Hi, Telepictures? This is Reason calling. We heard you were thinking of spinning off your website MomLogic.com into a daytime talk show. We are not mothers, so we don't really ever visit your dot-com, but it's actually quite good, though it certainly lacks the wittiness of Babble. We also understand that moms, especially the stay-at-home kind, are a big chunk of the daytime TV audience, and are responsible for keeping Oprah and Ellen in business.

So why is this most terrible, money-losing, reputation-melting decision you could ever make?

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Evidence that iVillage continues to be a $600 million disappointment to NBC: They're shutting down subsidiary Healthology.com (which was bought for $17.2 million) and axing nine employees now, then waiting till May to ditch nine more. [PaidContent]

Whether you call NBC's dismal Internet-to-TV spin-off by its current name, In The Loop With iVillage, or by its old moniker, iVillage Live, you won't be calling it anything for much longer: A staffer on the show relays to Jossip that the network is FINALLY canceling one of history's most embarrassing examples of live programming. (To make matters worse, Bill Rancic is a co-host. Ew.)

"I'm there for the next month. The show got cancelled. Our last day is March 28th. I am dusting off my resume," says our source. (TVWeek broke the news.)

We've made no secret how much this show, the "brain" child of Beth Comstock, unnerved us. Or maybe it was just the way NBC tried to spin its dismal ratings into a positive.

So after spending $600 million on the largest women's website (we don't count Glam.com) with hopes of spawning a synergy behemoth, what does NBC have to show for itself? Oh, right: A $925 million acquisition of Oh!.

What does a giant media conglomerate do when its $600 million web purchase aimed at women doesn't meet expectations? Spend nearly a billion bucks to snap up a TV outfit aimed at women.

That's NBC Universal's strategy with the just-announced deal to acquire Oprah's Oxygen network for $925 million, paid for by selling off "non-core assets," i.e. Spanish-language stations. Oxygen's acquisition, of course, comes after NBC snapped up online estrogen-fest iVillage.com, a purchase that, in hindsight (and with any foresight), was an egregiously overvalued property. It's also responsible for In The Loop With iVillage, so … enough said.

But: Is Oxygen just another pumped up dollar figure? It's available in 74 million American homes, sure. But Al Gore's Current TV is in 40 million, and anyone in M&A would be hard-pressed to value Mr. Planet's property at even half Oxygen's price.

And Oxygen gets cred for being built from the ground up by Oprah, Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner, and Caryn Mandabach — rad. But if you're best flagship programming amounts to Girls Behaving Badly and Oprah After the Show, aren't you basically on par with MyNetworkTV?

We've got some bad news for you. Well, it's more like bad news for NBC Universal: Your re-configured daytime gab fest iVillage Live, since renamed the MUCH MORE HIP In The Loop With iVillage, is actually worse than it ever was. The last time we tuned into this amateur hour of programming, we cringed. This time, we're performing a civic duty: Publicists? Do not let your clients appear on this show.

The brainchild of NBC digital chief Beth Comstock, the show's first incarnation aired while readership of the $600 million iVillage.com website … dropped. The ratings? Embarrassing. Not that either of those factors would allow NBC to admit its mistakes and kill the show.

Instead, iVillage is back after a re-tooling, though as far as we can tell, the only thing that's changed is its location; it's airing from Chicago now, with Apprentice Bill Rancic at the helm. And as you'll see in the above clip, it doesn't even belong on YouTube.

Just in time to follow up to last week's showcasing of the televised misery that is iVillage Live (unbeknownst to us, it was a repeat) comes Brooks Barnes' report that even NBC thinks the show is an utter failure.

After NBC paid $600 million for the lady lifestyle site, they attempted to capitalize on their myriad avenues of synergy with a daytime spin-off show. But even with constant plugs on the Today show and an entire TV program dedicated to plugging the site, traffic to iVillage.com had actually fallen off. Cue the halt in production on iVillage Live, which returns, um, live next month. After some serious tinkering.

NBC's interactive media chief Beth Comstock is not, however, ready to call the show a bust. In one effort to save the hemmoraging, they're relocating the show from Orlando – where they had endless opportunities to plug the Universal Studios theme park – to Chicago, so they can book more celebrity guests. And be closer to Oprah, who owns a little TV network called Oxygen. Which NBC is said to be interested in a possible acquisition of.

Last Wednesday, Post biz reporter Peter Lauria let fly a hollow-point bullet through the temple of Beth Comstock, NBC Uni's integrated media chief. Even though "she is still considered a fast-rising star among General Electric and NBC brass," Lauria reported staffers are losing confidence in her and, according to a source, "people are beginning to question why she has been given so much responsibility relative to her performance."

More than a few industry onlookers agreed Lauria's item was delivered on a silver spoon from NBC chief Jeff Zucker, who's leading the battle against Comstock, letting her take the blame for iVillage Live, the disaster of a TV show spin-off of iVillage.com, the women's website that's been faring somewhere between "alright" and "eh." (To be fair, Lauria did deliver an iota of hope: "NBC still appears to be behind iVillage and Comstock, whose other credit is playing a key role in the creation of the online video joint venture between NBC and News Corp.")

Today, however, the fun is just getting started.

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• Simon Dumenco weighs in not on the Oscars, but on whether reading media blogs makes you fuckable. The answer? Abso-fucking-lutely.[AdAge]

• Men's Vogue, it turns out, is a hit. Jay Fielden – and we're just guessing here – is not. [WWD]

• NBC Universal is forking over $600 million for iVillage, which sounds like a whole lot of cash for an online estrogen fest. [The Street]

• How, exactly, does a status-seeking media social climber manage to standby his money-losing trash rags? Daniel Gross is on the case of American Media Inc.'s David Pecker. [Slate]

• The Chinese love Jann Wenner's products, when written in Chinese. [London Times]

• Has Dateline's timeline come and gone? We hope not, if only because we'll miss that online sex predator series. [B&C]

• Embroiled Village Voicer Nick Sylvester may be suspended from the alt-weekly, but he's gone for good at Pitchfork. [The Nation]

• To enter the Bloomberg house of financial news, you must have your glamour shot taken. [Washingtonian]

• Looks like Geraldo Rivera needs to invite some chair tossing neo-Nazis on his new syndicated show — and Fox might force him to with his dismal 2.9 rating debut. [TVNewser]

• First Britney Spears' new track "And Then We Kissed" makes the Internet leak rounds and then suddenly Kevin Federline's attempt at rapping ("Ya'll Ain't Ready") finds itself online too? We love record companies' in-house PR efforts. [Stereogum, and again]

• Kanye West is filling in for The Game in 50 Cent's rap feuds, but this time it's all politics. Kanye is sticking by his "Bush doesn't care about blacks" while 50 is, uh, attributing Hurricane Katrina to God. [AP]

• Wired magazine is joining the temporary store craze with a SoHo location filled with gadgets, just in time to make up for lost ad revenue with the holiday shopping season. [Beta News]

• This time next year there could be as many as 96 job openings swarming Mediabistro and ED2010 thanks to Conde Nast's business unit. [MIN]

• Now that everyone's all hot and bothered about Internet companies again, iVillage is looking for a suitor. [FT]