Unlike Olbermann, Maddow plans to interview some conservative guests. But she is determined to avoid the left-right pairings that sustain much of cable news. "It creates fake balance," she says. "I'm sorry -- we're going to have a debate about whether or not the Earth is flat? It doesn't make sense to have a debate about whether offshore drilling is going to bring down gas prices. You know what? It's not. The fact that it's false ought to be reported, or you're advancing a lie."

Odenkirk and Cross co-wrote the project, which will star Cross as himself. He leaves Hollywood to move into a suburban, gated community where he has two roommates, a right-wing conservative and a liberal hippie.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

I mean, here is a fact... an honest to God fact: last year, there were more corpses on the three Law & Order franchises, which were all set in Manhattan... there were more dead people shown on that show than there were actual homicides in Manhattan.

[T]he shows will try to work around the missing writers (and the guild rules that bar anything that's traditionally the domain of scribes) by relying heavily on pretaped segments from the field.