When the nominations for the 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards are announced at 5:35 a.m. on Thursday July 18, a big change will be the number of categories honoring interactive TV. From Variety awards editor Jon Weisman‘s Monday item:

Chief among the changes is the establishment of a competitive award for outstanding interactive program, saluting either a standalone experience or one that serves as a companion to a TV program. In the Emmy context, “interactive” denotes anything that encourages proactive engagement from the audience — not to be confused with video content delivered via broadband, such as Netflix’s House of Cards.

This category can have zero or multiple awards as determined by the Academy’s 12-year-old interactive media peer group, which currently counts 627 members. The other new interactive TV awards categories cover multi-platform storytelling and visual experience/visual design, to go along with the existing brackets of original interactive program (not tied to an existing TV show) and social TV experience.

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For Episode 2 of By the Way: In Conversation with Jeff Garlin, the talented actor-writer-host cues up the conversation he had with Lena Dunham at Largo right after the 2012 Prime Time Emmy Awards. (He’s up to eight episodes now, the latest being Conan O’Brien.)

It was during that crazy awards weekend crush that Garlin met Dunham for the first time in person. And it was also, at a Friday night bash catered by the restaurant Animal, that his guest found herself gorging on some cliched fried chicken:

“I was so happy, and then I had this thought where, ‘So here I am at this party, fulfilling everyone’s expectations of what they’d see me doing at a party, just f*cking eating everything!’ I was so bummed.”

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We each mourn the death of Newsweek in our own way. For Conan O’Brien, that meant taking a look at 10 improbable titles that somehow outlasted the once great news magazine.

To be fair, Racing Pigeon Pictorial International never ran a creepy, computer-generated image of an aging Princess Diana walking alongside the daughter-in-law she never met.

A slideshow of the magazines profiled can be viewed here.

To playfully set the stage for this year’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue, the folks at People are taking product placement to a whole new level. The night before the official announcement on November 14 of the 2012 SMA recipient, the storyline of ABC sitcom Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23 will be all about the determination of this year’s honoree:

June (Dreama Walker) is obsessed with People magazine’s annual Sexiest Man Alive issue, though Chloe (Krysten Ritter) tells her she shouldn’t be such a sheep and let others dictate what’s hot and sexy. To prove her point, she swoops into the People offices in an attempt to coerce them to feature James Van Der Beek on this year’s SMA cover. James is thrilled by the prospect, and now June suddenly finds him irresistibly attractive.

“This just seemed like the perfect sitcom to do this with,” People executive editor Liz Sporkin tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “Especially since James Van Der Beek sends himself up every week on the show and he was a hot guy on Dawson’s Creek.” Returning the synergistic favor, People will have Van Der Beek pen for the 2012 SMA issue the latest edition of companion column “If I Were Sexiest Man Alive.”

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Rising comedian Pete Holmes has yet another reason to celebrate as he heads to Montreal this week for the prestigious Just For Laughs festival. According to an exclusive item on Vulture, TBS has given the go-ahead for a half-hour late night pilot starring Holmes, to be produced by Conan O’Brien’s Conaco.

From Margaret Lyons’ report:

Holmes definitely shares Conan’s goofy gregariousness, though he skews cynical where Conan skews silly. The show starts filming its pilot mid-August, but there’s no word yet on when TBS would have to render a final decision.

Last year, Holmes was voted one of Variety’s Top Ten Comics to Watch. This guy is indeed all over the map, drawing cartoons for The New Yorker, voicing those annoying e*trade baby commercials, contributing to collegehumor.com and writing episodes of FOX’s I Hate My Teenage Daughter.

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The last time Conan O’Brien dropped in on David Letterman, Y2K was topical monologue material. In the intervening years, the prize they both coveted also slipped right through O’Brien’s fingers.

The red-haired one did not sound entirely convincing when he insisted (at the top of the clip below) that he is 100% happy at his new TBS home. He then told a funny story about how, the Monday after the Friday of his last Tonight Show broadcast, he was forced to convene his staff at a Marie Callender’s. O’Brien located the restaurant in Burbank, but it’s actually Toluca Lake.

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With some free time on his hands, Metta World Peace finally sat down with Conan O’Brien Monday night.

The Los Angeles Lakers forward had to cancel a scheduled appearance last month following his elbow incident with Oklahoma City guard James Harden.

With his seven-game suspension winding down, World Peace admitted to O’Brien that he hasn’t called Harden to apologize but spoke with “third parties” to make sure he was OK.

Playoffs or no playoffs, World Peace should have picked up the phone by now to say, “I’m sorry.” But that’s Metta being Metta, I guess.

Ron Burgundy made the trip up north from San Diego to Burbank today to announce that an Anchorman sequel is in the works. He also took the time to make reference to his “turgid penis” and to suggest Conan O’Brien get immediate plastic surgery. Good times.

Behold the diametrical opposite to all that annual “it’s an honor just to be nominated” nonsense.

In a scathing YouTube video, Conan O’Brien‘s canine correspondent Triumph the Insult Comic Dog rips apart the six nominees for the first-year Golden Collar Awards category of Best Dog in a Television Series. Namely because he isn’t on the list:

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CurbedLA started out the New Year by sharing a great reader tip. Someone pointed them to an SEC filing by Thomas Properties Group, which contained confirmation of a nine million dollar kill fee received by the developer from NBCUniversal.

Too bad Arrested Develpment ran on FOX, rather than NBC. Otherwise, the (still pretty good) headline chosen by CurbedLA would have been utterly perfect. From yesterday’s item:

On December 19, 2011, Thomas Properties Group, Inc. and NBC Universal Media LLC mutually agreed to terminate further work on the MetroStudios@Lankershim property that was planned for the Universal City area of Los Angeles. In light of NBCU’s changing requirements for office and post-production space, the planned MetroStudios@Lankershim project was not considered economically viable at this time.

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