TVSquad

Fantasy football is a tricky thing. You either love it or you hate it and that largely depends on whether you're good or bad at it. For the most part, the same can be said about FX's newest comedy The League. When it's good, it is good, but when it's bad... well, you get the picture.

The show, which premieres tomorrow night, Thursday 10/29, at 10:30 p.m. after It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is FX's first solid attempt to produce a lasting companion piece to Sunny and, given some of its predecessors (like Starved or Testees), it'd be easy to write The League off. But, like a two-minute drill that gradually picks up steam, The League might actually go... all... the... way.

OK -- no more football metaphors.

FX has announced a couple of interesting new additions to its slate of comedies - The League, about a fantasy football league, and Louie, an autobiographical sitcom starring Louis C.K. (Variety broke the news Wednesday). The League features some talented comedians, namely Paul Scheer (from Human Giant), Nick Kroll, and Jon Lajoie. But it's Louie that I'm most interested in.

Louis C.K. is, hands down, the funniest and most productive comedian working in America today. He has taped his third stand-up special in three years, called Hilarious, which is set to come out later this year or early next year. I've seen him perform the material for it, and it's just as funny as the first two. And he's already dropped most of that material in favor of a new hour of material intended for another special. That's a tremendous pace for any stand-up comedian. George Carlin, the guy who inspired C.K. to do this, is the only other comic I can think of to keep to a schedule like that.

With Arrested Development, Mitchell Hurwitz went through the ringer with critical support, winning awards, and grassroots campaigns to convince Fox to keep the show on the air that ultimately failed. So what does Hurwitz do for a follow-up? He takes some of the same cast (Will Arnett, Jason Bateman), goes back to the same network (Fox), and back to an idea he had before Arrested hit the airwaves.

The new show is Sit Down, Shut Up, an animated series that debuts April 19th at 8:30 PM, in between The Simpsons and Family Guy.

"It's funny, this is a show that I actually wrote in the year 2000, and it was an adaptation of a live-action show from Australia," Hurwitz said in a recent conference call. "I kind of kept it in the drawer for a long time, and finally brought it out, mostly because I needed money, which - I enjoy money, and I also use it for all sorts of different things in my life, but mostly for food and shelter."

ABC is not showing the retooled and reshot Cavemen to TV critics.

Now, this could be a strategy, a la CBS and Kid Nation, to not show the pilot of a show that has been savaged by critics and the industry, to create buzz, or it could be a matter of not showing it to critics because it's just bad, like when movie studios don't let movie critics screen a bad film before it opens on a Friday.

Tonight marks the beginning of my favorite time of the year. The temperature has gone down to a tolerable degree here in L.A, the leaves are turning brown, people are starting to decorate their houses for the holidays and, most importantly, the new fall season is beginning.

Just like a kid on Christmas Eve, I await the arrival of the new fall shows with giddy excitement. I was lucky enough to see some of them already, but there are still plenty to look forward to.

If you've seen Blue Collar TV or any of the Blue Collar movies, you know the comedians always end the night by getting on stage together and riffing.

At Bonaroo, comedians David Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development), Aziz Ansari (Human Giant) and Nick Kroll (Cavemen, Human Giant, Best Week Ever) did their own version of the "old pals sitting on stools and shootin' the breeze" act with their list of criteria to determine whether or not you're a "deadneck" -- which, as far as I can tell, means a racist hippie of some sort.