Tuesday, May 18, 2010

TV News: Islands, Spies, and Single Ladies

Hawaii Five-O Theme

For no other reason than that Cal reminded me about it, here's one of the five greatest TV show themes of all time. (For some reason, it doesn't show up on my browser when I'm looking at the blog's front page, but it does when you open the post itself. Just in case you can't see it either.)



For all its Daniel Dae Kimness, if the new version doesn't have some variation of this music, it will have utterly failed.

Off the Map picked up



This was probably a no-brainer, but ABC has agreed to air Shonda Rhimes' (Grey's Anatomy) new tropical-island-doctors show Off the Map starring one of my favorite actors, Jason George (Eli Stone, Eastwick, Grey's Anatomy). [The Ausiello Files]

No Handsome Man for Terra Nova



Well, I'm sure it'll have a handsome man in it, but it won't have the Handsome Man, Kyle Chandler. He's apparently passed. [Hollywood Insider]

Chuck, Undercovers, a buttload of other new shows, and Captain Jack dances for "all the single ladies" after the break.


Chuck renewed



It's official. He's coming back for a fourth season and will be on Mondays at 8:00pm (Eastern Time).

Undercovers trailer and air time (plus a lot of other NBC shows)



Undercovers is JJ Abrams' new spy drama I was talking about last week, but NBC has trailers for all their new shows here.

That includes The Event, which I was kind of excited about until watching the trailer. I think a lot of my disappointment though was in how many times they squeezed the words "The Event" into the spot. That got really old.

Chase (about a woman who's a US Marshall) could be good. It looks like the trailer just summarizes the first episode, so it's hard to tell if I'll like the rest of the series.

I'm also undecided about The Cape. A lot of it looks like generic superhero crap, but there's some really touching stuff about family that got to me. Then again, the hero's quest to win back his family looks like such a core element to the show that it'll likely never be satisfactorily resolved. I hope I'm wrong about that. Also, Verne Troyer looks really cool in this. If you've seen him in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, you know he's capable of real acting, so I'm happy he's getting another opportunity to do that.

Out of the comedies, The Paul Reiser Show looks funniest, but Love Bites and Perfect Couples could be interesting, if not especially hilarious.

NBC's also announced their complete Fall schedule. The Event and Chase will be on Mondays after  Chuck. Undercovers will be on Wednesdays at 8:00 (ET) and Love Bites will be on Thursdays at 10. Paul Reiser and Perfect Couples will start mid-season.

And Now For Something Completely Different



Stuff Nobody Cares About But Me



That new Keri Russell show that I was hoping would get picked up has gotten picked up.



Man, I used to love 3rd Rock from the Sun. Now Kristen Johnston's going to be in a new show (if it gets picked up) called Beach Lane. It stars Matthew Broderick and Patton Oswalt as a journalist and the owner of a small, struggling newspaper in the Hamptons trying to turn their paper around. Johnston plays Oswalt's step-sister, a real-estate agent.

It's a sitcom, so I don't know that it'll make good on this, but there's interesting potential in having the lead characters working in industries that are so hard up right now. For instance, I wonder if Oswalt and Broderick's characters will talk about taking their paper online. I can't imagine that that would be the focus of the show, but I'm also trying to figure out how to do a newspaper show in this day and age without at least addressing it. [The Hollywood Reporter]

2 comments:

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

I was a little pissed to see JJ Abrams out with another show. I wish he would just stick to the shows he has one already. He's got a bad habit of starting strong and then letting everything fall to crap. I really hope this doesn't happen with Fringe like it did with Alias.

I have no hope that 'The Cape' will stay on more than a dozen or so episodes because we all know that Summer Glau is the kiss of death. But I will watch anything Kieth David does just to listen to him talk.

I also love anything Patton Oswalt is in so that series could work. It's a small town newspaper and small local papers tend to do better than the giants. I know the paper in our town is booming.

Michael May said...

I thought that looked like Summer Glau! I meant to check, but got distracted by something or other.

Good point about the small, local paper. I'm kind of hoping that a major focus of the show is the small-town aspect, but that would probably work better for an hour-long drama than the half-hour sitcom this is going to be. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see their approach. I like all three of the main actors.

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