Author: Will Harris (Page 40 of 261)

Will is a member of the Television Critics Association and has written for Decider.com, the Onion A.V. Club, The Dissolve, Indiewire, Rhino.com, TV Week Magazine, The Virginian-Pilot, Popdose.com, and EW.com along with writing for Bullz-Eye.com and Premium Hollywood.

TCA Tour: Showtime Executive Session

January 9, 2010 / Will Harris

You’ll have already seen my story about Showtime greenlighting “The Borgias,” which I posted because it was easily the biggest news within the network’s executive session, but Robert Greenblatt, Showtime’s President of Entertainment, did have a few more things to say during his remarks…and these are some of them:

* First of all, it must be said that Greenblatt had us from “hello,” offering an opening which couldn’t have been more perfectly designed for his audience. “I’m glad this is the first day,” he said, “because it’s so great when you guys are not sort of at the end of the rope here after rolling your eyes from all of what we’re saying to you, and I hope I can engage you enough today, because I’m sure all of you are just waiting for tomorrow’s NBC presentation. I’d love to get my temporary TCA card so that I could sit in on tomorrow’s session.”

* Coming soon is Showtime’s first foray into the world of traditional reality series. Get ready for “The Real L Word of Los Angeles,” which Greenblatt says will be on the air probably this summer. “We’ve just cast those women,” he said, “so at some point we will parade them in front of you for some kind of grilling…and I mean ‘parade’ in the best sense of the word.”

* When discussing the network’s new series, “The Big C,” a dark comedy starring Laura Linney as a woman dealing with a diagnosis of stage-four cancer, Greenblatt said, “I hope you all got our press announcement yesterday that we greenlighted a series about a character facing a terminal illness; I just want to make it clear that we have not picked up ‘The Jay Leno Show.'” Ouch…and ho, ho, HO!

But seriously, folks, Greenblatt says, “We look at the show essentially as a wake-up call as she begins to kind of look at her life and decide how she’s going to live it for the last amount of time that she has, and I think in the best possible world here, I think what we’ll do with this show is humanize the dilemma of her illness. Obviously, the show will walk the line between drama and comedy, and I don’t think there’s anybody better who could do that than Laura Linney. We’ve also surrounded her with some extraordinary people, an ensemble of great actors: Oliver Platt plays her husband, and we have Gabourey Sidibe, who’s the star of ‘Precious,’ who’s in the show as well.”

The pilot for “The Big C” was directed by Bill Condon, who already has experience with directing Linney and Platt from when they all did “Kinsey” together. We aren’t yet privy to the entire pilot, alas, but Greenblatt offered us a sizzle reel from it, and it looks really good, but for my money, no line topped this one from Linney to Sidibe: “You can’t be fat and mean. You can either be fat and jolly or a skinny bitch. It’s up to you.” The network has ordered 13 episodes, and the series goes into production as soon as Linney finishes her current commitments at the Manhattan Theater Club, with a premiere planned for later this summer.

* Greenblatt also spoke briefly about “Episodes,” the network’s new comedy, which was announced a few months ago. Created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, the series is about a British couple who have a hit series on the BBC and, when an American TV network comes to them and convinces them to come to Hollywood and do an American version of their show, Hollywood just systematically destroys the show.

“Not,” added Greenblatt, “that that would ever happen at Showtime.”

Although “Episodes” won’t actually begin production until the spring, the producers thoughtfully put together a short piece to give us an idea of the flavor of the series…and it was funny. As you may have heard, the series will start the former Joey Tribiani, Matt LeBlanc, who will play himself as the woefully miscast star of the show within the show, and the piece showed us what he had to go through to get the part. (“I’d be playing myself, and I have to read? Fuck Showtime!”) Production on the series starts in late spring, and Greenblatt hopes the series will be on the air in the fall…and if it maintains the tone of what they showed us, then so do I.

External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Comedies, TV Dramas

Bill Condon Gabourey Sidibe Laura Linney Oliver Platt Robert Greenblatt Showtime The Big C The Borgias The Real L Word of Los Angeles The Tudors

Showtime greenlights the perfect series to replace the outgoing “Tudors”

January 9, 2010 / Will Harris

During his welcoming remarks to the Television Critics Association, Robert Greenblatt – President of Entertainment for Showtime – revealed that the network has decided what will take the place of “The Tudors” when the series completes its run at the end of its fourth season.

Get ready for…”The Borgias.”

Greenblatt joked that they wanted to give fans of Showtime’s current period piece the opportunity to enjoy another “demented dynasty,” and, boy, do the Borgias fit that bill. Adultery, theft, rape, bribery, incest, murder…yep, sounds like a premium cable series to me.

“We think it’s a pretty dynamic story to dramatize,” said Greenblatt. It must be: not only will Neil Jordan serve as the executive producer (he will also direct the first two episodes), but “The Borgias” has drawn Jeremy Irons to play the role of patriarch Rodrigo Borgia. Plus, in a nice bit of torch-passing, Michael Hirst – one of the primary behind-the-scenes players on “The Tudors” – will be working on series as well.

“The Borgias” is scheduled to premiere on Showtime in the spring of 2011.

UPDATE – Showtime has issued its formal press release about the pick-up the series, describing “The Borgias” as “a complex, unvarnished portrait of one of history’s’ most intriguing and infamous dynastic families. The series begins as the family’s patriarch Rodrigo (Jeremy Irons), becomes Pope, propelling him, his two Machiavellian sons Cesare and Juan, and his scandalously beautiful daughter, Lucrezia, to become the most powerful and influential family of the Italian Renaissance. And all that power and influence eventually leads to their demise. As Machiavelli once said about his friends, the Borgias, ‘Politics have no relation to morals.'”

Greenblatt also offers this further quote:

“Having blazed a trail with the award-winning ‘The Tudors,’ we wanted to continue to offer our audience a period drama as wicked, witty, and utterly compelling — and that’s what ‘The Borgias’ will be. I can guarantee you’ve never seen a family quite like this before, nor could you make up the outrageous twists and turns of their epic saga if your life depended on it. The directorial mastery of Neil Jordan along with Michael Hirst’s flair for bringing historical dramas vividly to life for a contemporary audience will make ‘The Borgias’ unlike anything else on television.”

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Jeremy Irons Michael Hirst Neil Jordan Showtime The Borgias The Tudors

TCA Press Tour: CBS Executive Session

January 9, 2010 / Will Harris

Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, favored us with her presence this morning at the TCA tour, sitting down for an executive session which provided us with the following quotes and tidbits:

* Regarding the decision to place the new reality series “Undercover Boss” in the plum spot following the Super Bowl, she said that it was a combination of good timing and a good series. “We’re very high on the show, but we spent a lot of time talking about what the right strategy would be,” she said. “We’ve seen five or six episodes of ‘Undercover Boss’ by now, and there is a tone and a quality to the show that we felt was a great fit after the Super Bowl. It is aspirational. It is a feel-good program.
Everybody who is sitting and watching the Super Bowl, be you 8 or 80, can stay right there and enjoy the program. I think 15 years ago, that spot was used to launch new programming. Obviously, in the last 10, 15 years it’s been used more as a platform to get greater exposure for existing shows. But we thought, ‘You know what? We have a great project, we’re very high on it, and we think we’re going to launch another big-branded reality show.'”

* Obviously, NBC’s continued fall from grace via the great failure that was “The Jay Leno Show” was a topic of conversation that everyone wanted Tassler to weigh in on. “Through it all, we have to realize that ABC, CBS and FOX…we’ve all fared, I think, very well during this experimental phase for NBC,” she said. “But if we can harken back to when there was that grand proclamation about 8 o’clock at NBC…? Remember? We all wrote about that: 8 o’clock was over at NBC. They were going to have a whole different strategy developing for 8 o’clock. And then along came 10 o’clock, and they were going to have a whole different strategy for 10 o’clock. You know, I think ultimately, there is no substitute for developing great shows, working with great talent, and getting your program on the air.”

“The unfortunate thing is that our creative community was to some degree somewhat bruised by this,” she continued. “I think that the talent as this was taking place, a lot of people were put out of work. A lot of people really saw this as having a pretty negative impact on our business. But I think right now for us, it just allowed us to get a bigger piece of the ad revenue pie at 10 o’clock, and again, what I have the most trouble with is for their company, their decision to do what they did, to sort of turn that and say that his is a reflection on the whole network business, I think is misguided. Our business is thriving right now. We are enjoying success with new hit shows, as is ABC, as is FOX. So I think at the end of the day, it was an experiment that obviously did not work, but for us, like I said, there’s no substitute for just developing and producing and launching great shows.”

There’s certainly no question that a couple of CBS earned some additional success from viewers’ indifference to “The Jay Leno Show.” As Tassler observed, “We moved ‘The Mentalist’ to 10 o’clock on Thursday night and launched ‘The Good Wife,’ so 10 o’clock has been good business for us.”

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American Idol CBS Charlie Sheen Chuck Lorre CSI Miami CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Flashpoint Guiding Light Laurence Fishburne Let's Make A Deal Medium Miami Medical NCIS Nina Tassler Numb3rs Olympics Super Bowl Survivor: All Stars The Amazing Race The Bold and the Beautiful The Bridge The Good Wife The Jay Leno Show The Mentalist The Price Is Right The Young and the Restless Three Rivers Undercover Boss William Petersen

Bill Paxton is up for a “Twister” sequel. Anyone else?

January 7, 2010 / Will Harris

In an interview with Bullz-Eye in conjunction with the season premiere of HBO’s “Big Love” (Sunday, Dec. 10th), Bill Paxton revealed that one of the items on his to-do list is a sequel to his 1996 blockbuster, “Twister.”

“I’ve had a meeting at the studio with Kathleen Kennedy about it,” Paxton said, whose inspiration for a sequel came as a result of a trip that he took to the Ozark Mountains last spring.

“I flew into St. Louis with my buddy Scott Thomson, who played Preacher in ‘Twister,’ and we rented a car and drove down to southeastern Missouri, into the Ozarks,” said Paxton. “We spent the night, and the next morning we got up and we started tracking the trail of the most famous tornado that ever hit the country, which was the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. It still holds all of the records. It was called the Tri-State because it was a mile wide when it came down from the sky on the afternoon of March 16, 1925, and it was a rural area, but, boy, before it was through, it crossed the Mississippi, it cut across southern Illinois, where it hit a lot of towns. The biggest one was Murphysboro, which was…it literally looked like Hiroshima after it hit. And then it went across the Wabash, into Indiana, staying on the ground three and a half hours and cutting a damage path 219 miles long, killing about 700 people. There’s actually footage that I found in Murphysboro at their historical society. They had footage from a biplane that the government sent down, just to do aerial footage of all of the destruction and the damage. So we just did that to kind of get some ideas, and from that I kind of extrapolated an idea for a sequel. And I kind of put that together into a format, and now we’re kind of waiting to see if that’s going to move forward.That would need Steven Spielberg’s blessing, ultimately, and they probably won’t take it to him ‘til there’s real studio interest, but I think the 3D applications of that could obviously be pretty amazing.

“The only reason I’d like to revisit that ground is because I realize we’re living in a time where big movies cost so much to make that the town is looking for built-in audiences,” admitted Paxton. “Of course, I’m so glad to see that the success of ‘Avatar’ is disproving that theory, but…I always thought the first ‘Twister’ was an exciting ride, but I thought a sequel could explore it in a more enthralling way, getting into more of the history and the lore, more of a darker version of the first one.”

Although it may sound more serious than the original “Twister,” Paxton doesn’t think that fans of the first film would have any problem accepting the sequel. “I think you’d still want to have a lot of the dark humor and all of that, with the flying cows and everything,” he said, with a laugh. “I think you could kind of intrigue people more by getting into a little more of the lore and really understanding. I just think there’s a lot more to explore there. When I researched the first film when I was getting ready to do it, I just found so much stuff. Ultimately, I was happy with ‘Twister,’ but I also had thought that it could’ve gotten a little deeper into it.”

What you do you think? I can’t say I’ve been chomping at the bit for “Twister 2,” but Paxton has proven in the past that he can make just about anything worth watching, and his point about how such a film would be perfect for 3D is certainly food for thought.

Check out the full interview with Mr. Paxton by clicking right here.

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10 “New” TV Series Which In No Way Matched The Shows That Inspired Them

January 5, 2010 / Will Harris

Since we offered up a “New”-themed movie list to kick off the new year, it seemed like a reasonable idea to put together a TV-related list as well, but when we looked back and saw the number of series which featured the word “new” in their title, we noticed a recurring theme: many of the “new” series didn’t come anywhere close to living up to the standards set by the shows which inspired them. These are but ten examples, but rest assured that there are many more which could’ve made the cut.

10. The New Leave It To Beaver (1985): You may recall that this show was entitled “Still the Beaver” when it premiered as a Disney Channel original series, but when it transitioned over to TBS for its second season, that’s when the “New” title kicked in. It’s possible that it doesn’t really belong here, since it’s been ages since I last saw it (the rights to the series are sitting in limbo at the moment, which means that we won’t be seeing it in syndication anytime soon, let alone on DVD), but my recollection is that, although the TV movie that inspired the show was pretty great, the show itself often wasn’t. Still, while “The New Leave It To Beaver” may not come anywhere close to matching the perfection of the original series, it deserves a certain amount of credit for being the most successful series revival / sequel of all time, bringing back virtually every single surviving member of the cast: Tony Dow (Wally Cleaver), Barbara Billingsley (June Cleaver), Ken Osmond (Eddie Haskell), Frank Bank (Lumpy Rutherford), and, of course, Jerry Mathers as the Beaver.

9. The New WKRP in Cincinnati (1991): Given the success of the original “WKRP” in syndication, it’s no wonder that someone had the idea of bringing the show back, but while the new version did manage to corral a few of the old cast members – Gordon Jump (Mr. Carlson), Frank Bonner (Herb Tarlek), and Richard Sanders (Les Nessman) all came back – the folks who opted out of the series were replaced by tepid new characters who couldn’t hold a candle to those whose shoes they were filling. Given how disappointing “The New WKRP” was, it really should be higher on this list, but I’m keeping in this slot because the show did manage to convince Loni Anderson (Jennifer Marlowe), Tim Reid (Venus Flytrap), and Howard Hessman (Dr. Johnny Fever) to make guest appearances at various points.

8. The New Avengers (1976): Fans tend to be split about the merits of the return of John Steed with two new partners, Mike Gambit (Gareth Hunt) and Purdey (Joanna Lumley), but you can hardly blame them, given how iconic a figure Emma Peel was. It’s said that the reason Steed had a pair of partners this go-round was that producers weren’t entirely confident that 54-year-old Patrick Macnee could hack the work regiment anymore, but he managed to pull it off pretty well, all things considered. Nowadays, it’s no wonder that the original series is the one which stands the test of time best: “The Avengers” had a look which helped define a decade, whereas “The New Avengers” has a look which is defined by its decade. Mind you, it doesn’t exactly help that you can’t look at Purdey without thinking, “Hey, it’s Patsy from ‘Absolutely Fabulous’!”