Recaps
The Weekly Round-Up for April 19 to 23
Here are the entertainment news items for this week:
NEWS
Congratulations to all the winners of the 45th annual Academy of Country Awards, including Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert and Lady Antebellum.
Looks like legendary actor Leonard Nimoy will be retiring from acting after his final appearance on Fringe later this season.
TV SERIES NEWS
Scott Porter will be back as Jason Street in the 7th episode of the fifth season of Friday Night Lights.
Laurence Fishburne will return for another season on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
AMC has given Mad Men a premiere date for its fourth season: Sunday, July 25 at 10 PM. Then on the following Sunday the new AMC drama Rubicon will have its two-hour debut at 8 PM. The series is a conspiracy thriller starring James Badge Dale (24 and The Pacific) and Miranda Richardson. It is set in a New York City-based government intelligence agency. It will shift to its regular time of 9 PM after its debut.
NBC has picked up family drama Parenthood for a second season. It also looks like Jason Ritter (Joan of Arcadia) will appear in the May 25 season finale
The new A&E summer crime drama The Glades will debut on Tuesday, July 13 at 10 PM. The series is about a charming Chicago homicide detective (Matt Passmore from McLeod’s Daughters) is exiled to a small and not-so-idyllic Florida town. The series also stars Kiele Sanchez (Lost) and Carlos Gomez (Sleeper Cell).
The next Glee soundtrack – Glee, The Music: Volume 3 Showstoppers – will be out on May 18 and will include 19 songs from the second half of the season. Glee: The Music, The Power of Madonna has already been released.
Monet Mazur will return to the ABC series Castle as Gina Cowell, Castle’s ex-wife and book editor. She shows up because Castle has fallen behind on his latest book.
While network confirmation has not been made yet, it looks like the Canadian series Being Erica has been renewed for a 3rd season. It was also reported that actor Dillion Casey will be back on the show as Erica’s former boyfriend Ryan.
The Closer will be back on TNT on July 12 at 9 PM with the debut of the new series Rizzoli & Isles at 10 PM. Also, actor/singer Donnie Wahlberg will appear in two episodes of the new series, which stars Angie Harmon (Law & Order) and Sasha Alexander (NCIS) as crime-solving friends Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles. He will appear as a childhood friend of Rizzoli who is now working as her boss. Lorraine Bracco (The Sopranos) co-stars as Rizzoli’s mother.
Mark Your Calendars: The two-hour pilot of Lost will be aired on Saturday, May 22 at 8 PM with five hours of Lost to then be aired on Sunday, May 23, starting with a two-hour preshow and recap followed by the two-hour finale and a special edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live: After the Final Rose.
ONLINE NEWS
The online series Web Therapy from Lisa Kudrow that is comprised of 45 mini-episodes will be threaded together into half-hour episodes and aired on Showtime sometime later this year.
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
Aisha Tyler (Ghost Whisperer) and Scott Foley (Felicity and The Unit) have joined the CBS comedy pilot Open Books about June Gage (Laura Benanti), a book editor at a boutique New York publishing house. Tyler will play Lydia, June’s best friend, a libidinous, glamorous, waitress-actress. Kevin Rahm and Patti LuPone also star.
Brannon Braga (FlashForward) will be the show runner of the Steven Spielberg FOX drama Terra Nova. The sci-fi drama is about a family from 100 years in the future who travel back in time 150 million years to prehistoric Earth ruled by dinosaurs. It is rumored that Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights) has been offered a lead role in this series.
Mireille Enos (Big Love) has landed the lead role in the AMC drama pilot The Killing, which ties together three distinct stories by a single murder and as the detectives assigned to the case disagree about the best course of action, they chase down a variety of leads and suspects. She will play Sarah Linden the homicide detective who’s investigating the aforementioned murder. Billy Campbell and Michelle Forbes also star.
BOX OFFICE NEWS
Summit Entertainment has acquired the rights to the best-selling book series Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The plan is to launch an ensemble-driven film franchise.
Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen and Cliff Curtis (Trauma) are attached to star in the movie The Dreamers about an opera singer who loses her voice in a fire and decides to travel the world anonymously. The project is based on a screenplay written by the late Orson Welles and Oja Kodar, which is based on two stories from the 1934 novel Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen.
Kurt Russell, Adrien Brody and Sharon Stone will appear in the box office movie Waco, which delves into the Branch Davidian compound disaster that took place outside the city in 1993.
Looks like MGM won’t be making the next Bond movie due to their current shaky financial situation.
Brittany Snow (American Dreams) is expected to appear in the movie 96 Minutes, which follows two college girls held hostage by high-school-aged hijackers.
Pam Grier is set to play the best friend of Julia Roberts’s character in the Tom Hanks movie Larry Crowne, which is currently filming.
Blake Lively (Gossip Girl), Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) and Hugh Dancy (Ella Enchanted) are attached to the romantic comedy Cover Girl.
Dwayne Johnson will replace Clive Owen in the action-thriller Protection about a disgraced former Special Forces soldier turned bodyguard of a judge’s 21-year-old daughter who witnesses her father’s murder at the hands of a member of a powerful Mexican cartel.
MADE-FOR-TV MOVIES
David James Elliott (JAG) will star in the Hallmark Channel movie Dad’s Home on June 19 at 9 PM. The movie is about widower Ben Westman (Elliott) who barely knows his two kids. As a busy advertising executive, he hires housekeepers to keep things running smoothly at home; but suddenly, that all changes when he loses his job and must fire his help, takes over the household chores and becomes a full-time father. Sharon Case (The Young and the Restless) will star as one of his kid’s third-grade teacher.
Christine Taylor (The Brady Bunch Movie) will star with Christopher Wiehl (Jericho) in the Hallmark Channel holiday movie Farewell Mr. Kringle. The movie centers on a small town’s Santa Claus who, after 50 years, is hanging up his hat and Anna Walls (Taylor), a magazine writer, is assigned to find out what makes this Santa tick. Wiehl plays a former cutthroat divorce lawyer turned compassionate bed and breakfast owner.
CASTING SCOOP
Marion Ross will guest star in the May 13 episode of Grey’s Anatomy, playing an older patient who has an amazing epic love story with another older patient in the hospital.
Gil McKinney (ER) will appear in a six-episode arc on the upcoming 5th season of Friday Night Lights playing a smart and attractive graduate teaching assistant in a college history department who is married. While his wife is away on sabbatical, he strikes up a relationship with Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarden) that will become more than professional.
David Sutcliffe (Gilmore Girls and Private Practice) will appear in an upcoming episode of Drop Dead Diva as the man with one too many wives (ala Big Love). Vivica A. Fox and Bellamy Young will play his wives.
Kellie Martin (Life Goes On and ER) will also guest star in Drop Dead Diva as a victim of a Ponzi scheme.
Claudia Black (Farscape and Stargate: SG-1) will make a guest appearance on the May 11 episode of NCIS.
Laura San Giacomo (Saving Grace) will be guest starring on In Plain Sight, playing Laura, a woman who, after one scare too many, decides to snitch on her family’s organized crime biz.
Chad Faust (The 4400) will guest star in the May 7 episode of Miami Medical as a trauma patient who is admitted after Miami’s “Calle Cubana” celebration takes a violent turn.
Legendary actor Hal Holbrook will guest star in a four-episode arc, starting with the third season premiere, of Sons of Anarchy, playing the father of Gemma (Katey Sagal).
RUMOR PATROL
Anna Camp (True Blood) has reportedly filmed scenes for the AMC series Mad Men. The network has yet to confirm the casting, however, nor are their details on the story arc.
Garrett Hedlund, who will be seen in the upcoming movie Tron: Legacy later this year is in talks to play one of the two lead roles in the movie On the Road, which is an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s acclaimed 1951 novel about his years traveling all over North America with his friend Neal Cassady. Hedlund would play Dean Moriarty, the character based on Cassady.
Zooey Deschanel (Alice) is in talks to play star in the period drama Enchantress of Numbers where she will play Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, was a 19th-century writer and key figure in the development of machines that went beyond simple mathematics and into more complex computational problems. Billy Crudup (Watchmen and Almost Famous) and Toby Jones (The Mist) have also joined the cast.
Matt Damon and Keira Knightley have been offered the lead roles in a film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is The Night, which follows the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wealthy wife and patient Nicole who live on the French Riviera in the 1920’s.
Marisa Tomei is in talks to join the legal thriller The Lincoln Lawyer. Based on the 2005 Michael Connolly best-seller, the story follows a low-level criminal defense attorney (Matthew McConaughey) who ends up representing a wealthy client with ties to a previous murder case he handled. Tomei will play the attorney’s ex-wife and the case’s prosecuting attorney Maggie McPherson.
Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) may be joining the action thriller Deathgames about a young man (Kellan Lutz) who is kidnapped and forced into a savage, modern-day gladiator arena, where men fight to the death for the amusement of online gamblers. Samuel L. Jackson plays the organizer of the games. Kim would play a fellow prisoner, an artist and skilled kendo fighter who competes for the sake of both his life and his wife’s.
Sam Mendes is in the running to direct and Robert Downey, Jr. MIGHT play ‘The Wizard’ the box office movie Oz The Great And Powerful, the planned prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” from Disney.
Seth Rogen and Chris Pine are on the short list to possibly star alongside Reese Witherspoon in the comedy movie This Means War, which follows two life-long friends who fall for the same woman (Witherspoon) who has moved into their spare room.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
The following movies, specials and series will debut and/or air this weekend and throughout next week:
The HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino in the lead role, will air on Saturday, April 24 at 9 PM.
NOTE: The movie will reair on Sunday, April 25 at 5:45 PM.
CBS will air the movie When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story on Sunday, April 25 at 9 PM. The movie is about the story of Lois Wilson (Winona Ryder) who co-founded Al-Anon after her husband Bill (Barry Pepper) co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous.
The Lifetime Movie Network movie Deadly Honeymoon will air at 9 PM at Sunday, April 25 and stars Chris Carmack (The O.C.) as a groom who goes missing on a honeymoon cruise after an adulterous night of partying. Summer Glau (Firefly and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) stars as his bride.
There will be a mini-marathon of Merlin episodes on Syfy on Tuesday, April 27. Check your local listings for start time.
PBS will air Hamlet as part of their Great Performances on Wednesday, April 28 at 8 PM. This version of the Shakespearean classic stars David Tennant (Doctor Who) in the legendary role alongside Patrick Stewart.
The new series Happy Town will debut on ABC on Wednesday, April 25 at 10 PM. The show is about Haplin, a small town in Minnesota, which has its first crime following a period of peace after a series of unsolved kidnappings. Among the cast are Geoff Stults (7th Heaven), Amy Acker (Angel) Steve Weber (Wings), Robert Wisdom (Prison Break) and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park).
Here are the new episodes of the dramas (and a few others) that will be airing this coming week:
Saturday, April 24:
The Guard on ION at 9 and 10 PM
Doctor Who on BBC America at 9 PM
NOTE: Legend of the Seeker will air in syndication this weekend. Check your local listings for date, time and channel.
Sunday, April 25:
Desperate Housewives on ABC at 9 PM
Brothers & Sisters on ABC at 10 PM
Breaking Bad on AMC at 10 PM
The Pacific on HBO at 9 PM
Treme on HBO at 10 PM
Army Wives on Lifetime at 10 PM
The Tudors on Showtime at 9 PM
NOTE: Legend of the Seeker will air in syndication this weekend. Check your local listings for date, time and channel.
Monday, April 26:
One Tree Hill on the CW at 8 PM
Gossip Girl on the CW at 9 PM
House on FOX at 8 PM
24 on FOX at 9 PM
Chuck on NBC at 8 PM
Trauma on NBC at 9 PM
10 Things I Hate About You on ABC Family at 8 PM
Tuesday, April 27:
V on ABC at 10:02 PM
NCIS on CBS at 8 PM
NCIS: Los Angeles on CBS at 9 PM
The Good Wife on CBS at 10 PM
Glee on FOX at 9 PM
90210 on the CW at 8 PM
Parenthood on NBC at 10 PM
Survivors on BBC America at 10 PM (Series Finale)
Justified on FX at 10 PM
Law & Order: Criminal Intent on USA at 10 PM
Wednesday, April 28:
Mercy on NBC at 9 PM (Special Air Time)
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC at 10 PM
In Plain Sight on USA at 10 PM
Thursday, April 29:
FlashForward on ABC at 8 PM
Grey’s Anatomy on ABC at 9 PM
Private Practice at 10 PM
CSI on CBS at 9 PM
The Mentalist on CBS at 10 PM
The Vampire Diaries on the CW at 8 PM
Supernatural on the CW at 9 PM
Bones on FOX at 8 PM
Fringe on FOX at 9 PM
Friday, April 30:
Ghost Whisperer on CBS at 8 PM
Medium on CBS at 9 PM
Miami Medical on CBS at 10 PM
Smallville on the CW at 8 PM
Stargate Universe on Syfy at 9 PM
Merlin on Syfy at 10 PM
NOTE: Please check your local listings for the correct air dates and times for all of the above.
Have a great weekend!
Please note that I will feature a weekly round-up of sci-fi based (and similar genres) news items at our sister site located at http://scifitvzone.com/. Please visit there as often as you can. Thanks!
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