Bennett Raglin/Getty Images, AP Photo• He's made the band. Now Diddy's looking to be a StarMaker. The hip-hop multihyphenate is teaming up with MTV and Survivor mastermind Mark Burnett for a new reality series. Taking the Idol formula one step further, StarMaker features solo artists trying to outperform each other while also dealing with photo ops, press interviews, paparazzi and living together. The premiere is set for January.
• Now that she's back from her fab summer at Camp Rock, Demi Lovato is matriculating to Sonny With a Chance. The Disney Channel's family-friendly comedy series riffs on the Hannah Montana show-within-a-show concept with Lovato as a Midwestern teen cast in a sketch-comedy series. Nancy McKeon is on board in a recurring role, presumably to teach our dear Demi the facts of life.
• Jesse Ventura ready to entertain us. He's been tapped to host a new, yet-to-be-titled series for truTV aiming to prove, or debunk, some of the world's greatest conspiracy theories. Let's start with how a former pro wrestler managed to get elected governor of Minnesota.
• Ellen Burstyn has come aboard the Showtime pilot Possible Side Effects, a drama series about the inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry written and directed by Tim Robbins. Burstyn will play the matriarch of the Hunt clan, a powerful family that owns and operates a drug company that gets into a world of trouble. Josh Lucas and Tim Blake Nelson costar.
• Terminator bane Thomas Dekker just wants to sing! He's been cast as the lead of MGM's redo of Fame, playing a working-class teen who manages to get into New York's top public high school for the arts. The new Fame starts shooting in February and is slated to hit theaters next September.
• Shark star Danielle Panabaker has snagged a plum role in Prodigy, a sci-fi action flick about an elite prep school that turns teens into geniuses through a special diet-and-drug program that comes under scrutiny when several of the school's alums are murdered. She'll play a brilliant daughter of a senator who probes the powers that be. Chuck Russell (The Mask) directs.
• Trading Spaces perkmeister Paige Davis and former Noxzema pitchwoman Rebeccca Gayheart are set to join Christine Baranski in Broadway's hit sex comedy Boeing-Boeing, which won the 2008 Tony Award for Best Play Revival.