Category: TV Dramas (Page 174 of 235)

TCA Press Tour: “Life Is Wild” makes bid to become the “Daktari” for the 21st century…

July 25, 2007 / Will Harris

…but how long will it take The CW to realize that it’s been forty years since “Daktari” and that there might not be a market for such a series in 2007?

Oh, wait: do you people even know what “Daktari” is? Sorry about that. Sometimes, I let my inner TV geek out to play and forget how to interact around normal human beings. Long story short, it was based on the movie, “Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion,” and it focused on the family of Dr. Marsh Tracy, a veterinarian at the Wameru Study Center for Animal Behavior, in East Africa, as they protected animals from poachers and whatnot. Basically, it was a pleasant family drama that gave producers an excuse to trot out lots of jungle beasts…and, honestly, that’s exactly what “Life Is Wild” is shaping up to be.

The panel for the show was a unique one in that the show is filmed in South Africa, so the cast appeared live via video, courtesy of a satellite link-up, but the conversation proved a little stilted at times, due to the few seconds of delay between us, and, ultimately, the most interesting part of the conversation wasn’t even audio; it was visual. A couple of the show’s animals, including a sleepy lion cub and a cheetah, appeared during the course of the event, and they were nice moments, but they left you wondering, “So is this what we can expect from the show itself? Will the opportunity to see these animals be the only real reason to tune in?”

You can actually see me in the lower left-hand corner of this shot. Note how hard I’m working.

Theoretically, the answer is “no.” At the very least, if the enthusiasm of South African actor Atandwa Kani is anything like his acting ability, he’ll be worth watching.

Of working on a big Hollywood production, Kani says, “It’s pretty amazing, because I think the only thing we see of Hollywood in South Africa is on TV and on the big screen. So when you have it, when you become part of it, and it becomes right in your face, it’s out of this world. It’s sort of surreal. I don’t think it’s hit me yet that I’m in this production. I don’t think it’s really hit me yet. And when it does, I think I’ll just faint, because it’s every actor’s dream to get to that standard, to the level in production that they produce. There’s a lot of South African actors that would love this opportunity. And to be in a production like this, it’s magnificent.”

I’m sure it is. And I’ll even give it a chance, because it really does look gorgeous. But I just don’t know if my interest will last…and I’m even more skeptical that the viewing audience’s will.

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TCA Press Tour: I am so not in The CW’s demographic…

July 24, 2007 / Will Harris

…and, yet, somehow, they still managed to slip one of the best shows of the upcoming season into their lineup: “Reaper.” But more on that in a bit…along with details about a surprisingly promising comedy called “Aliens in America.” (I haven’t seen the whole episode yet, but the preview was hilarious.)

First up were the pair of announcements from The CW’s executive VP of communications, Paul McGuire, who looks a little bit like Darrell Hammond and, to the relief of the gathered critics, had pretty decent comedic delivery as well. (There’s really nothing more excruciating than watching a network exec get an attack of the flop sweats as they attempt to be funny when it goes against every fiber of their being. Well, maybe watching the pilot for “Cavemen.” But not much else.)

* Supergirl will be flying onto “Smallville” this season, played by Laura Vandervoort. She’s hot, she can fly…what more do you want?

* There’ll be two new cast members on “Supernatural” this season: Lauren Cohan and Katie Cassidy. Katie’s dad, it turns out, is David Cassidy. I was so, so tempted to find her at the party later that night and ask her what her dad’s deal was about only wanting to talk to press who give rave reviews to his albums – back story: I only kinda-sorta liked his recent Target-exclusive album of remixes, and my indifference led to the cancellation of an already-scheduled interview – but I restrained myself…mostly because my wife was with me.

After McGuire’s comedic monologue, he introduced Dawn Ostroff, President of Entertainment with The CW, who dropped the following tidbits:

* On September 18th, the new season of “Beauty and the Geek” premieres with a new twist: this time, there’ll be a male beauty and a female geek.

* The CW has extended their deal with Tyra Banks through the 2009-2010 season, which means that as long as it keeps performing, you’ll keep seeing her within the context of “America’s Top Model.”

* Waiting in the wings: an ensemble comedy called “Eight Days a Week,” starring Christina Milian, Mario Lopez and Justin Hartley and produced by “Will & Grace”‘s Sean Hayes.

* “One Tree Hill” will be back with 22 new episodes…much to the annoyance of several of the critics, you could tell, since they – like me – would rather have seen the return of “Veronica Mars,” instead.

* This season’s new cringe-worthy reality show concept: “Farmer Wants a Wife.” Big city girls move to the country, and “Green Acres”-styled comedy hijinks almost certainly ensue.

* This season’s new cringe-worthy reality show in practice (or, at least, based on the clips I saw): “Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants.” Mother-daughter beauty pageants. It’ll probably be huge. But it made me want to run far, far away.

* Casting changes to new shows: Missy Peregrym, formerly the shape-shifting bad girl from “Heroes,” is now going to be on “Reaper,” while Scott Patterson – a.k.a. Luke from “Gilmore Girls” – will now be the dad on the sitcom “Aliens in America.”

* Chris Rock will finally appear in front of the camera on “Everybody Hates Chris” rather than simply serving as the show’s offscreen narrator. He’ll play a guidance counselor in the season premiere. (Further appearances aren’t currently scheduled, unfortunately.)

* No further movement on that long-rumored “Spike” movie. Says Ostroff, “We typically do not do movies of the week or miniseries. I never say never. You never know. Something could come up that just, you know, feels so right for us. But we have not had any conversations with Joss about the ‘Spike’ movie, although we would love to be in business with Joss in any way.”

* Asia, the winner of last year’s Pussycat Dolls series, has decided to go solo, thereby completely defeating the entire purpose of going through the season to become a member of the group.

* On the subject of “Gilmore Girls” wrapping up last season rather than lingering on for one for year: “We were looking at (the show) as the season was going on,” said Ostroff, “and I think that we all felt that the show had lost about 25 percent of its audience. Lauren Graham, who is, you know, the consummate professional and was truly fantastic to
deal with, as was Alexis — you know, we all talked about it. And I think that, at the end of the day, we just didn’t want to see ‘Gilmore Girls’ go on for another season and see the ratings go down even further. And I think we just felt that a lot of the stories had been told, and it was just time to move on. I was happy that the show ended on the two women, on the girls, because I felt that’s where the show started, and I was happy that that was the focus of how the show ended.”

* On the quick dumping of the much-tauted “Hidden Palms”: “We had ordered it as eight episodes,” explains Ostroff, “and we really saw it as probably a miniseries, a serialized miniseries of eight episodes. And if it were to catch on, we would have had the ability to do more episodes, but that’s really one of the ways that we talked about marketing it and having it on the air.”

* On dumping “Veronica Mars” after only three seasons, despite the loud clamoring of the show’s fans: “I can honestly sit here and I say I can not look back and have any regrets. I feel that we gave ‘Veronica Mars’ every chance,” declares Ostroff. “And as many of you here know, there was no stronger champion of that show than me. You know, we gave it a better time slot to follow up every single year that it was on the air. And eventually, we just had to say how much longer do we go on without the show really catching on? So the taking the show off the air for a while was not the demise of the show. We really tried every single year to figure out how we can bring more viewers in. We just weren’t able to crack it.”

To just close on a personal note, sorry, but I absolutely don’t buy that. “Veronica Mars” was a smart, funny, exciting series, and I refuse to believe that the network couldn’t have tried another timeslot or two to see if any of them worked any better. I mean, the diehards would’ve followed it anywhere they put it, so what would it have hurt?

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Close Encounter of the Keifer Kind

July 24, 2007 / Will Harris

As you’ve probably determined over the course of the past week or two, I’ve had a lot of close encounters with a lot of different folks thanks to this TCA press tour, but certainly one of the most high-profile of the bunch would have to be the one tonight with Keifer Sutherland. Sutherland made an appearance at Fox’s all-star party at the Santa Monica Pier, and although he pointedly hovered by himself in a corner for several minutes after his arrival, he was, thankfully, gracious enough to make himself available for a brief press scrum…

As far as the new season goes, Sutherland admits, “We’re still really working on it. We tend to do shows…well, map out ideas…eight episodes at a time. I don’t know if that’s a conscious effort or if it just happens that way, and we really are…and I say “we” kind of very generously…Howard (Gordon) and Joel (Surnow) and Bob (Cochran) have really been focused on making those eight records right. I know, because someone else said it to me, that you all know about the female president. I think one of the things that the show’s always done, even though Jack Bauer is a real apolitical character, they’ve had a really interest comment on American politics through the different Presidents, and I certainly think this is going to be a very strong one, so that’s something to expect.”

The relationship between Jack and the new President is, as far as Sutherland can speak to at the moment, relatively nonexistent. “They don’t start off…she’s not on his radar at all. Jack is starting from a very, very different place this season. You know, at the very end of Season 6, he was abandoning this as a life, and so we kick off and see not so much that it keeps drawing him back in a context that he wants to pursue anti-terrorist work but that certain things that he has done over the years that start to come back to get him. So that’s really where he starts off in the season: he’d like to let it all go, but he can’t. And then how the President and Jack Bauer will cross paths at some point in that day, I honestly can’t tell you. It’s not that I don’t want to, I just couldn’t!

The first four episodes that they write…and last year, I thought that the first four episodes of Season 6 were really four of the best episodes we’ve ever made…but (those first four episodes) inform the rest of that day. They’re also very aware that they’re seen over two nights, back to back. So they’ve all got a different context, these four episodes, than the rest of the twenty, and they have to really write and cater to those for that reason. They have to be right. We’ve been known to go to the absolute wire, and this year will be no different. But (those episodes) will also open up everything you get to do for the next twenty episodes, or it’ll shut you down, and we have learned that…and again I say “we”!…they have learned over the last six years, and every year is an effort to make fewer mistakes. Every year’s got them, we run into bumps all the time, that is the cost of trying to do something different or new. And each year, we start the season off a little slower, trying to avoid as many bumps as we can before we start.”

Sutherland says the new season will take place mere months after the previous season finale, and that it will start in the morning again, although he admits that “that’s as much a production issue as anything else. We shoot in the summer when it’s daytime and we get longer days, and we shoot night scenes in the winter when we have longer nights.” Hey, wait a minute: if it’s only a few months, then how is there already a new President? “That’s a great question,” he acknowledges. “In all fairness, they haven’t put an absolute time down.”

Sutherland is only vaguely apologetic when it comes to discussing the backlash against the show from the fans and critics after the previous season. “I felt the same about last year as I did every year,” he shrugs. “Every year, there are moments that are better than we had ever expected, and there are moments that are disappointing for us. I read a lot of the criticisms, and some of them I agreed wholeheartedly with, and some of them I did not. Again, I thought the first four episodes of last year were four of the best episodes we’ve ever done, and I felt the same way about the last four, and there are moments in-between where we settled. I think that the writers…and I don’t want to speak too much for them…but I think they had a hard time getting my storyline going without my doing a whole lot of stuff that I’d already done. So, y’know, last year was a huge learning experience for us…but, again, it doesn’t feel any different to me than any other year. I mean, all the way back to the first year, there’s stuff where all of us go, ‘What were we thinking?’ But we have done well, and we have been given so much incredible support by all of you, but you have to have your shot (at us) at some point, and last year was as good as any. And we certainly hear you. We’re always looking over our shoulder a bit! But, y’know, it is what it is. Our job stays the same. We try to do the best we can, but it’s such a complicated format to write for, with the real-time aspect, and every year, there will be struggles.”

In closing, don’t hold your breath waiting on that long-rumored “24” movie showing up anytime soon, though. “We are so focused on the show right now that I couldn’t imagine that any of the writers have even thought about that,” says Sutherland. “I think we’ve collectively agreed that that will be the first thing that we’ll do after we finish the show.”

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TCA Press Tour: Have we learned nothing from “Cop Rock”?

July 23, 2007 / Will Harris

Well, if we have, it’s only that if we’re gonna try to create a television show that blends a family drama about a casino in Laughin, Nevada, with singing, you’d better at least have a major star or two in the cast in order to up the “must see” factor…which might well explain why “Viva Laughlin,” CBS’s new “dramatic television show with music” (choice of phrase courtesy of producer Bob Lowry), features recurring appearances by Hugh Jackman and Melanie Griffith…and while I haven’t seen the pilot yet, in the clips we saw before the panel, we bore witness to the former making his entrance by way of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy to the Devil,” while the latter cooed Blondie’s “One Way or Another” through a seduction scene.

I’m not saying there isn’t a certain amount of curiosity there. I’m just saying, when the curiosity factor has passed, will the series be able to maintain that level of interest when that responsibility lands on the shoulders of the show’s regular cast?

Maybe that’s why Lowry is, at least to a certain extent, trying to downplay the level of music in the series, throwing out the stat of “two and a half to three” when asked how many songs he was anticipating to appear per episode. “The way I get the fraction out of it,” he explains, “is sometimes we use a reprise.

“What I love about this show — one of the many things that I love about this show — is we always have about four balls in the air,” explains Lowry. “We always have the grounded stories in the casino franchise. We have a murder mystery which we need to have in the air. We have a family drama, we’re juggling that. And how these three areas interweave with our characters and how they play off of each other within these three different dramatic elements. And then, fourth is music. So music doesn’t really outweigh the other three. It’s a question of balance. And I think if we were excessive with music or if music weighed more heavily in these four elements that I’m talking about, then it would be perceived more as a musical. When we’re approaching these stories, we’re telling story first. And I tell them what we are doing is addressing all of these stories as if music did not exist. Because if you were to remove the music, we still want to have a very entertaining, dramatic piece, so we need to have solid story to tell. And then, the music we use to enhance that is sort of an emotional soundtrack of our characters and to support the essence of the scenes.”

As far as song selections, don’t be expecting any Beatles; they simply aren’t down with licensing out their songs for…well, much of anything, really. (Just ask the producers of “The Singing Bee.”) And don’t go looking for Pink Floyd’s “Money,” either. “We wanted to use (‘Money’) because we’re about a casino, and we were simply denied the song. But,” shrugs Lowry, “there are a lot of songs about money.”

As far as how often we’ll see Mr. Jackman pop up during the proceedings, Lowry says he appears a few times during the first few episodes, but “he’s doing a movie in Australia now with Baz Luhrmann, and he has a terrific feature career, and his availability is purely limited to us. I hope we will be able use him more and more up until our 22 episodes, even though we don’t have a pickup for 22. I hope that we will go to 22 and (that) we will use him more.” (Adds star Lloyd Owen, “I think if he sees me getting too many good songs, he’ll start making more appearances.”)

Fortunately, the Tony Award-winning Jackman won’t have the pressure to do all the show’s singing…which, given his apparently rare appearances, stands to reason, really. Even so, star D.B. Woodside acknowledges, “I believe we can all carry a tune…which is good!”

As someone who monitors the release of TV series on DVD, however, I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows when Lowry admitted that he had no idea if, in fact, the songs in the show were licensed for DVD release purposes. I mean, I wouldn’t bet on this thing being the big fall hit, but crazier things have happened…and if it IS a success, can you imagine what a let-down it would be for fans to discover that, hey, sorry, we can’t actually do it. You’d like to think that people have learned their lesson after the issues with shows like “The Wonder Years” and “WKRP in Cincinnati,” but I guess we’ll see…

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TCA Press Tour: Newsflash – “Moonlight” in no way resembles “Angel”!

July 23, 2007 / Will Harris

Any similarities you may find between the two series, both of which are produced by David Greenwalt and are about a vampire who – ho, ho – moonlights as a detective, are, of course, complete coincidence. Right…?

Says Greenwalt, “My agent said in May, “You’ve got to read this ‘Moonlight.’ It’s fantastic. And I read a couple of pages and discovered it was (about a) vampire detective, and I said, ‘Not only am I not going to read this, I’m going to sue them. This is my show!’ But he kept talking to me and, eventually, I did read it, and I did fall in love with it.

“It’s vampire 2007. It’s a new ball game. You know, it’s certainly a genre show. But just some tiny examples. You know, there are no other demons, there’s no other monsters. You know, it’s not that supernatural of a world. It’s a sleek modern world, Los Angeles. And literally the vampire makeup is different, the mythology is different, and it’s a world where they really live among us. And there’s not that many of them. And the show has all my favorite things. It’s got deep heart, and big love, and funny, which I am attracted to.”

Actor Alex O’Laughlin, meanwhile, is just plain attracted to playing a vampire, so he’s quite psyched about scoring the lead role of vampire detective Mick St. John. “I’ve been kind of obsessed with the genre since I first discovered it,” he admits. “I discovered Anne Rice when I was sort of late teens. And I read the first five or six books of “The Vampire Chronicles” twice, actually, which was a little obsessive. But I loved her character development, (and) I learned so much about the mythology of vampires through her storytelling. Also, I grew up in Australia with American TV and American cinema, because we didn’t really have that much of our own, so I grew up with all of the films that you guys did; ‘The Lost Boys’ was a huge film for me when that was made, and the ‘The Hunger’ was also something that I really loved. So, yeah, I’ve always sort of wanted to play a vampire!”

Basically, what fans of Greenwalt’s previous show should be aware of is that this is a very different universe from the one in which Angel and company reside. There are comparatively few vampires in the world of “Moonlight” (“Maybe there’s a thousand or two in all of Los Angeles,” says Greenwalt, “(so) it’s a small thing”), and, as it stands right now, there aren’t trolls, demons, and whatnot wandering around.

A closing note: during the “Bones” panel, someone asked David Boreanaz if he was planning to do a cameo on Greenwalt’s new vampire-turned-detective show. “Yeah,” he said, with a laugh. “Maybe I’ll show up as the guy who kills the vampire.”