That Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game is about to get a lot easier.

The Philly-raised Bacon, who’s famously worked with at least half the actors in Hollywood, will be tracking a vast network of serial killers in “The Following,” a new drama from Kevin Williamson (“Vampire Diaries,” “Dawson’s Creek”) that Fox’s entertainment chief calls “our next ‘24.’ ”

Premiering at midseason — where Fox is still at its strongest — it has Bacon playing a former FBI agent brought in to help deal with a death row escapee (James Purefoy, “Rome”) who’s found a way to make connections with other serial killers, getting them to form alliances and work together.

 I’m thinking LinkedIn — or the Bacon game — but with a much higher body count.

The 53-year-old Bacon, son of the late city planner Edmund Bacon, has made an occasional TV guest shot — often playing himself — and was nominated for an Emmy for the HBO movie “Taking Chance,” but he’s never starred in a series.

 Landing him “really was the casting coup of the year,” said Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly in a conference call with reporters Monday morning, hours before the network unveiled its 2012-13 schedule to advertisers in New York.

 “He had expressed an interest” in a series, Reilly said. “There are more and more big stars who are intrigued with doing television.”

 It probably didn’t hurt that Bacon’s wife, Kyra Sedgwick, is coming off an extremely successful seven-season run on TNT’s “The Closer,” which will air its final six episodes beginning July 9.

 Or that “The Following” will have a cablelike schedule, with a 15-episode season that will allow Fox to air it for “15 weeks straight,” Reilly said.

It’s hard to imagine a major life change, be it marriage or mourning, that couldn’t be made a little worse by being experienced on camera for a "reality" show audience.

But the family of the late Whitney Houston, whose presence in her then-husband’s Bravo show, "Being Bobby Brown," didn’t exactly represent a career highlight, has apparently decided "reality" is the way to go.

Lifetime Friday announced it was picking up 10 hourlong episodes of a show about Houston’s family, tentatively titled, "The Houston Family Chronicles," described as "an all-new docu-series that will follow the lives of the late Whitney Houston’s family, led by Pat Houston, Whitney’s sister-in-law and manager, and including Pat’s daughter Rayah, Whitney’s brother Gary, daughter Bobbi Kristina and mother, Grammy Award-winning singer Cissy Houston."

Though the emphasis will supposedly be on the family dealing with the loss of Bobbi Kristina’s mother, the idea of a show had apparently been around long before Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton in February.

 "I have been working … over the past few years developing a project suitable for myself and our family. The unexpected passing of Whitney certainly affects the direction of the show. However, it is my hope that others will be enlightened as they watch our family heal and move forward," said Pat Houston in a statement released by Lifetime.

 "Certainly affects the direction"? Bet it does.

Am I the only one who thinks Lifetime wouldn't have been nearly as  interested in a show about Whitney Houston's sister-in-law (and, OK, manager) this time last year?

In a move that’s bound to call for a celebratory glass of wine in some circles, TBS has swooped in to rescue ABC’s Courteney Cox sitcom “Cougar Town.”

The show’s fourth season will premiere on the basic-cable channel early in 2013 and has also acquired rerun rights for the 61 episodes from the first three seasons.

Created by Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs,” “Spin City”), the unfortunately named comedy stars Cox as Jules, a divorced mother of an almost grown son (Dan Boyd). Other stars include Josh Hopkins who plays her fiancé, Christa Miller and Ian Gomez as neighbors, Brian Van Holt as Jules’ ex and Busy Phillips as her “feisty protégé.”

Yes, they drink a lot, but mostly on weekends, insists Lawrence.

And now they all have something to drink to.

When famous people die, reporters look to their notebooks (or their audio files) for old interviews, and TV people go to the videotape.

Bill Moyers' people have sent along (see below) what they're calling  "one of the most candid and comprehensive interviews ever with [children's book author] Maurice Sendak," which includes this response to the oft-asked question of what happened to Max, the indelible protagonist of "Where the Wild Things Are":

"It’s such a coy question that I always say, ‘Well, he’s in therapy forever. He has to wear a straitjacket when he’s with his therapist,’” Sendak told Moyers.

Hulu has some other Sendak-on-TV stuff:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/354073/the-colbert-report-stephens-childrens-book

http://www.hulu.com/watch/99642/where-the-wild-things-are---maurice-sendak-and-spike-jonez-vignette

"There’ve been a lot of changes since you’ve been gone," says one "Eureka" character to another as the small-town sci-fi series returns for its fifth and final season at 9 p.m. Monday.

Do tell.

Almost anything I could say about the episode would be a a spoiler – though let’s just say the surprise near the beginning isn’t the last – but for fans of the quirky charmer about a town full of geniuses and the average-bright sheriff (Colin Ferguson) who tries to keep them from hurting themselves, it should be enough to know that it’s back for 13 episodes, including a series finale that Syfy says "will complete the journey of the residents of the unique little town of Eureka."

Given that Syfy reportedly canceled the series as production began on the original season finale, that may have taken some doing, even with the addition of an episode to make up for the loss of a sixth season.

But the producers of "Eureka" have been nothing but inventive so far, so I’m hoping for the best.

Hard as it might be to believe, there are still people who've never volunteered to be stranded with a bunch of scheming malcontents on  "Survivor," now in its 206th season on CBS.

OK, maybe it's 207th. I lost count a while back. (Actually, it's the 24th. But I had to look it up.)

If you're one of them and you think the prospect of a $1 million prize is well worth being filmed eating yukky things and arguing with people whose greatest ambition is to be the next Rob Mariano (who's virtually made a career out of appearing on CBS "reality" shows), then you have yet another opportunity to apply.

CBS 3 will be holding auditions for the show at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City on Saturday, April 28, from noon to 3 p.m.

"CBS 3 staff will assist candidates with the application process at the casting call and shoot their audition videos which will be sent directly to the show’s casting department," says the station.

"Candidates should be interesting personalities, strong-willed, outgoing, adventurous, physically and mentally adept and adaptable to new environments.  Applicants must be 18 years or older, and a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. For details and application forms, go to www.cbsphilly.com."

Looks as if the HBO groundhog saw its shadow, because winter is still coming on “Game of Thrones,” which Tuesday received a not-unexpected pickup for Season 3, just nine days after its second-season premiere attracted a series-high 3.9 million viewers.

Altogether,  that episode “has already accumulated a gross audience of 8.3 million viewers, and is on track to easily surpass the season one average of 9.3 million viewers,” according to HBO.

The cast and crew of the sprawling drama based on the epic fantasy series of novels by George R.R. Martin aren’t the only ones with something to celebrate.

Fox late Monday announced early renewals for “New Girl,” “Glee” and “Raising Hope,” putting three more shows in the safe zone before the May upfronts, when the fall schedules are unveiled to advertisers.

“Glee” returns to Fox at 8 p.m. Tuesday, but first the cast and show creator Ryan Murphy will be getting the James Lipton index-card treatment on Bravo’s “Inside the Actors Studio” at 8 p.m. Monday.

And if you always figured Murphy was mining  a few of his own high school issues on the show, you were right.

“ I was an odd creature in high school because I was a target but also I was popular, and that’s because on the sly, I was dating a lot of the football players,” he tells Lipton.

A couple of  other quotable quotes being teased by Bravo, which also released a clip:

Lea Michele, recalling her audition for the show: “I was listening to music and singing ‘On My Own’ in the car and about to pull into the Fox lot and totaled my car at the time. I’m from New York and was driving in LA. I ran up the lot pulling glass out of my hair, and I had nicks on my body.  I ran into the building – and exactly what Rachel Berry would have done – they were like, ‘You don’t need to audition today!’And I said, ‘There is no way that I’m not auditioning.’They didn’t even believe I got in a car wreck!”

Chris Colfer, responding to Lipton’s reminding him he’d said he wanted to be an actor since he was “an embryo”: “Embryo – yes. I used to pose for the sonograms.”

Winner, along with Showtime’s "Homeland," HBO’s "Game of Thrones" and "Treme," NBC’s "Parks and Recreation" and IFC’s "Portlandia," in the 71st annual George Foster Peabody Awards.

What is "Jeopardy!"?

Yes, Alex, it’s April, when the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication honors achievements in television – and other "electronic media" – with awards blessedly unaccompanied by lame production numbers and E! Entertainment red-carpet coverage. (The awards will be  presented May 21 at a luncheon in New York, hosted by actor Patrick Stewart.)

Best of all, the Peabodys don’t bother with categories, avoiding the head-scratching dilemmas posed by, say, the Emmys, where the lines between comedy and drama, and series and miniseries, have become meaningless.

This year’s winners, announced Wednesday morning, are, as usual, an eclectic group. Aside from the entertainment shows mentioned above – the citation for "Jeopardy!" was, appropriately phrased as an answer ("Encouraging, celebrating and rewarding knowledge is this Peabody Award winner’s legacy") – news and information figured heavily, with honorees ranging from PBS, NPR and the BBC to Comedy Central’s "The Colbert Report," singled out for Colbert’s launching of his own Super PAC "as a satirical protest against megabucks politics."

Here’s the complete list of this year’s Peabody winners:

CNN’s Reporting of the Arab Spring including Worldwide Coverage: Egypt –Wave of Discontent and Uprising in Libya (CNN)

(CNN)