Giant robots fighting giant monsters. Guillermo Del Toro. Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman, Idris Elba and Charlie Day.

Giant frakking robots fighting giant frakking monsters! ‘Nuff said.

Enjoy the first trailer for Pacific Rim and be amazed.

• Alec Baldwin is very excited to be the first host of this season of SNL, so excited he felt the need to hump Bill Heder.

• Netflix had a pretty big week, between splitting off into 2 companies and pissing off their clientele. This song pretty much explains it all.

• What happens when the world’s biggest game of dodgeball starts on a football field? Complete pandemonium.

• One of the wrongest-yet-funniest comedies on TV started back up this week as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returned to FX. In order to prep for the season, here is the blooper reel from last season.

A staple of the classic sitcom is that, by the end of the episode, everything has to return to normal. Within the 20-or-so minutes of each week’s installment, the characters are free to travel to Beijing, adopt a koala, or make a big sandwich so long as that somewhere around the 18-minute mark, the status quo is maintained. From the ‘50s and on up to the ‘80s there wasn’t anything wrong with having normal, decent people thrown into far-fetched situations and coming out relatively unaffected—or, if they did learn some life-altering lesson, they’d forget it by next week.

Then, along came Seinfeld in the ‘90s, which broke ground by calling BS on the idea that any normal person would function like that—that’s the behavior of a sociopath, and hence Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, and Larry David’s “no learning, no hugging” rule. More than any other contemporary sitcom, Sunny lives by Seinfeld’s example.

It even goes a step further with its characters’ depravity (cheerfully paraded in ‘Dee Gives Birth’s opening when Dennis and Mac learn of Frank and Charlie’s naked, sewer-scouring hi-jinx), which is why this season’s running joke of everyone’s lack of concern regarding Dee’s pregnancy has worked so well—it threatens The Gang’s self-centered complacency. So, instead of facing the fact that Dee’s baby will force them to take responsibility for someone other than themselves, they chose to ignore it…maybe then it’d go away.

Not many people snynomize Neil Patrick Harris with video games. They do, however, consider him one of the greats when it comes to awards show hosts. Which is why Spike TV’s decision to hire him as the host of this Saturday’s Video Game Awards.

G4 may have their own version of the awards, but Spike’s show is considered the be-all, end-all of video game award shows. You can expect to see guests like the cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Guillermo Del Toro, Nathan Fillion, Chris Hemsworth, Olivia Munn, and a musical performance by My Chemical Romance.

You can check out the full awards show live on Saturday, December 11th at 8pm ET/ 5pm PST. Here’s the full press release announcing the new host.

New York, NY, December 6, 2010 – Acclaimed television, film, stage and video game star Neil Patrick Harris has been handed over the controller and will host Spike TV’s 2010 “Video Game Awards.”  Broadcasting in over 175 territories worldwide from Los Angeles, the “VGAs” will celebrate the best in gaming on Saturday, December 11 at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.

I never would have thought that I’d see Tom Sizemore make a cameo in Sunny, but he seems like a perfect fit among The Gang, playing Byron, the married trucker with a penchant for male prostitutes (“Treat me like a mailbox: Just shove anything you want in there”) who picks up Charlie and Dennis when they get titularly stranded in the woods.

That’s just one of the many highlights in an episode where The Gang heads to Atlantic City for an animal rights convention Frank endows simply so he can show up in a leather coat and tell off the activists—and so Mac can meet his idol Chase Utley (and on a lesser note for Dee to meet and seduce Ryan Howard, despite Frank’s observation that she’s “pregnant as shit”).

However, Frank doesn’t want to cough up any change for the “toll jockeys,” so he’s taking the backroads, and a chance encounter with a squirrel ends up totaling the vehicle. Frank, Mac, and Dee stay behind to scrounge up some food while Charlie and Dennis foot it for a ride, which takes us back to Tom Sizemore’s trucker.

Charlie and Dennis is one of my favorite pairings; Charlie’s bizarre host of talents and willingness to do almost anything and Dennis’ serial-killer charm make them ideal con men, and there’s a nice recognition of that dynamic when Charlie poses as Frank to deliver a speech to the animal-lovers (complete with him “making it rain” dolla bills, “FOR THE RATS!”). And Dennis takes up the role of Mac so he can drink heavily with Utley and Howard.

I enjoyed the uncharacteristically upbeat plotline with Charlie and Dennis (Charlie winning $15,000 at roulette and spending the bulk of it on a private jet for he and Dennis is a nice little reward for poor Charlie), but the best lines, as usual, belong to Frank, who goes into Elmer Fudd mode when he stalks wabbit—and then gets caught in its stare and concludes that its stolen his soul.

There isn’t too much for Dee and Mac to do, but overall the episode doesn’t have any dead spots—Utley and Howard don’t offer too much, but their nonplussed-to-creeped-out reactions to Charlie and Dennis is funny enough on its own, and Sizemore finds the right note of menace and perversity that I hope (though doubt) he’ll return.

Not the best episode, but solid all the way.

It’s now safe to say that Sunny has reached that stage of confidence in their characters that a show like Eastbound & Down has (or maybe I’m looking for a substitute now that that season has ended…withdrawals?). They’re different shows, of course, and Sunny’s always known its strength is in the bizarre dynamic of the group, but I think it plays safe for the most part, and whenever it takes chances it does so with the situation, so that by the end everyone remains unchanged—hey, they have a great show on a cable network; if it ain’t broke…

I have no doubt that The Gang will stay the same after “Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats,” yeah, but it played with some character development, and the results were sweet. The setup is that Charlie is in the midst of a philosophical crisis after wiping out several generations of rats in the basement, so The Gang decides to toss the poor bastard a bone (it is, as Frank notes, his birthday) and throw a surprise party.

Frank compiles a list of things Charlie might like, based on his recent pal-ing around with This Guy Duncan from Under the Bridge, who’s into “this whole Hawaiian underground shit.” Dee’s not interested, that is, until Frank lays out the day’s plan, which involves his trip to the spa (thanks to these coupons I got in the mail) with Charlie while the rest of The Gang outfits the bar in whatever regalia “underground Hawaiian shit” entails.

Frank calls Dee out on her cynicism, explaining that a surprise party is one of life’s best gifts, but that odd bit of selflessness on Frank’s part goes ignored until Dennis, caught up in charitable frenzy, suggests Dee go with Charlie. It works, and Dee surreptitiously invites Charlie to a Spa Day (not a “Spaghetti Day,” as he interprets it). I’m not going to do justice to this by dryly summarizing it, so from here on, I’ll just summarize the summary and note a few highlights:

The amazing thing is that the further anyone distances themselves from The Gang, the more like an actual human being they appear. Dee seems to be, sort of, doing pretty well as a substitute drama teacher, despite her own glaring lack of talent, and Charlie, well, was born to be a janitor, and, with his eidetic memory, ingratiates himself to the students. He even takes a young Juggalo (leave it to Sunny to make an ICP reference—is this 1998?) under his wing to teach him…uh…whatever it is he has to teach.

And Dee is showing a surprising amount of commitment to her duties as teacher, even though there is a distinct lack of understanding the allowances granted to a substitute and, indeed, the art budget, neither of which permit a field trip to New York.

And the rest of The Gang (Frank, Mac, and Dennis) is discussing their fan film of Lethal Weapon 5, specifically whether going in blackface to portray Danny Glover is morally superior to playing him as a white guy. Frank stubbornly insists on blackface, noting that Laurence Olivier played Othello, and, you can guess where it goes from there.

The group has existed in their own isolation for so long, it makes you wonder why they would often go so far out of their way to exclude Dee from any of the activities, since it’s not likely that they’d find anyone else to replace her. And seeing as how the most recent entrants seem to be Charlie and then Frank, the screening process is aimed at scraping the absolute dregs of humanity. God help them if they find anyone worse than Frank.

But they couldn’t have always been that bad, right? Earlier in life Dennis, Dee, and even Mac were perhaps semi-decent people, with a higher-class group of friends and shared equally semi-decent goals for the future. And that’s what The Gang Gets a New Member explores.

Opening a time capsule the four buried 10 years earlier, The Gang relives some of their glory days before they became misanthropic alcoholics, discovering some long-forgotten relics, which include a laserdisc of The Cider House Rules; a note from the younger Dee that includes a million-dollar check made out to her high-school drama teacher (made out, that is, under the assumption that her future self was by now a famous actress); and some photos of the old days when the fourth-and-a-half member (I assume Dee only counts for one-half a member), Schmitty (guest star Jason Sudeikis).

Ah the Halloween special, long-honored tradition among sitcoms, when everyone—writers, directors, actors—can go hog wild and abandon the show’s official canon, tossing them into movie parody, having the cast pursue some horrific monster, or even killing them altogether.

Roseanne comes to mind as having some of the best Halloween Specials (one favorite had Roseanne and Dan competing at the annual Lanford costume party and introduced with the great line, “Well, it wouldn’t be Halloween unless the Conners overdid it”); The Simpsons Halloween specials are pretty much the only episodes I watch anymore (I suspect I’m not the only one); and who doesn’t look forward to seeing what everyone will wear on The Office? (Incidentally, this week’s episode takes the cake with Angela’s Sexy Nurse outfit—yikes!)

And now we have Sunny’s inaugural Halloween episode, “Who Got Dee Pregnant?” And it’s no schumlp. In fact, it even adds a new twist with theRashomon-esque story.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The episode opens with Frank, Mac, Charlie, and Dennis discussing their plans to spend the night in an eerie mansion/warehouse/swamp/insert any Scooby-Doo-inspired location here before taking a quick break to mock Sweet Dee’s recent sandwich binge only to find that she is, in fact, pregnant, and…you ready for this? One of them is the father (OoooOoo!). Even before it’s out of the gate, Sunny gets points for hinting that it’s going down the usual cheesy fantasy route most sitcoms use for their Halloween Specials before taking an abrupt turn to something truly horrific: unwanted pregnancy.

One of the gags in Sunny that’s always impressed me (mainly for the fact that it seems so obvious, but I’ve never seen anyone else do it) is making a joke out of the title: There’s a cold open, some back-and-forths that set the stage for the episode’s plot, and then WHAM the title screen hits and hints at how this week’s scheme will go horribly, horribly wrong. Kind of a bleak reminder of the Gang’s ongoing spiral into self-destruction (“Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire” comes to mind).

Other times, when there’s an especially bizarre title, it’s satisfied to simply leave it at that (“The Gang Dances Their Asses Off”). And while all your thrown-in-the-towel English teachers told you to never judge a book by its cover, you can often tell whether an episode of Sunny is going to be good by the title alone.

Unfortunately that means that when there’s a kind of “meh” title, there’s usually a “meh” episode to follow (such as last week’s “Mac and Charlie: White Trash”). Fortunately, even a Sunny “meh” is still pretty good by “meh” standards, and that’s what “Mac’s Mom Burns Her House Down” is: not great but still pretty good.

So this week Mac’s Mom indeed burns her house down, which spurs her son’s maternal instincts (instincts that seem far more developed than her own, and I suspect the former were a direct result of the latter), and he takes her and her apparently indestructible dog in to his and Dennis’s apartment, something Dennis is obviously uncomfortable with. In the meantime, Charlie, despite his being the moral center of the Gang (did I just write that?), feels no such duty toward his own mother, who’s become a wreck since his Uncle Jack moved out. And the less said about Dee and Dennis’s paternal loyalty, the better.

So Mac and Charlie come up with the brilliant and inevitable idea to have Mac’s Mom move in with Charlie’s. Meanwhile, Frank, worried that his kids won’t take care of him when he turns into a drooling mongoloid, tries to cement his relationship with Dee, who’s nursing a cold and trying to get well for the upcoming Josh Groban concert.

I’ve never thought much about the class dynamic of the Gang—Dee and Dennis representing the upper crust of society and Mac and Charlie bringing up the dregs. God knows where Frank fits in. How did they all join up and decide to open a bar? What made Dennis break the barrier and allow himself to manage a business with two degenerates (I always figured Dee was a tag-along)?

It’d be prime territory to mine the origins of the group (and who doesn’t love seeing the early family lives of the four? One of the highlights of the Christmas Special was the glimpse we get into each one’s childhood memories). But “White Trash,” while it brings up the class differences, doesn’t explore it too deeply.

As the episode opens, there’s a heat wave in Philly, which gets the Gang itching for a dip in one of Philadelphia’s three pools, the first being at the local Country Club (which seems odd that they haven’t been banned from it yet).

Mac and Charlie show up, a six-pack and Charlie’s adorable little inflatable fish in tow, only to be rejected for not being members, and when they ask how to become members, are told that the Club’s already at capacity.

Back at the bar, they pitch a plan for fixing up one of the dilapidated old pools of their youth to Frank, who isn’t interested, while Dee and Dennis maintain that real reason the Country Club wouldn’t take M&C is because they’re white trash (hence the title).

Mac and Charlie head to the fixer-upper pool while Dee and Dennis try their luck at the Country Club…and meet pretty much the same response as Mac and Charlie. Crestfallen, they hit up the public pool, which is a massive step down (“They’re wearing sneakers in the pool!”), complete with broken glass, children throwing rocks, and Frank’s pool game of “Grease the Watermelon” (I also like how Frank borrows a towel from one bather by letting him take a bite from his hotdog).

The episode opens with Mac and Charlie calling in to a local radio station to correctly answer a question about the Philadelphia Flyers for chance to score two VIP tickets to the station’s private beach house. Pulling the answer out of his ass at the last possible second, Mac now has to score a goal from the center of the rink and in front of several-thousand Flyers fans.

Back at the bar, Frank’s taken to recorded the “Jibba-Jabba-Jibba-Jabba” banter of Dennis and Dee, namely because he likes listening to it when he’s driving. Dennis and Dee get the idea to do their own podcast and set up an impromptu recording studio in the back room but get stuck on their first topic (and Frank’s constant cracker munching).

The dead air spurs Frank to bring in his first special surprise guest, the ever-devolving Rickety Cricket (David Hornsby), his latest ailment being a speech impediment brought on by a throat infection from when Frank hit him with a trash can. (I almost forgot that actually happened.)

Cricket talks about the homeless situation in Philly (and makes some alarming suggestions about his current occupation as…uh…”dog prostitute”?), but the discussion quickly devolves into a barrage of insults (“Ugly Homeless Bitch!”) between Cricket and Dee.