The cold, icy death hand of economic uncertainty and depression-era apple bargaining has finally pointed its bony finger at the TV industry and said, "I choose you."

The Hollywood Reporter reports that NBC Universal has already laid off 30 people as part of their ongoing effort to cut costs across the board.

So far, the 30 people who have been given their pink slips worked in the sales departments. More pink slips are expected to land on desks later this week in the news division, the first areas of the media industry that normally take a bullet when Wall Street starts firing in all directions like Hunter S. Thompson on an ether binge.

Like many of you, I love music, and I think we can all agree that the best way to listen to our favorite music is to have total strangers interrupt a song, and for the song to never play in its entirety. MTV understood this need, and that's why they gave us Total Request Live (or TRL as the cool kids call it).

In the wake of an announcement by Viacom that it would be cutting nearly 250 jobs from its music networks, rumors began to circulate that TRL would be taken off the air, but according to a rep from MTV, those rumors are not true. Regardless, TRL has seen a decline as of late, and Variety reports that interactive sites like YouTube and MySpace are partly to blame, as they provide a more personal mode of interactivity.

Last month, Rich told you all about NBC Universal's plans to cut costs by cutting jobs. Seven hundred jobs to be exact. The first wave of cuts came last week, where at least 17 people were laid off from Dateline NBC. Most of those jobs were based out of New York, with a handful in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. There is also an undisclosed number of people who volunteered for the company's buyout package.

More layoffs within NBC News will come this week, with even more coming in the next year. According to Broadcasting & Cable, NBC Universal is slashing costs mostly at the NBC television network, while its movie and cable networks remain untouched. That means the news division is going to take the biggest hit because it takes a lot of people to cover the news. I guess we know where NBCU's priorities are. If it's anything like the newsrooms I've worked in, the most expensive employees will be told to take a hike and they will be replaced by cheaper people with less experience. Does the quality of the product take a hit? You betcha.

[Via Lost Remote]

(S03E07) I'm sure that many of us have either been laid-off from their jobs or know someone that has, so this episode surely hit home with quite a number of people.

As what took place with the British version of The Office, Jan tells Michael that corporate has decided to close the Scranton office and will transfer a few staffers to the Stamford branch. Someone once said to me that you never truly find out what a person is made of until you seem him/her deal with a crisis. Watching Michael go to extremes to save his employees (and himself) showed that despite his overbearing, obnoxious, pompous personality, he does have a soul, and you ended up rooting for him to save the day. Of course, it was all moot when we learned earlier that after Josh decided to move on to Staples, the Stamford branch would be closed and merged into Scranton.