'Dance Moms' Is Bigger Than Ever

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Today in show business news: Too many of you are watching Dance Moms, Joseph Gordon-Levitt goes after another super hero role, and MTV teases us with more Buckwild.

America. What is wrong with us? Here we are in a new year, thinking we're doing OK, things changing, getting better, and then this: Dance Moms, Lifetime's reality show about a mean woman torturing children, made its third season debut last night and had the highest ratings in the show's history. Mmhm. Nearly 3 million people tuned in, meaning 3 million among us decided to sully this bright shiny new year by giving in to Abby Lee Miller and her child-debasing ways. How dare you. And how dare the rest of us let this happen. We've gone and ruined another year and it's only two days old. Now we have to wait for 2014 to try again, when we'll hopefully at least last until February before people start bitching about the Olympics and ruin another perfectly good year. Oh well. Guess we can all watch Dance Moms now, at least. Nothing to lose at this point. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Actorly hunk Joseph Gordon-Levitt is now in the running for the sought-after lead role in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, competing with the likes of Joel Edgerton, Jack Huston, Lee Pace, Jim Sturgess, Eddie Redmayne, and, bizarrely, Zachary Levi. Yes, that whole handsome cosmopolitan list and then Chuck from Chuck. British, Australian, and Handsome-American, and then Chuckles, from NBC's The Chuck. Strange work, casting director. Strange work indeed. And who is this most desired character? He is described as such: "Quill leads a group of alien superheros who team to protect the solar system from an evil alien race." So it's The Avengers with aliens. More aliens than Thor, anyway. It's kind of like The Green Lantern, with all those aliens and whatnot, but hopefully it is much better than that movie, which felt like it was made begrudgingly by prisoners. A lot of the movie's success will of course hinge on who is cast in the lead, so Marvel had better choose wisely. And by wisely, we mean of course they must and should hire Chuck. Always Chuck. Forever Chuck. [Deadline]

Are you gettin' real 'cited-like about tomorrow's big fancy pree-meer of MTV's Buckwild, the network's Appalachian answer to the end of Jersey Shore? Well here's somethin' to tide you over while you wait. It's a clip in which two of the enterprising young West Virginia lads make an impromptu swimming pool out of some plastic tarp, a coupla mattresses, and a big ol' dump truck. Everyone then does big fun flips off the dang roof and a grand ol' time is had by all. This show looks kinda sweet, don't it? What we've seen so far, minus some light drinking and fighting, more resembles the Roloffs than the guido-monsters of Seaside Heights. So we are cautiously optimistic about this show in a strange way. Of course we will very likely soon be disappointed and embittered, dismayed by the depths cast and crew were willing to travel to, but right now it looks like a friendly little thing. Can't wait to find out how wrong we are tomorrow night. [Entertainment Weekly]

I know you were worried about Jerry O'Connell last week when it was announced that his Munsters update Mockingbird Lane was officially dead at NBC, but fret no longer. He got himself another job, over at CBS. He'll be starring in an upcoming sitcom pilot from a How I Met Your Mother producer. The show is about "twentysomething Carter (Chris Smith), who finds camaraderie living among three more experienced men — Gil (Kal Penn), Frank (Tony Shalhoub) and Stuart (Jerry O’Connell) — he meets in a short-term rental complex." So... It's also a series about scary old monsters living in a haunted house? Great! See, the universe has a sense of balance, nature evens itself out. Jerry O'Connell can't be on one fiendish show about a bunch of ghouls? Well, he'll eventually wind up on another. It is the way of the world. Shanti. [Deadline]

Here is a trailer for Dead Man Down, a revenge-ish thriller starring Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace, and Terrence Howard. The movie is directed by Rapace's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev, so it seems we might be in for some more arbitrary and prurient violence. Terrific. It's the season for that, after all.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.