Ah, the girl-focused love triangle. For generations, male and female audiences alike have lived for watching two dudes fight over a woman, and oftentimes it can seem like a choice between the lesser of two jerks. Given the option, we would have loved to see these popular heroines — from Greek mythology to ’90s TV — embrace singledom instead.

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1. Slashfilm got an early look at Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises prologue, and discovered that the finished film will have a whopping 50 minutes of IMAX shot-and-projected footage. Here’s a spoiler-free recap.

2. This could be interesting: Spike Lee has signed on to direct Eddie Murphy in a new HBO biopic about former Washington DC mayor Marion Berry — aka the man once caught smoking crack in a hotel room full of prostitutes. John Ridley (Red Tails, Da Brick) is on board to pen the script. [via THR]

3. A group of Occupy Wall Street protestors took over the set of Law & Order: SVU last night; the show was shooting an episode that was centered around a fake encampment in Foley Square. “They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: they rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake De Groot told Mother Jones. “How could we not go and take it?” [via TV Squad]

4. “If Columbine is reenacted or some shit, that’s gonna be on my f*cking head. Yeah, it’ll be my fault, just like it was Em’s and Marilyn’s and fucking Slipknot’s and all them motherf*ckers.” — Tyler, the Creator is talking about Columbine again.

5. Pharrell Williams and famed composer Hans Zimmer have been named the musical consultants for this year’s Academy Awards; neither of them have worked on the show in the past. [via THR]

Bonus Buzz: Star Wars-Inspired ‘Lost’ Posters

Are you totally overwhelmed by the number of projects J.J. Abrams has going? Earlier this year, he channeled ’80s Steve Spielberg with Super 8. And there’s the new Mission: Impossible, which comes out later this month, and the recently announced Star Trek sequel. On TV, he’s got Person of Interest, which is doing well in its first season. And now, we’ve got a teaser for Alcatraz, the sci-fi/adventure/cop drama that will premiere on Fox in January. As Vulture points out, the preview’s 30 seconds are packed with trailer clichés. Most of all, we’re worried that Alcatraz is going to be a watered-down version of Lost – with an island, a mysterious, action-catalyzing disaster, hints of time travel wonkiness, a spooky soundtrack, and even a familiar close-up of a worried Jorge Garcia (who will apparently play a geek on this show, too). It’s obviously too soon to render an opinion, and any Abrams production merits a chance, but we are starting to wonder whether the über-producer needs to slow down a bit. Watch the teaser and decide for yourself after the jump. Read More »

It’s hard to wrap up a years-long TV series, with all of its mysteries, questions, and unresolved narratives, in a single episode. Fans will need you to help them cope with the separation, and critics will watch your every move, looking to pick out the one loose end you forgot to tie up. But the 10 TV finales we list below transcended the average tear-jerking resolution. Whether deliberately planned endings or simply the unintentional result of sudden cancellations, these last episodes go above and beyond when it comes to leaving us in the dark, crushing our dreams, and preparing America’s children for years of psychiatric therapy. Browse through our list of happily never afters and tell us which cliff-hanging, hope-sucking shows you’d add in the comments.

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Here at Flavorpill, we can hardly wait for Ringer, the new TV series on the CW that has Sarah Michelle Gellar playing the dual role of estranged twins who are both entangled in high-stakes intrigue. In our anticipation of the show’s premiere tomorrow night, we started thinking about other memorable twins — both real and fictional — in pop culture. Our top 10 are after the jump; add yours in the comments.

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We’ll try not to be too spoiler-y about this, but if you don’t want to hear anything about the most recent episode of True Blood, you’ll want to skip the next paragraph.

Now that we have that out of the way — Sunday’s True Blood sure ended on a cliffhanger, didn’t it? We’ll have to wait until next week to learn whether one of favorite characters really does bite the dust. But in the mean time, all that fretting made us think about characters we loved who were cut from their show too soon. Our top ten are after the jump; add yours in the comments.

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Well, the news (and non-news!) from Comic-Con just keeps rolling in. One of our favorite tidbits so far comes from the Lost: One Year Later panel, which had creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse claiming that they could shut up viewers who suspected they were making up the show as the went along with the “smoking gun” — a deleted scene from the Season 1 finale that would prove they had their mythology in order years before reality split and everybody went to heaven. Of course, the whole presentation (which even involved Stormtroopers because, you know, it was Comic-Con) was a joke, which Nerd Bastards reports was recently shot by Lost director Jack Bender on the Disney backlot. But it was a well-executed one, with Lindelof and Cuse proving they have a good sense of humor about their haters. Watch the three-minute video and learn the Man in Black’s name after the jump.

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If you happened to be paying attention to Twitter around 11pm Sunday night, then it won’t be a surprise to you that viewers were tremendously frustrated with the way the first season of AMC’s The Killing ended. Although initially among the most promising new series of the year, it’s been trying audiences’ patience with its sloppy story line and poor character development for several episodes. In fact, when Nina Shen Rastogi at Slate graphed critics’ assessments as the season progressed, she discovered a pronounced downward trend. The Killing‘s precipitous plummet got us thinking about other shows that started out great but eventually lost steam. Our list of ten TV series that went bad is after the jump.

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Today at Flavorpill, we got a first look at Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator, his upcoming Larry Charles comedy which we didn’t realize is based on a romance novel by Saddam Hussein. We were excited to hear that Disney has signed on Lost executive producer Damon Lindelof to write and produce a mysterious science fiction project called 1952, but we wanted some more details about the film. We watched John Carpenter’s video introduction to They Live, which is playing tonight at a special screening at the Alamo Drafthouse. We wondered if you get in more trouble at school for your penis prank when the results show up on Google Earth for the next two years. We traveled back in time to Brooklyn in the summer of 1974 thanks to this living wall outside of the National Gallery in London that was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s A Wheatfield, With Cypresses. We searched for clues about the upcoming season of Breaking Bad in this newly-released promo poster. And finally, we laughed out loud as Sean Penn channeled his Fast Times character Jeff Spicoli in this clip from the 2011 Guys Choice Awards.

This week, the long-running WB-turned-CW drama Smallville airs its two-hour series finale. No doubt the most anticipated moment of the episode will be the return of Michael Rosenbaum reprising his role as Lex Luthor. The actor, who left the series in 2008, finally decided to come back due to the intense outcry of fans, who lobbied long and hard for the bald villain to bid adieu before Clark Kent flew off the airwaves forever. There are a variety of reasons why actors return to shows they had departed, including wrapping up storylines and honoring the series that launched them into stardom. Here is a look back on other actors who came back for the swan songs of their respective series. (Needless to say, there are spoilers ahead.)

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