Fourth Season for White Collar, It’s Official for Breaking In

Still got it.

USA has ordered a fourth season for White Collar, bringing the show back for another 16 episodes in 2012. The show comes back this winter with the final six episodes of its third season. White Collar‘s ratings have been pretty steady since around the middle of its first season. This leaves Covert Affairs as USA’s only veteran show to still be waiting on a renewal, incidentally.

Also, Fox made it official today and renewed Breaking In for the 13-episode second season we heard about yesterday. Kevin Reilly said some nice things about it and expressed a lot of confidence in the show they canceled three months ago, so take that for what it’s worth.

News Roundup: New Shows, Returning Shows, Annoying Shows

We like ourselves, no matter what you think.

Hello, all. Here’s a few news items for your perusal today:

• Entourage boss Doug Elin apparently doesn’t care what you think about the show’s final season. Also, he says the show wasn’t canceled; he just thought it was time to stop.
• Vulture uses One Day as a reason to look at how frustrating the audience has become the new fad of highbrow entertainment, with a bonus dig at The Killing.
• USA has released the official winter return dates for Covert Affairs: Annie and the gang will be back Nov. 1 for six more anticlimactic spy stories, two days before Burn Notice starts its winter run. Also, the end of White Collar‘s third season won’t be airing until January 2012.
• Shawn Ryan is one of those guys who’s consistently good at turning out television that’s almost too clever to work on TV, so get this: His latest project, The Last Resort, apparently centers around the crew a nuclear submarine who occupy a NATO outpost and declare independence. The project is only at the pilot stage, but the idea’s just too cool not to mention.

News Roundup: Movie Marketing, the Playboy Brand, Spy Tweets!

 

Whatever could it be?

Hello, and happy Monday. Here’s a hint at what was happening while you were out enjoying your fine summer weekend:

• Deadline‘s Mike Fleming wonders if Super 8‘s strong opening weekend might relate to J.J. Abrams’ hands-on approach to marketing. Fleming specifically pegs the promos’ secrecy, which I think half misses the point. I never had any trouble figuring out what the movie was about, but the approach of hiding most of the action (and the monster) tracks well with how the movie itself played out, so you got a nice preview of what the experience would be like without knowing the details. Now, that’s exactly how previews ought to work, and it makes perfect sense that letting a director plan the marketing would enhance the effect.
• I’m pretty sure NBC knows that The Playboy Club is the kind of show that’s way more likely to generate headlines than viewers. So if a conservative studio affiliate in Utah wants to ban it for unspecified inappropriate content, then probably all the better.
• Covert Affairs is getting into the online supplemental game with an Auggie-centered tweetcast, which gave AOL TV occasion to talk up Christopher Gorham.
• Also in USA news, White Collar creator Jeff Eastin talked to TVLine about some of the twists ahead for Peter and Neal this season.

News Roundup: The More Things Change

It's all perfectly simple, really.

Good afternoon, kind readers. Let’s take a look at the stories of summer.

• Variety got someone over at Community to write us an entire column for us in which Abed handicaps the Emmys. Seriously. Read it.
• THR sat down with Covert Affairs creators Matt Corman and Chris Ord for a Q&A ahead of the show’s new season. Also, Piper Perabo and White Collar‘s Matt Bomer hinted on Today that a crossover might be in the works for the upcoming season.
• NBC will be keeping the Olympics for a while longer: Despite a bidding war with Fox and Disney, Comcast won the rights to keep showing the Games through 2020.
• After a fun couple weeks of totally unverified reports, we finally got official confirmation that Cheryl Cole is out of The X Factor, which is only really news insofar as it freed up Simon Cowell to talk about it a bit. Plus, THR is reporting that Cole may end up on a British version of The Voice.
• Would you like to see even more Green Lantern footage? Cinema Blend can help you with that, with a new eight-minute clip of Hal Jordan fighting Parallax. It’s a good thing this movie’s coming out next week; else they might end up releasing so many previews that we could piece the whole thing together from the clips.