The Weekly Round-Up for April 18 to April 22

Here are the entertainment news items for this past week:

TELEVISION NEWS

After just three airings, CBS has pulled its mid-season series Chaos. Effective immediately repeats of CSI: NY will air for two weeks then starting on May 6, the new season of Flashpoint will air at 8 PM.

Game of Thrones just debuted on HBO on Sunday (April 17) and already the cable network has given the series an order for a second season.

The FX series Rescue Me returns on July 12 at 10 PM.

The BBC America will debut the new sci-fi drama Outcasts on June 18 at 9 PM. The series stars Eric Mabius (Ugly Betty), Liam Cunningham (Clash of the Titans) and Hermione Norris (MI-5) and Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica). The series takes viewers into a new world as it explores survival, sex, politics and the drive for power in a new post-Earth era.

The other new BBC America drama Bedlam will debut on October 8 at 9 PM. The series is set in Bedlam Heights, an apartment building converted from a pre-Victorian lunatic asylum where the inhabitants experience the darker side of the building’s history when former asylum spirits come back to claim what they believe to be theirs and seek revenge on those who have wronged them. The series stars singer and actor Will Young (Pop Idol and Skins), Charlotte Salt (The Tudors) and Joanna Page (Gavin & Stacey).

The cable network A&E has announced the season 2 premiere date for The Glades: June 5 at 10 PM.

Actress Amanda Tapping got onto Twitter yesterday to clear up some confusion regarding her Syfy show Sanctuary. Seems the show is moving to a new night, but tonight’s episode will air and then all further episodes will air on Monday nights at 10 PM.

BBC America has picked up the rights to air all 80 hours of the remake of Battlestar Galactica, including the two-part mini-series that started it all as part of the network’s “Supernatural Saturday”. It all kicks off on June 18 at 7 PM.

Actress Mary McCormack (In Plain Sight) is expecting and it turns out her character on the show – Mary Shannon – will be also. It is being presumed that the father is FBI Agent Farber (Steven Weber) for who Mary was involved with the season 3 finale. The show returns to the USA Network on May 1 at 10 PM.

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

Two Dallas alums will be joining the cast for the pilot of the TNT reboot. Charlene Tilton and Steve Kanaly will join Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray for the Ewing family reunion. Meanwhile, Cuban-born actress Marlene Forte (Crossing Jordan and House of Payne) has landed the final role on the TNT pilot (reboot of) Dallas. She will play Carmen, the Ewing family’s longtime housekeeper, whose daughter, Elena (Jordana Brewster), enjoys a friendship with Ewing cousins John Ross (Josh Henderson) and Christopher (Jesse Metcalfe). The network has yet to announce if the pilot will be picked up to series, though.

Chris Colfer (Glee) has penned a pilot that the Disney Channel is about to shoot. The project is called The Little Leftover Witch, which is based on a children’s book of the same name by Florence Laughlin. The series (if picked up by the cable network) would be about a little witch who was taken in by a family after crash-landing from her broom.

The recent Pulitzer Prize winning book A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan has been purchased by HBO with the intentions of making the “sprawling tale” into a TV series. The book focuses on a coterie of characters first introduced as they orbit the world of punk rock in 1980s San Francisco. Their lives are explored for the next 30 or so years, with interlocking stories that deal as much with changes in the lives of the characters as it does changes in technology.

Actor Masi Oka (Heroes and Hawaii Five-0) is teaming up with writer Alex Sabeti on an Inception-esque pilot script for Syfy that is called The Correctors. The pilot follows two agents of the Exceptions Bureau who are dispatched to a parallel universe where they inhabit the bodies of their identical selves in order to stop events from occurring. Sabeti and Oka developed the story and Sabeti will write the script with Masi attached to star and executive produce.

MADE FOR TV MOVIE NEWS

Young New York stage actor Dan Amboyer has been cast as William in the Hallmark movie entitled William and Kate: A Royal Love Story that follows the “glamorous future royal couple”.

CONDOLENCES

Much beloved British actress Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who and was the lead in the popular Sarah Jane Adventures TV series has passed away. She had been battling cancer. She was 63.

ME: Rest in Peace, Ms. Sladen. Deepest condolences to her family, friends and fans.

Tim Hetherington, news photographer and Oscar nominated co-director of the harrowing Afghanistan war film Restrepo, was killed in Libya this week while he was chronicling the civil conflict on the front line. He was 41.

ME: Rest in Peace, Mr. Hetherington. Deepest condolences to his family and friends.

MOMENT OF SILENCE, PLEASE….

CASTING SCOOP

Actor Kevin Alejandro (Southland and True Blood) will play Hercules Maldanado (aka The Tornado) in the season finale of Bones. Hercules is said to be a flashy, arrogant man obsessed with bowling, but his skills don’t match up. He’s sort of his team’s dead weight.

Actor Cliff Curtis (Trauma and Body of Proof) has landed the male lead opposite Ashley Judd in ABC action series Missing that centers on Becca Winstone (Judd), a devoted single mom who, after her 18-year-old son disappears in Italy, takes it upon herself to travel to Europe and track him down. It soon becomes clear that Winstone is a former CIA agent who will stop at nothing to bring her son home alive. Curtis will play the director of a CIA branch in London who risks his career to help Becca in her search.

NOTE: The weekly calendar and the box office news will appear separately this week.

Have a great weekend!