What do you think a younger version of Sex and the City produced by Judd Apatow would look like? Well for one, the annoying and boring Miranda wouldn't be one of the friends...

Tags: 30 Seconds to Fame, Amy Acker, Christine Taylor, CNN, Donald Faison, Fox, Girls, Intervention, Judd Apatow, Kristen Johnston, Lena Dunham, Oprah Winfrey, Piers Morgan, Relapse, Ted Haggard: Scandalous, TLC, TV Land

Like any good American and New Yorker, I watched last night's election coverage in a bar. The particular bar I was in had about 12 giant TV screens tuned to Fox, CNN and MSNBC, so I got a pretty well-rounded exposure to the coverage, and to several glasses of something called a "Blue State Shooter," which was in a pilsner glass, so it technically was not a shooter, but that's not the point of this post. My point is that CNN had the most entertaining coverage, for the following three reasons: 1) They had Anderson Cooper, who is America's sweetheart (also, it may have been the Blue State Shooters playing tricks on my eyes, but I swore I noticed for the first time that Andy is shorter than Wolf Blitzer, which just blew my mind all apart), 2) Paul Begala is the funniest man on television and I'm not exaggerating, and 3) THEY HAD HOLOGRAMS LIKE IN STAR WARS! I'm serious! It was like a less sad version of when Superman would get messages from his dead parents in the Fortress of Solitude! It was like if Kirk and Bones spontaneously started talking about the 2008 election when they came back from a mission!

Tags: Anderson Cooper, CNN, Paul Begala, video, will.i.am.

Doesn't it seem like everything we've been hearing lately about the news business makes it seem really grim and depressing and makes you question the validity, accuracy, and straight-up newsworthiness of whatever stories actually do somehow trickle down to you? How budgets are being cut all over the place even as the sheer volume of coverage available just keeps going up? And how the internet keeps making inroads into what used to be the domain of real, trained journalists? Well, CNN just made things worse.

Tags: budgets, bummers, cnn