Okay, kids, we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover here, so let’s start off by just hitting the highlights of the initial HBO panel, which was simply the network’s programming group president Richard Plepler and co-president Michael Lombardo opening up the floor to questions.
* The next season of “Big Love” is shooting now and will hopefully land on the air in the first quarter of 2009.
* Larry David is currently filming a Woody Allen movie, but he’s planning to get back to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” once he’s finished with that, so fingers crossed for Season 7 in late 2009.
* There are six completed episodes of Linda Bloodworth-Thomas’s “12 Miles of Bad Road” floating around, but HBO has decided that the series isn’t right for them, so it’s anyone’s guess if, when, or where we’ll ever see it.
* There is enormous interest by Warner Bros./New Line to do another “Sex and the City” movie, and they’re trying with HBO’s help to put that together.
* David Chase is on vacation in France, but if he wants to do a “Sopranos” movie, HBO would be “delighted to explore that.”
* Pilots have been greenlit for “Treme,” dealing with post-Katrina New Orleans, “The Washingtonian,” based on a Jessica Cutler book, and one-hour drama about 1920s Atlantic City that’s written and executive-produced by Terry Winter, with Martin Scorsese also executive-producing.
* David Milch is working on a pilot called “Last of the Ninth” about New York City Police Department in the 1970s, which means that the likelihood of a “Deadwood” movie happening is slim to none.
* Both “In Treatment” and “Tell Me You Love Me” will be returning.
* The network’s upcoming miniseries, “Pacific Theater,” executive-produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman, just wrapped principal photography, and should air in either late ’09 or early ’10.
* Coming soon: “Number One Lady Detective,” based on the series of books by Alexander McCall Smith.
* Also coming soon: “Hung,” a half-hour comedy with Alexander Payne directing.
* Chris Rock will be doing his fifth HBO concert on September 27, 2008.
So there you go. Not a bad slate of stuff to keep you looking forward to for the next several months…and that’s not even counting the shows that earned their own panels.
First up: Ricky Gervais.
Though many Americans remain unaware of this fact, Gervais has stretched his career beyond television and film into the world of stand-up comedy. (His possession of the ability to do hilarious stand-up will come as no surprise to anyone who’s become addicted to the podcasts he’s done with his longtime writing partner, Stephen Merchant, and their associate, the inexplicable Mr. Karl Pilkington.) There are actually three DVDs worth of Gervais’ stand-up available in the UK – “Animals,” “Politics,” and “Fame” – but, to date, his Stateside fans have been given little opportunity outside of YouTube to investigate his facet of his work. Thankfully, HBO stands ready to change this by filming his performance next week at the Wamu Theater at Madison Square Garden, for air in the very near future. (The venue, according to Gervais was chosen because “I’ve just bought an apartment right near it, so I can walk.”)
Despite being one of the most distinctively British comedians working today, Gervais assured us that he won’t really have to change a great deal in his act for American audiences. “I obviously take out cultural references you wouldn’t get,” he admitted, “but I think it’s as simple as changing sort of stones for pounds. There’s nothing that I think an American audience wouldn’t like. It’s purely cultural references that might not be mutual. The things I pick on are probably global…and, you know, America, by its definition in the world, is pretty global, anyway. It’s a huge part of the world. Particularly the English-speaking world. I pick on the comedy classics. You know, Hitler, famine…
“What I do is, I have a bag of observations that I think might be funny, and I jot them down. I probably start with about half an hour, and that becomes an hour, and the other half an hour is sort of ad-libs and additions over the course of a
tour. The audience chooses the best bits for you. It’s a process of natural selection. So over a hundred dates, they’ve chosen your best hour. You thought it up and you said it, but they’ve sort of done the difficult bit for you.”
