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NBC PLANS MUPPETATIONAL CHRISTMAS

Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and the rest of the Muppets will help NBC celebrate the holidays this year.

The network has announced its holiday-specials lineup for this year, and it's a little bigger than usual. The Muppet special, titled "Letters to Santa _ A Muppet Christmas," is one of several new shows NBC will use to help fill out its end-of-the-year schedule, in addition to old standbys like the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Christmas in Rockefeller Center."

"We want to give our viewers, especially families, some great original shows that they can gather around the TV and watch together this holiday season," says Craig Plestis, who oversees specials and alternative programming for NBC.

"Letters to Santa" will find the Muppet crew _ most of them, anyway; Miss Piggy is busy planning a trip to the tropics _ trying to deliver three letters to Santa Claus that they accidentally stopped from reaching their destination. "Muppet Movie" composer Paul Williams will contribute new songs to the special, and the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Sirico, Steve Schirripa and Richard Griffiths will help them in their quest.

NBC will also air an original animated special called "Macy's Presents Little Spirit: Christmas in New York," about a boy who loses his dog in the city just before Christmas but gets help from a magical being called the Little Spirit in finding her. Danny DeVito, Lucy Liu, Freddy Rodriguez and Brenda Song will lend their voices to the special.

Additionally, the network will air three countdown shows celebrating the best of holiday entertainment: "Greatest Holiday TV Specials and Movies," "Greatest Holiday Songs" and "Greatest Holiday Home Videos."

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'24' PAUSES FOR BREATH

Production on "24" will take a two-week break while writers figure out what will happen next on the serialized Fox drama.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, filming on "24" will be shut down from Sept. 15 to Oct. 9, a previously unscheduled hiatus. The trade paper says that the down-time was imposed by veteran showrunner Howard Gordon as an opportunity to rewrite several scripts and reconsider the direction of the season's final six episodes.

This is just the latest speedbump in the seventh season of the Emmy-winning drama.

The show's producers have been quite candid about the different false starts for the season, shifts in plot that caused several delays last summer. After production actually started rolling, the writers strike interrupted things after the competition of the season's eighth episode, causing fans to have to go a season without a new chapter of the Kiefer Sutherland-fronted series.

The show returned to production in April on both seventh season episodes, as well as the two-hour telefilm which will air in November and serve as a bridge to new episodes.

Because of the eight episodes in the can and the early production start, the two-week hiatus won't have any impact on the "24" January premiere.

Few faces set for the show's seventh season include Jon Voight, Cherry Jones, Colm Feore, Sprague Grayden, Janeane Garofalo, Annie Wersching, Jeffrey Nordling, Rhys Coiro and John Billingsley.

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ABC IS AGLOW WITH 'MOTHERHOOD'

ABC is adding one more show to the five it picked up late last month, ordering 13 episodes of a comedy called "In the Motherhood."

The show, based on a Web series of the same name, follows the travails of three moms, played by Chelsea Handler, Leah Remini and Jenny McCarthy. However, not all three actresses may make the transition to the TV series. Handler is expected to continue on with the TV show, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, Megan Mullally and Cheryl Hines are in talks to take over for McCarthy and Remini.

The online series, which ABC highlighted as a possible midseason contender at its upfront presentation in May, sprang from media-branding firm MindShare and was "conceived by" advertisers Suave and Sprint. MindShare's David Lang and Peter Tortorici will be executive producers of the TV series, and Sprint and Suave will keep a hand in as well.

Jennifer Konner and Alexandra Rushfield ("Help Me Help You") will serve as writers and exec producers of "In the Motherhood"; Stu Bloomberg will also be an exec producer. All three were involved in the network's pilot "Bad Mother's Handbook" earlier this year, which co-starred Mullally.

"In the Motherhood" joins two other comedies, "Better Off Ted" and "Single With Parents," and dramas "Castle," "Cupid" and "The Unusuals" on ABC's midseason roster.

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'DANCING WITH THE STARS' PRO HAS TWINS

Tony Dovolani has two new tiny dancers in his life.

The "Dancing With the Stars" pro and his wife, Lina, welcomed a boy and a girl Monday at a hospital near their Connecticut home, reports People.

The boy, Adrian Driton Dovolani, was born at 3:14 a.m., weighing 7 pounds, 14 minutes before his sister, Adriana Dovolani, was born, weighing 7 pounds, 10 ounces.

"We are so happy, I can't stop smiling," says Dovolani. "Lina was such a champ, and she looks incredible right now."

The couple has been wed for eight years and have another daughter, 3-year-old Luana.

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Dovolani, 35, is currently partnering with Emmy winner Susan Lucci for the seventh season of "Dancing With the Stars," which premieres Sept. 22. His previous partners include Stacy Keibler, Sara Evans, Leeza Gibbons, Jane Seymour and Marissa Jaret Winokur.

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