The Emmy nominations are so 24 hours ago. Nobody's declined their nomination yet, so I'm officially declaring this TWoP News an Emmy-free zone. Unless somebody wants to nominate it for something.

I watched the entire hour and a half of Superstars last night and I'm still not sure I get this show. The premise seems to be taking pseudo-celebrities and pairing them with a pro-athlete and then forcing them to do different athletic tasks. This seems simple enough, and it is how the old show worked, but I guess I just expected some sort of twist or ... at the very least something new and different. Maybe we could have seen the sports stars try and train the celebrities, but the problem seems to be that the sports stars are new to many of these tasks too. I can't imagine that Terrell Owens encounters a lot of cargo nets in his football training.

Aside from Greek, I haven't really been hooked on any ABC Family shows (I'm probably just still bitter because they canceled State of Grace like 100 years ago) since Wildfire ended. But I do love gymnastics and anything remotely Olympic related, so I had pretty high (though realistic) hopes for their new offering Make It Or Break It. And it's fine. It's not horrifically bad like that Secret Life of the American Teenager show with the pregnant girl, but it isn't exactly as addictive or clever as Greek.

I get it. The Super Bowl is a blown-out-of-proportion commercial consumergasm, and we should all be better than that. All of that is justified, but as a football fan and die-hard Super Bowl apologist (yes, even this year), I was tasked with coming up with 10 good reasons to sit through the lengthy shillfest. And believe me, there are 10 reasons to watch it. I swear! Read on and I promise to share my hot wings with you.

To be upfront about this, I like watching baseball on TV. It's one of the few non-Olympic sports that I actually find engaging on the small screen and not just in person. I'm a Mets fan by marriage, but I'll watch the local Yankees or the Red Sox since I grew up in New England, or the Orioles, since my dad is a fan. But this World Series match up between the Phillies (whom I am sort of in theory rooting for because they outplayed the Mets in their division and I respect that) and the Tampa Bay Rays (whom I have lost all respect for since they took the word Devil out of their name) is shaping up to be the most tediously boring series ever (people who know real stuff about sports agree!). Unless you live in Philadelphia or Florida, or grew up there, are you at all interested in them? If the Red Sox had made it, I know plenty of people who would have watched, just to see if they'd lose (it's the schadenfreude effect in action).

Just when you thought U.S./U.K. relations were at an all-time high, something like this happens. In a clear violation of the Gladiator Non-Proliferation Treaty, BBC America will be broadcasting the game show Gladiators, the U.K. version of the U.S. hit American Gladiators, to American audiences starting on November 1. Since the return of American Gladiators, the U.S. has been careful not to send them overseas or even point them at anybody, so the threat to send British Gladiators into American homes is being taken quite seriously in Washington. ...Washington D.C., not Washington State. Washington state doesn't really care.

No, HBO hasn't joined the ranks of USA and SciFi in broadcasting the weekly exploits of World Wrestling Entertainment superstars -- the wrestling they're gonna be showing is of the decidedly old-school variety. Their newest drama series, Everybody Hurts, will focus on a family that runs a professional wrestling organization in New York City in the 1970s, back when wrestling was a regional sport, and Andy Kaufman had to go to Memphis to fight Jerry Lawler. Think Hogan Knows Best meets Six Feet Under. It'll be written by The Riches scribe Aaron Blitzstein, who watched regional shows as a child in Baltimore and New York and later did marketing for World Championship Wrestling. (Hopefully, it will be better-written than most WCW storylines. Also, we hope it uses the REM song of the same name as its opening theme.)

This goes against everything I've complained about for the last two weeks, but I actually kind of enjoyed watching beach volleyball last night. Well, at least the final set. The American team, Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser (who have stupid nicknames like the Professor and the Thin Beast) totally dominated the last round and shut out the poor Brazilian guys. It was intense and kind of awesome. I didn't even mind watching the live broadcast until 12:10 in the morning. That is, until Bob Costas popped up to tell me that because the game went so long, our promised coverage of the decathlon (one of the most impressive feats in the Olympics) was getting jettisoned to the wee hours of the morning. But you know, that's how they roll. Two hours of track and field (just sprinting and hurdles), an hour of beach volleyball, an hour of diving and ten minutes of BMX racing, no time for the 20 odd other sports happening. Would it kill them to put in a 20 minute highlight reel of the events on a given day? MSNBC does this update thing, but it is at like 5 in the afternoon when I don't have time to pay attention. A primetime debriefing would be wonderful. Even if they aired it at midnight as a wrap up. It's really too late to do anything about it now, but if they are looking for ideas for the future 2012, that's my suggestion.

Where is the BMX that I was promised at the top of this episode? Not on my TV, unless I blinked and missed it. I thankfully got to catch a little bit of it from the taping that I did in the wee hours of the morning, but I was told there would be primetime coverage and I feel cheated. Also, instead of like 400 hours of soccer or water polo during the day, couldn't they mix it up a little bit? Or, instead of showing the absolutely pointless Gymnastics "gala," (aka encore where people are just doing mini-versions of their routines) how about showing some competition that's still on-going. This is about the competition, not the spectacle, isn't it? I sometimes forget.

Is there a person in the country who doesn't know about Michael Phelps and his awesome achievement yet? Probably not. Some aren't as enthusiastic about the geeky 23-year-old and his misguided fashion sense, but that's just part of being in the spotlight. I'm sure there will be more people picking on his dorky behavior. And then there are others who think he can do no wrong (people other than me... of course). In the great tradition of the Chuck Norris facts (a site dedicated to the man, myth and legend) comes Michael Phelps facts (these people have way too much time on their hands... and clearly so do I since I've been reading their site). My favorite "fact" of the moment is: "Ancient Greeks used to sacrifice 100 cows to Poseidon who would then turn around and sacrifice them to Michael Phelps." Impressive. I'm wasting way too much time laughing at these.