Category: TV Action (Page 67 of 145)

TCA Tour, Jan. 2009: Fox newsflash

January 13, 2009 /

Kevin Reilly, president of Fox Entertainment, just came onstage and announced:

* The scheduling process for “Dollhouse” was considered very seriously, and the thought is that moving “Sarah Connor” to Fridays as a lead-in makes a good combo; additionally, there’s a solid promotional platform the night before, with “Bones” being moved to Thursday nights. Long story short, they’re committed to 13 episodes, and they’ll see how it’ll play out.

* He confirmed conclusively that “Prison Break” will end after this season, but that “they’re gonna finish strong.” There are four episodes and are contemplating doing a few more, but no formal decision has been made on that. “We didn’t give it the hook,” he said. “It’s just played out.”

* He described “Fringe” as “a keeper,” though he also referred to it as “a bear, creatively, because it’s so ambitious,” and doesn’t really expect it to take off just because it’ll be airing after “American Idol.”

* “Moment of Truth” has a season’s worth of episodes – 24, he reckons – sitting on the shelf, and “we’ll come back to it at some point,” but “we had other options, and we had other things that we wanted to put on more immediately. We have it as a tool when we want to go for it.”

* The idea of doing a show about a high school glee club (“Glee”) was one that came about predominantly because of one reason: it was created by Ryan Murphy, of “Nip/Tuck” fame.

* He hopes to have Paula Abdul stay with “American Idol” for the long haul.

* He described NBC as “the crazy ex-wife I can’t get away from,” but gave them credit for signing up Jay Leno and described it as “a smart, strategic move for a troubled place.”

* “Bones” works everywhere they put it and has only been growing, thanks to its base. If it does what they hope it will do for them on Thursday, however, they’ll lock it down there.

* He smirked that “Do Not Disturb,” if nothing else, made a lot of lists this year, and that they’re mostly sticking with their animated sitcoms, though they’re ordering five half-hour pilots and will see whether or not one of them will end up on the fall schedule. “It doesn’t make sense to order comedy for the sake of comedy,” he said. “Even if I have a show that we love, if we don’t think it can be protected on the fall schedule, we won’t put it on there.”

American Idol, External Entertainment, External TV, Interviews, News, Prison Break, Reality TV, TCA Blog 2009, TCA Press Tour, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, TV, TV Action, TV Comedies, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

24 7.3-4: Tony’s the dude playing the dude, disguising an undercover dude.

January 13, 2009 /

It turns out our conversation about Tony Almeida pulling a Harvey Dent was one of two “Batman” references that this season of “24” would boast. Yes, he switched teams for a few years, and did some bad stuff. But the business with General Candyman reset his moral compass. So if the FBI has no record of him working undercover, then who is he working for?

Why, Big Balls Bill Buchanan, of course, who has also recruited Chloe – presumably after he hit up Vidal Sassoon for a makeover – in a quest to expose government corruption on a massive scale. So who is Bill working for? This is where it gets a little fuzzy – he doesn’t work for anyone, since no one can be trusted. Doesn’t this mean that Bill, Tony and Chloe are just vigilantes, and their acts against the government could be classified as treason? How is their operation funded? And what exactly do they plan to do with the evidence that they obtain? Take it straight to the President? What if she’s one of the dirty ones?

Actually, one of the things that I like about these first four hours is that there are no clear-cut bad guys. There are lots of stupid guys – Renee knows there is a leak in her department, but that doesn’t stop her from having a candid conversation about it in a crowded hallway – but at the moment, everyone looks like they could be in on it. That’s the point, of course, and odds are that none of the truly suspicious characters are bad (I’m reserving judgment on Ethan Kanin, a.k.a. Warden Norton, for the moment). But I like the paranoia that floats around the new characters. Is Morris the leak? Janis? Surly Sean? The First Husband’s Secret Service agent? Have we even met the leaks yet? There are still 20 hours to go, which is plenty of time to meet a whole new group of scumbags. Odds are, though, we know half of them already. Remember, this is the show that dangled Nina Myers in front of us early on in Season One, at a time when we didn’t want to believe it. There is no reason to think they wouldn’t do that again.

“Guys, someone’s hacking into our mainframe. Oh, and they’re sending me catty, passive-aggressive comments while they do it.”

Something just occurred to me: someone at the FBI called Tony to tell him that Jack and Renee (new nickname forthcoming) were on their way to see Gabriel Schecter. Doesn’t that mean that Tony knows who the leak is? If so, why is everyone still in the dark about the rogue agent’s identity? Perhaps the turncoat only deals with Emmerson, who forwarded the message to Tony. Some clarification on this point is in order.

Is anyone else as surprised by Renee Walker’s sudden metamorphosis from contemptuous do-gooder into a results-only renegade? (Until she gives me reason to do otherwise, she will henceforth be known on this blog as Jacqueline Bauer.) You can count the minutes since she first met Jack, and like some traumatized Stockholm Syndrome victim, she seems to have fallen in love with him, or at least his methods. She watches Jack deprive Tony of oxygen in the interrogation room, then employs the same technique to Schecter’s killer as he lies in a hospital bed in critical condition. She says she wants to make things right by bringing Bauer in after he knocked her out and took her gun – gotta say, that garage escape is one of the more plausible and exciting shootouts the show’s ever done – but on a subconscious level, she has to know that Jack is the reason for, well, every single piece of intel they’ve acquired since they brought him in. And you have to know that once he sees her implement his techniques, he’s going to be on one knee in a nanosecond. Girls like that don’t come around every day, you know.

Small conversation about the B-story: it turns out the First Husband isn’t nuts, and his son was in fact murdered. No shocker here, but one small (which is to say, HUGE) question: how did Samantha come into possession of a flash drive that contains every piece of incriminating evidence that got her ex killed, yet she lives? Ugh.

With tonight’s two hours, the “Damn it” counter is at nine, by my count. Props for giving one of them to a nurse. Why should the leads have all the fun?

One last thought: doesn’t the Prime Minister of Sangala look like he could be Angela Bassett’s brother? Just sayin’.

24, TV, TV Action

24 7.1-2 – I see dead people

January 12, 2009 /

First off, a thousand lashes to the exec at Fox who thought it would be a good idea to run the season premiere of “24” opposite the Golden Globes. I don’t care if you had the date booked years before NBC decided to host the awards that night; you move the show back a week. Or even a day. But you don’t run a premiere against an awards show, and not just an awards show but one of the biggies. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Having said that, hats off to Mickey Rourke and “Slumdog Millionaire” for their wins.

As season premieres go, “24” has certainly had more explosive openings, but I liked what they did here, and also what they didn’t do. The show had gotten way too insular in terms of everything happening in Los Angeles, so moving the show to the east coast is a nice change of pace. Even better, the terrorist plot involves a threat that would actually affect the entire country. (No power or drinking water? Yikes.) Yes, it’s a riff on the plot from “Live Free or Die Hard” – and there is absolutely no way that they would ever get those planes synced up so that they would both hit the crossing point of two runways at the exact same time – but if it means that we don’t have to worry about a nuclear weapon this season, that can only be a good thing. They were also smart to acknowledge what a walking cliche Jack Bauer had become. “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR?” (*stabs man in genitals with spork*) That couldn’t have been easy for the producers to admit, but it needed to be done.

“Mr. Bauer, do you swear to kick the butt, the whole butt and nothing but the butt, so help you God?”

However, I’m still trying to wrap my head around Tony Almeida as this year’s villain. We still don’t know why he switched teams – and that’s good that they haven’t revealed that yet, that was the ‘what they didn’t do’ that I was referring to – but I’m not sure they can possibly come up with a rationale that will satisfy me. At the moment, he appears to be a free agent of sorts, a contract guy that offers his services to anyone willing to pay for them. God knows he wouldn’t be doing the bidding of a mass murderer like General Candyman any other way, right? And are we really to believe that Jack is only now learning that Tony is still alive? Yes, he was kidnapped by the Chinese hours after Tony’s supposed death, but he came back…years ago. I’m thinking the first thing someone at CTU would have told him is that Tony is not dead. They better have an answer for that as this season unfolds.

And man, did they stunt-cast the bejeezus out of this season. Janeane Garofalo as an easily stressed techie? Please tell me that Chloe O’Brien literally eats her alive at some point in the season. Bob Gunton, aka the warden in “The Shawshank Redemption,” is on Madame President’s staff, and Colm Feore is the First Man? There’s no way I’m looking at him without thinking of “Storm of the Century.” Bonus points if they work the phrase “Give me what I want, and I’ll go away” into the dialogue. Lastly, the great Kurtwood Smith is the senator that is trying to bring Jack to “justice.” Now, I like Kurtwood Smith, but did they really need him to play that part? You get the sense that the suits were nervous, so they snagged as many name actors as they could. It’s overkill, of course, but that’s Hollywood for you.

For those of you playing the “24” drinking game, The “Damn it” counter is at three, though Jack only said one of them.

All in all, not a bad way to start the season. Not great, but who knows, maybe that’s a good thing; in years past, they would blow the doors off the show in the premiere, only to implode six episodes later (ahem, abandoned plot involving Jack’s “nephew” in season six). The ads for hours three and four even hint at a big bombshell dropping. Maybe they finally get it now: the premiere is useless if everything that follows is shit. Yep, that’s what blogging a show will do to a person: turn them from a fan to someone who simply hopes that he’s not blogging about shit. Sigh.

24, TV, TV Action

TCA Tour, Jan. 2009: “The Prisoner”

January 11, 2009 /

There are cult TV series, and then there are cult TV series. Standing rather far ahead of the rest of the pack by just about every critics’ estimation, however, is “The Prisoner,” starring Patrick McGoohan as a former secret agent who is held captive in a small seaside village by the sea by an unidentified power that wants to know why he’s resigned from service. Hell, I’ve never even watched the series, and yet I’d still rate it as one of the top cult shows of all time, based solely on its reputation.

Once again, I think you have to give AMC kudos for their boldness as a network, because not only have they decided to re-imagine “The Prisoner,” thereby putting themselves in line to take no end of flak from the highly obsessive fans of the original series, but they’re even offering up the original show on AMCtv.com for those who haven’t seen it yet. (They also gave all of the critics in attendance a copy of the DVD box set of the series, since we’re clearly far too busy to watch television online.)

Confident much?

Well, you probably would be, too, if you could lay claim to having secured Jim Caviezel as your new Number Six and Sir Ian McKellen as the devious Number Two, then filled out the cast with Lennie James (“Jericho”), Ruth Wilson (“Jane Eyre”), and Jamie Campbell Bower (“Sweeney Todd,” “RocknRolla”).

It’s still going to take some convincing to get the old-school “Prisoner” fans to accept that the seaside of Portmeirion has been thrown out in favor of a new Village located in the midst of a desert setting, of course, but director Nick Hurran is clearly pleased with this new interpretation of the concept, which still focuses on a man trapped somewhere from which he cannot escape.

“The themes have the issue of family, of love, of control and of freedom in the same way,” said Hurran. “Freedom of choice, how much should we be allowed to have in our society of freedom. So, in that way, there are parallels of someone leaving a world and waking up in this extraordinary place for a reason that wants to be discovered. As in the original, there’s The Village. It’s an ideal world where everything will be provided for you. For us, you’ll be endlessly happy. Everything will be fulfilled for you, as long as you don’t ask questions. You won’t have the freedom to ask why, to say, ‘I’d like to leave now.’ And Six is the only one who questions that and says, ‘No, I’m not going to just take a number and join your marvelous world. I’m going to ask why and why is everybody else like this.’ We follow his challenge to question it and try and find out.”

McKellen, who conceded that he didn’t watch the original “Prisoner” when it first aired and only caught it in reruns years later, seems happy with the fact that AMC’s re-interpretation will be far less open-ended than its predecessor.

“One of the characteristics of the original was that in 17 episodes, the questions that you were invited to ask as to why and who is in charge and what are their motives, was never really answered, hence the enduring fascination,” said McKellen. “The viewers are still guessing as to what was the meaning of it all. Well, this is different. By episode six, you know everything about The Village: Where it came from, where it’s going to, who created it, why they did it and what it’s like to actually live there.”

McKellen also agrees with the decision to abandon the unabashedly British nature of the original. “Even though the location was in Wales, it didn’t feel like that,” he said. “It felt like a little English Disney place. Frankly, I’m more attracted to (screenwriter) Bill Gallagher’s notion of ‘The Prisoner’ and The Village and it’s on a world scale. The implications are for us all. To have an American character at the center of it seems appropriate in a way it would not have been to that curious English feeling that saturated the original series.”

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Actors, Actresses, Celebrities, External Entertainment, External TV, Jericho, News, TCA Blog 2009, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action, TV Dramas, TV Sci-Fi

TCA Tour, Jan. 2009: “Breaking Bad”

January 11, 2009 /

Has it truly come to this…? Will I once more actually have to spend money on a DVD set…? Yes, I fear I must, because I’ve been feeling guilty for awhile about not having found the time to watch the first season of “Breaking Bad,” and now that I’ve seen clips from Season 2, it’s clear that I need to just suck it up and buy Season 1 on DVD as soon as it’s released on February 24th. (It’s also clear that I should henceforth put my unconditional faith in AMC, since this is exactly the same thing that happened to me with “Mad Men.”)

Actually, this decision has been in the making for awhile now, starting not long after Bryan Cranston took home the Emmy for Best Actor. At first, I was convinced that Cranston’s win was less to do with his work on the show and more to do with the vote being split so profoundly that his win was simply a matter of mathematics and little to do with his performance, but I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. I mean, have you taken a look at the guy when he’s in character? I had no idea quite how much he was putting into the role of Walter White…or how much he was taking off.

“When we did the pilot, I was 186,” said Cranston. “And then, I got down when my character started his chemotherapy. I got down to 170. I’ve now started beefing up; I’m ready for a slaughter, because we’ve finished for the season. But I had to go back down to 170 again when we started up the second season.”

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Actors, Actresses, Celebrities, External Entertainment, External TV, News, TCA Blog 2009, TCA Press Tour, TV Action, TV Dramas

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