Hm, is it just me or does How I Met Your Mother feel the need to compete with all the Neil Patrick Harris debauchery we’re being promised in the new Harold and Kumar movie?

Tonight’s episode sees Barney looking at 64 women he wronged to see which one would have the most reason to be currently sabotaging his love life. Fingers crossed, usually the only thing better on HIMYM than a Barney episode is a Robin Sparkles episode…

Here’s a preview clip of tonight’s episode:

The idea of Countdown with Keith Olbermann celebrating an anniversary is a mixed idea since the series was a follow up to Olbermann’s Countdown to Iraq and, thus Countdown’s fifth anniversary also, sadly, indicates that we’ve been stuck in that war for the same amount of time.

Still, we do get to see Olbermann on the mothership once more, as tonight sees a special Sunday edition of Countdown.

Wow, with the Iraq war just passing it’s fifth anniversary BBC America’s Newsnight has filmed an interview with “Curveball”, the key source who was vital to making the case of WMD in Iraq, even thought German intelligence had determined him an unreliable source. This was never a “get” I imagined any of the newsmagazines pursuing… or even booking so I’m definitely seeing how this is handled.

Last week, I mentioned that Reaper would be introducing Michael Ian Black and Ken Marino as a gay demon couple who live next to the show’s leading guy. Having seen the episode (thanks, not to my temperamental DVR but iTunes) I can’t wait to see them return in tonight’s episode. I could forget that the rest of the show is pretty watchable because Black and Marino make a positively adorable couple.

It’ll be interesting to see where they go from last night’s episode, as well as how they fit into the show’s mythology. In the meantime, I get the feeling there’s someone writing Torchwood/Reaper fanfic, already.

• Mixed emotions dept: Britney Spears’ appearance on How I Met Your Mother gave the show an all-time high in the 18-49 demo. I’m thrilled the series got the eyeballs, but, as someone who dislikes stunt casting, I’m disappointed in audiences who tuned in just to see Spears. (Sigh and now I have a Britney Spears tag.)
• Okay this makes me adore John Mayer (my guilty enjoyment of his first album aside) — cute and a dry sense of humor?
• It looks like Scrubs is closer to making a network switch, it’d be nice to see Scrubs go down the path that Newsradio almost made, but missed.
• You can listen to the new B-52’s album online. It’s a pretty solid album.
• Fox’s Jezebel James is already gone. I checked out ten minutes of this one, turned to The Spouse and said, “So this is what Gilmore Girls would have been like if it were completely miscast.” For a show that sounded so promising on paper, I’m not sad to see it go.

A bit of Googling found me this Tracey Ullman Q&A, and Tracey’s comments about the news media were too funny to share:

I’m an MSNBC junkie. I love watching Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann and Tucker Carlson. They’re hilarious. I’d like to [parody] Tucker Carlson. I’d love to show the moment when he was a kid and his big cousins came over and beat him up as he was wearing his bowtie. I’d like to find the cousin who beat him up and say: “Well done, man.”

Yes, apparently even the usually-jovial Ullman finds the idea of violence against Tucker Carlson funny.

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman comes up with an interesting way to look at this current era, dubbing it the age of the Anti-Cassanda:

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

And, sadly, not only is that a spot-on assessment of things, it’s a pretty descriptive term. Sigh.

Okay, so I heard about MTV’s sketch comedy show Human Giant before but I totally forgot the show’s name in between reading about it and heading to the DVR to set it to be recorded and missed the first season.

However, a second season has started and, somehow, the name rung a bell and I decided to check this one out. I’m glad I did, this show is bringing back fond memories of the genius of The State for me. Here’s a very crude sketch about internet fame (seriously, I’m warning you about the crudeness, it’s very funny but it’s also more than a bit ewwww).

Tonight the ABC Family series Greek returns (I refuse to spell it with sigmas) with its “spring premiere” (why not just call it a second season?) While this series stumbles in many areas, it’s mix of soapy scandal, light comedy with the discovery of depth can be addictive. Greek hasn’t shown Gossip Girl levels of depth so far, yet (the boring, blandly attractive guy still has not shown any hidden deepness, unlike on Gossip Girl) but with characters like Calvin, a gay African-American student — one of a very small number of fictional gay men of color on television — who comes from ba background of privilege and understands that; Dale, a conservative evangelical engineering student who’s is portrayed as more than a nutjob; and Ashliegh, who seemed to be seeing the problem with giving in to pressure to just be pretty and pleasant.

Greek isn’t without problems, particularly when it comes to its female characters, who seem to spend most of their time focused on being the alpha female or fighting over men. Still, the moments that work really work and the female characters did get (slightly) smarter as the season went on. While I’m mostly tuning in for Calvin, I’m interested in seeing if the female characters become more interesting.

Futurama fans finally get to see their show return to television tonight as Bender’s Big Score debuts on Comedy Central tonight. I’d try to tell you about it but the synopses I’ve read make it sound like this one is pretty packed on plot, pop culture satires, a plethora of guest-stars (including Al Gore) as well as the jaded social commentary the show is known for.