No Dick Clark, Carson Daly, Ryan Seacrest, Anderson Cooper, Kathy Griffin, or Miley Cyrus for me tonight on New Year’s Eve. I’m skipping all those tedious, ultimately depressing leading-up-to-midnight shows and spending time with more fun, imaginative people. On the G4 network this evening, there’s a rerun of Monday’s Attack of the Show! featuring, its website says, “the most unforgettable Olivia Munn moments.” Munn, if you don’t know, co-hosts the video/gaming/tech round-up show with Kevin Pereira. Hired initially, perhaps, to give the fan-boy viewership someone to drool over, Munn long ago established herself as the Lucille Ball of the iPhone generation, a wacky comic performer happy to do everything from dressing up in a Wonder Woman or Princess Leia costume to dancing with a dead salmon, and more than a good sport about the jokes the producers come up with about her chest.

As clip-shows go, this one’s aces, and there’s also a new edition of Attack! tonight, in which Olivia and Kevin train to compete on Ninja Warrior. I’m betting that’ll be way better than watching the Fox network’s New Year’s Eve show hosted by Spike Feresten and Hole In The Wall host Mark Thompson (really? Spike Feresten and Mark Thompson?? why doesn’t Fox just air a couple of hours of footage of someone getting his spleen removed?).

And before and after Munn-time, you can also revel in the Sci Fi network’s annual Twilight Zone marathon, which is going on right now and will continue through New Year’s day. Tonight there are classics including “To Serve Man,” the 1962 episode about an alien invasion which follows, says rumbly-voiced host Rod Serling, “the cycle of going from dust to dessert.” I won’t spoil the ending. Happy new year.

When it comes to MTV reality shows, it’s crucial that the narrative structure imposed on them be solid, because the personalities they’re built around are less than fly-weight. Brody Jenner was immediately doomed in last night’s premiere of Bromance, stuck in a bro-schmo show whose pathetic premise is half-Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, half-The Pick-up Artist. Choosing from nine guys to become his new object of bromance, when you’ve already got a couple of perfectly good, creepy-leech “friends,” Frankie and Sleazy T? Who wants to watch desperate, sweaty losers suck up to Brody, when I assume most Brody fans would have been content to watch an hour of wealthy, sweaty loser Brody lowering and raising himself from his jacuzzi (how many times did they replay Brody easing in and out of that hot-tub last night?). I’ve got nothing against Brody–he’s clearly the kind of rich, good-looking lunkhead lots of Americans want to gaze upon–but it’s too bad he doesn’t have the brains to have objected to the concept of his show, because Bromance is the slow-dance of reality programming. (Oh, and who’s one of the producers? That Momma’s Boy, Ryan Seacrest. Everything this guy touches turns to tedious slime, doesn’t it?)

By contrast, The Hills spin-off The City had the good sense to surround doe-eyed, slack-jawed Whitney Port with the soft-glow lighting and swoony-romance pop music that makes watching Hills nonentities like Lauren and Heidi such a decadent dream. I was happy to see glimpses of people who have accomplished something in the world–and here I’m talking about Whitney’s new boss, Diane von Furstenberg, and Whitney’s old boss, Kelly Cutrone. (Really, I’d watch a Kelly Cutrone series–such blunt common sense! such tough friendliness!–but I suppose she’s considered too “old” for the idiot-demo MTV craves.) And I’ll watch The City again, to have another good laugh at that fascinatingly appalling phony Olivia, the show’s designated bitch-villain, but actually a common Manhattan type: the nouveau-riche climber. See? There’s a story, a plot, a narrative to follow in The City: Will Whitney’s blank-slate “goodness” defeat Olivia’s vivid “badness”? And all Bromance has going for it is Brody Jenner’s toilet-seat ethics, the “can-fessional.” Yuk.

Was either of these shows worth your time last night? And if so: What did you think of Bromance? Of The City? Would you watch either or both again?

More on The City:

The City premiere: Hits and misses

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/12/the-city.html

We’re hitting the saggy part of the holiday season, that hammock between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when as a TV watcher, even your favorite cable channel is starting to get tedious (all those marathons of Top Chef and Trading Spouses and Girlfriends). Me, I am happy it’s Saturday because that means Fox is forced to show back-to-back episodes of Cops. In recent years, Fox has tried to get a bit game-show-educational (Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?) and a bit foodie (Kitchen Nightmares), and ignoring its original core shows like Cops.

Cops is tops. Whether we’re in the squad car with law-enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Florida, or in Portland, Oregon, as we are in tonight’s two reruns, you know there’s going to be a few dandy car chases, a couple of perps running like hell with their pants falling down, and more than one blasted-out-of-his-skull poor soul screaming something like, “Why’re you cuffing me? My skanky sister-in-law put that meth in my pocket!”

Cops is justice in action; it has been since 1989. Yes, I often have sympathy for the poor underclass that is pursued with greater vigor than white-collar criminals who are ripping off society for much more money. But I also have great admiration for the men and women in blue who have to drive into a crime scene with no idea what they’re going to confront, and do their best, most often using only their brains and some stern commands. And the occasional billyclub. I do like it when some bad guy makes a violent move and a billyclub must be applied with quick force. Does this make me a bad person?

First, thanks to all of you who responded to my Help A Guy Enjoy Bones More post yesterday. I received a lot of solid tips on episodes, seasons, and key character traits that are invaluable in my ongoing research into Bonesology 101. So, a tip of my wooly cap to all of you who wrote in!

Now, then: Merry Christmas! And what better way to celebrate, after the presents are unwrapped and copious amounts of food and grog are consumed, than to scan the prime-time listings and see that Comedy Central is providing just the right 8-11 p.m. programming block of oddity this evening.

First, there’s Bad Santa (8-10 pm, EST), the 2003 dark comedy starring Billy Bob Thornton as a grumpy, frowsy, cynical, profane, and alcoholic department-store Santa. It is, of course, the saga of Thornton’s Willie and his little-person pal Marcus (Tony Cox, in a finely calibrated performance of great comic hostility), along with tip-top performances from Cloris Leachman and the late John Ritter and Bernie Mac. (Special music note: it’s not too late to run out and get the new release by Billy Bob Thornton’s band The Boxmasters, Christmas Cheer: cool Yule tunes.) If you ever watch/listen to the DVD commentary for Bad Santa, you’ll hear director Terry Zwigoff apologize publicly for not giving the lovely Lauren Graham much of a role to play, but that doesn’t prevent Bad Santa from being a superb achievement in low-down comedy. (Warning: this clip has bad language as well as a bad Santa.)

And speaking of comedy, if you’re anything like me (and are you, really? It will be interesting to see, as this blog proceeds), you can get behind a little ventriloquism courtesy of Jeff Dunham and his Very Special Christmas Special
(10-11 pm EST). I approach people who make wooden dummies talk on two levels: with leftover childhood wonder that anyone is able to perform this way, and with grown-up goof-on-it campiness that a ventriloquist can still be popular in the 21st century.

Either way, Dunham is an excellent example of this much-maligned profession: he’s a smooth, even slick, ventriloquist, and he’s got a bunch of dummies, each infused by Dunham with fully formed personalities. The best of them is Walter, whose constantly sour mood is just the thing if you’ve reached your limit of Christmas cheer.

Happy viewing!

One of the best reasons to watch late-night TV occurs tonight, as The Late Show with David Letterman welcomes an annual guest, comedian Jay Thomas, who sits down with Dave to tell his terrific “Lone Ranger” anecdote (what? you mean you’ve never heard it?) and then knocks a pizza off the top of a Christmas tree set up in the studio–with a football (Dave takes his jacket off and joins in. If you want to see a riotous example from an earlier year, click here.) Also, singer Darlene Love belts through her classic, ’60s-girl-group, always-brings-the-house-down performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” And as if that wasn’t enough, tonight’s third guest is Mickey Rourke, fresh from his comeback in “The Wrestler” and always a completely unpredictable talk-show guest. Do I have to program your DVR for you???