Variety is reporting that HBO’s popular undead gothic series True Blood will return for a twelve episode third season on June 13. The return of the series shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, as the series drew more than 12 million viewers per episode last season. The season two finale alone drew a record 5.1 million viewers, making it the cabler’s most watched contemporary show.

Fans should be prepared to expect some new faces around Bon Temps, as  Alfre Woodard and Kevin Alejandro (Southland) have both signed on for the season. Michelle Forbes, who played Maryann Forrester, Bon Temp’s seductive and deadly maenad, will not be returning for another season (which isn’t too surprising if you paid attention during season two’s finale).

Based on the hit series of novels from Charlaine Harris,  True Blood stars Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer and Sam Trammell.

When you say the word “history” out loud, it’s usually met with a chorus of groans. “I hated history in school! All those dates and crap! So boring.” It’s depressing.

History, if taught right, is a story.  (That’s why it has “story” embedded into it. No joke.) It’s not names, dates, and places. It’s blood and sex, with a dash of art and higher aspirations. It’s the stuff you pay to watch in theaters or on HBO but with the kicker that it actually happened.

I couldn’t be happier that television has decided to take that idea and run crazy with it. The new trend on cable is taking finding some notorious era of history, populated with sex and swearing, and spin a few seasons out of it. HBO kicked off the trend with Rome and Deadwood (and promptly broke our hearts in the process), and now Showtime and Starz have taken up the gauntlet.

Showtime has been happily running around Renaissance England with The Tudors, which is about to wrap up in its fourth season now that Henry VIII is coming to the end of his wives. While it’s played a little fast and loose with history, it’s been a sumptuous watch, and fans won’t have to look far for a replacement.

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For just about all of 2008, Danny McBride ended up being the most ubiquitous screen comedian out there based on his cameos in Fanboys, Drillbit Taylor, Pineapple Express, Tropic Thunder and more. Things got a little more quiet in 2009, as he had a starring role in Land of the Lost and the original HBO series Eastbound and Down. Now it looks like things may be picking back up for the foul-mouthed actor.

According to Pajiba.com, the story of his latest comedy is basically set up to be “What if Kenny Powers was in Wedding Crashers?”:

The project is The Chadster, which at one time had The Hangover’s Todd Phillips attached to both produce and direct. Phillips has fallen off as director, but he’s still producing the comedy, which is moving ahead with Eastbound co-writer Shawn Harwell as scribe.

The studio wedding comedy, set up at Warner Brothers and produced by Phillips’ Green Hat Films, is about a best man who has his position threatened when an eccentric, long-lost childhood friend shows up at the wedding and causes trouble.

With this news coming in, a second season of Eastbound & Down on the way, McBride starring in an adaptation of the comic book Hench, and the actor popping up in another 5 films over the next year, it seems 2010 will be a repeat of 2008 for Danny McBride.

Right off the bat, I should point out that HBO’s Rome was the best TV series ever made. That’s right, ever made. I’m a huge fan of Roman history and mythology.

I was extremely impressed by the creators of HBO’s Rome because they took their accuracy seriously. So seriously in fact that even the craftsmen in the bazaar were actual Roman craftsmen. The money spent to create a truly accurate atmosphere just may have had a tiny bit to do with why it was canceled after 2 seasons.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand, however, doesn’t care nearly as much about history. What it does care about is blood and sand. The title does not disappoint. Within the first episode, I swear, a gladiator spewed gallons of blood on a very sandy plane of death.

A human body holds around 8-10 pints of blood, so it’s quite a feat for a gladiator to expunge even a few gallons. These men must have been built very tough and it seems very liquidity.

While the mono-syllable, shoddy dialogue is straight out of 300 or perhaps G.I. Joe, the view is stunningly breathtaking (for TV).  Spartacus is wholly gratuitous in a cheesecake, soft-core sort of way, but it’s worth noting that it is equally gratuitous. There are plenty of raunchy shows that panhandle to men in the audience with oh-so-classy shots of women come undone. These same shows forget that perhaps some women might be watching.

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I guess it’s only natural that one of the most successful podcasts out there (and if that sounds like a dubious distinction, the BBC reported that in 2006 The Ricky Gervais Show podcast had received a staggering 8,000,000 downloads) would get its own show…though for reasons I’ll go into in a bit, I’m not entirely sure why.

The new HBO show, which premieres February 19^th but is currently available for free download on iTunes, features flash animations of Office and Extras creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant antagonizing their co-host Karl Pilkington for his inane and often outlandish beliefs.

Episode #1 opens with Gervais and Merchant systematically debunking Pilkington’s assertion that technology reached its peak sometime around the turn of the 19^th Century. “What about planes?” Merchant counters, “they let you go on holiday all over the world.” “No,” Pilkington shoots back, “because you go to places where if you don’t get a shot beforehand, you can die.”

Next Pilkington proposes a biological “advance” that would allow older women to have children the moment they died. “Who would take care of them?” Merchant usefully asks.

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Funny Or Die is one of those websites that brings wasting time on the internet, and our favorite comedians together. Originally created by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, the minds behind Anchorman, Step Brothers, and Taladega Nights, the site was meant as a place for comedians to come together and contribute for the masses.

The site has had such contributors as Zach Galifiniakis, Judd Apatow, Ed Helms, Don Cheadle, Tim Meadows, James Franco, Aziz Ansari, Tom Lennon, and countless others. HBO finally caught wind of the site’s growing popularity and have put together a weekly anthology collection, which premieres this week.

The show will have some of our favorite bits, such as Drunk History, Just 3 Boyz, Hold Up, Between 2 Ferns, and many more. The first episode hits this Friday, February 19th at midnight, and looks to be a good one.

Check out an exclusive new preview of the coming episodes after the jump, and be sure to keep it here for all the updates we can bring you on HBO’s Funny or Die Presents.

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HBO is planning a half-hour comedy series with writer-director Bill Condon and Tell Me You Love Me creator Cynthia Mort. The show, titled Tilda, ”centers on a powerful female online showbiz journalist with a no-holds-barred style.” For examples of such a character you can look to online reporters Nikki Finke, Sharon Waxman and Anne Thompson. Entertainment journalists who have made a successful career online.

As traditional news outlets scale down reporting, or go out of business entirely, many reporters have found a new home online. This is especially true for entertainment and celebrity reporting. Given that, it seems only natural for a network like HBO to latch onto this transition and build a show around it.

While there has not been a lot of details about Tilda provided this, in my opinion, could be Sex and the City 2.0. A female lead, who’s a writer, dishing on relationships (in this case about celebrities).  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Furthermore, a show such as this is ripe for celebrity cameos, and given the rich talent pool from HBO I’m sure they can pull a few strings to get walk-ons. Being a writer, specifically one who covers entertainment news, I’m interested to see how this show shakes out.

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Much like vampires, zombies are having quite the resurgence these days. Not that they ever really went anywhere, but it seems after the success of Zombieland (and video games like Left 4 Dead) everyone in Hollywood wants a piece of the zombie pie (which, while popular, probably wouldn’t taste very good).

Recently, AMC announced they were adapting Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead for the network with Frank Darabont in charge and now, not to be left out, MTV is apparently turning George Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead into a TV series.  Yes, one more non-music program on a channel named Music Television.  Don’t worry, it’s doubtful they’ll make the zombies dance.  At least in that MTV will preserve the greatness that is Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

So far MTV has not made any details about the project available:

“They haven’t given away much in terms of details surrounding the show, how it will link to the original film or even when it might hit the air. They have noted the show will feature a mix of the classic, slow moving zombies and the latest fad of turning the undead into Olympic sprinters. It’s good to see so much diversity on television.”

A television series based on zombies may seem unconventional, but one only has to look to shows like HBO’s True Blood to understand the supernatural appeal. Moreover, I can’t help but wonder if some, if not all, of MTV’s motivation is driven by Zombieland itself.  While made into a movie, Zombieland was originally pitched to CBS as a television series.  Coincidence? Perhaps not.

No matter how the project started, is anyone really going to complain about more zombies to watch?  I didn’t think so.

2009 has been a great year for TV. Everyone’s favorite shows like The Office, Lost, Weeds, and True Blood continued with some killer seasons, new shows like Trauma, Castle, and Lie to Me caught audience’s interests. We’ve got a list for you of our favorite TV shows of this year, including some of the latest and greatest of 2009 as well as some old favorites.

Glee – Fox

Glee has stolen viewer’s hearts this season not just with its love triangles and intense drama, but also the song and dance that the students in William McKinley High School’s glee club perform. The mid-season finale just aired, and it surely made “gleeks” even more anxious for the rest of the season, which will air beginning April 13th.

Not only has Glee swept the nation’s TV sets, but also it’s iTunes playlists. The first soundtrack to the season has already gone gold, while the second soundtrack is climbing the charts in the top 5.

True Blood – HBO

Where the Twilight series fails to thrill audiences, True Blood succeeds. Just finishing its action packed and hair-raising second season, the show, based off Charlaine Harris’ vampire mystery series continues to confuse us, surprise us, and make our blood boil with such storylines as an anti-vampire cult, a love triangle, and flying Eric, all in this season alone!

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Coming on of the heels of Monday’s news that Showtime would be ordering a fourth season of their adult comedy Californication, it looks like another cable movie network is having the same success with their newest show Bored to Death.

The series has great potential, bringing together names like Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galifiniakis, and Ted Danson into a noir-like situation comedy about a bored writer who decides to moonlight at a private detective Each week, Schwartzman finds himself in yet another predicament while dodging his pot-smoking boss (Danson) and confiding in his best friend, a scruffy comic book artist (Galifiniakis).

The show has gotten big numbers in ratings since it’s start 4 weeks ago. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the pilot received 4.1 million viewers, not including an extra 500,000 who watched online for free. Following this past week’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which the cast of Seinfeld made a reunion, the show (which followed) earned 1.1 million viewers, which was an increase from the previous week.

Though the series is only 4 episodes into an 8-episode season, things are already looking up for them. This is the third new series from HBO, following Hung and Eastbound and Down, all of which have been renewed for another season.