up to appear in the show include Tim Gunn, Nia Vardalos, Liza Minelli and Rosie O’Donnell. Drop Dead Diva follows the story of a model who dies only to find herself trapped in a plus-size female attorney’s body. Everyone gasp at such an awful thought!! Sounds lame, but who knows, there’s nothing like taking the mick out of big boned girls to get a laugh.

Actor Rocky Carroll is going to be one busy man. He’ll be appearing simultaneously on both NCIS and NCIS spinoff series NCIS: Los Angeles. Needless to say Carroll will be playing the same character on both series, that of NCIS director Leon Vance.

As the NCIS directors role covers multiple jurisdictions, so will Vance’s. We’ll be seeing team leader Special Agent Jethro Gibbs – played wonderfully by Mark Harmon – and team reporting to Vance, along with Special Agent’s Callen and Hanna (Chris O’Donnell and L. L. Cool J respectively) from NCIS: Lost Angeles. NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles will air back-to-back this fall on Tuesday nights.

Great news for science-fiction fans, looks like SyFy (That’s the new name of the SciFi Channel for those that missed it) are doing a reboot of classic scifi series Alien Nation. Tim Minear is said to be penning the series, which is fairly good news given his portfolio includes Dollhouse, Angel and Firefly.

I always thought the movie of Alien Nation (with Mandy Patinkin and James Caan) was way better than the TV series (with Eric Pierpoint and Gary Graham), but either way the cop / buddy / alien / drama thing works really well and lord knows cop shows are booming right now. We’ll definitely be covering this one as it grows.

Premiere dates for your favorite FX shows are on the table, starting with Sons of Anarchy which will be moved to a Tuesday night slot beginning September 10 at 10pm. There will be 13 episodes of Anarchy which sees the return of Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Katey Segal.

FX has placed It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a Thursday night slot at 10pm. Sunny in Philadephia returns to screens for its fifth season (really that many?) from September 8. Lastly the Sixth season of slice and beautify drama series Nip Tuck will premiere in October (that one is a run of 10 episodes).

This post contains spoilers for TV series Supernatural, so if you don’t want to know what old character is returning to the show, please don’t read any further, lest werewolves and demons come a knocking at your door. Right, so who was banished to hell in last seasons finale? That’s right it was Meg Masters.

Supernatural creator Eric Kripke says he really missed Meg Masters, so much so he wrote her back into his script. Fans of Nikki Aycox who originally held the role will be saddened to hear she couldn’t schedule it in to make the return, so actress Rachel Miner will take on the role.

Hilary Duff has joined the cast of Gossip Girl as a movie star named Olivia Burke. Duff will feature in a multi-episode arc in the teen series when she enrolls at NYU. The upcoming season is scheduled to air from October 5 in the US. Duff’s character Burke will become roommate of Jessica Szohr’s character Vanessa Abrams.

Duff has plenty on the boil at the moment including the upcoming The Story of Bonnie and Clyde with Michael Madsen and Lee Majors. She’s also finished filming Provinces of Night co-starring Val Kilmer and Kris Kristofferson.

Past Life is a new show from Fox that follows a pair of detectives who deal with reincarnated victims. Yeah, ‘reincarnated’. Strange premise, but the preview trailer actually looks pretty cool. Starring Kelli Giddish, Nicholas Bishop and Richard Schiff, Past Life delves into murder cases through the eyes of the victims, now reincarnated into other people. Judging from the trailer though, the victims didn’t always necessarily have to have died.

Check out the preview trailer below, it looks pretty cool. Past Life airs on Fox Spring 2010.

UK TV host Chris Tarrant has a new show in the offing called Tarrant Lets the Kids Loose. The host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire in the UK says he loves working with kids because “Kids are funny, magical and always surprising. What parent hasn’t told an anecdote about the funny things their children say?”.

That’s true. Tarrant Let’s the Kids Loose will feature kids put in adult positions, such as coffee shop manager, radio station manager and hairdressers. Hidden camera’s will capture how the kids cope with the pressures of the adult world, allegedly with hilarious outcomes. No word on an air date at time of writing.