An archive of articles about US television programmes and production.
This one hadn’t occurred to me but it makes a whole load of sense:
“It is my opinion that the cast of Lost, having experienced far worse locations than Hawaii and slightly worse scripts than Lost, are stringing this thing out a bit.”
Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian
You just can’t get rid of Stargate. There was the movie. Then there was the first TV series, Stargate SG-1, which is now filming its tenth season, making it just about the longest running sci-fi show in the world short of Doctor Who. Then there’s the spin-off series Stargate: Atlantis, which is on to season three. There was also a spin-off cartoon, that was, thankfully, cancelled. Now they’re thinking of another movie that will launch a third series as well.
Can I say, at this point, enough with the Stargates already? To make both Stargate and Stargate: Atlantis requires a budget of $75 million per year. Give it to the poor instead. The idea has been milked well and good already. I keep watching them, mind you, but then I have an addictive personality. Cut me off, please. I beg you. I resent being addicted, intrigued and bored simultaneously.
On the other hand, guess how much money it’s made for the economy of British Columbia, the part of Canada where it’s filmed. Go on. You won’t be able to guess.
$500 million. That’s right. And we’re talking US not Canadian dollars here. You can see why they keep doing it, can’t you? Maybe some poor Canadians are getting some of that. We can only hope.
The Hoff has been trying to get a movie version of Knight Rider off the ground for years, but now the show’s creator, Glen A Larson, seems to have beaten him to the punch. There have already been two Knight Rider revivals – Knight Rider 2000 and Knight Rider 2010 – both of which were quite bad, but third time lucky, perhaps?
Personally, I’m holding out for an Airwolf movie, but will it really be the same?
NBC were going to give The West Wing a great big send-off this Sunday, just before the show’s last ever episode. But just as the network cancelled the series because of falling ratings and high costs, they’ve cancelled the interviews-and-clips special for the same reasons. Sad that, isn’t it?
On Saturday, I suggested that the producers of US crime shows don’t watch any of the other shows. I’ve now decided to expand the hypothesis to include other genres, thus necessity a name change for the hypothesis, which will now be called “Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ hypothesis” (so-called because only people in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!”).
I’m prompted to do this hypothesis-expansion because of Monday’s episode of Prison Break. During the last five minutes of the show, there was an extended montage overlaid with an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “So what?” you ask yourselves. Well, the thing is Prison Break airs on the Fox network in the US, as does House MD, everyone’s favourite tale of grumpy doctors. And as I’ve droned on about ad nauseum, the theme tune to House in the US isn’t the same as it is in the UK (the UK’s theme is apparently called “Buddha Grass Soul(kpm 548)” and was composed for the show especially, because of licensing issues). The US theme to House is in fact Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Two Fox shows in more or less the same time slot, both using the same piece of music.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned this to avoid being too anal about it. But Variety picked up on it, too. When quizzed though, Fox replied, “The music supervisor for Prison Break didn’t know it was the theme song for House.” But as Variety’s Josef Adalian points out, surely one of the producers of Prison Break will have watched House at some point.
Except if my hypothesis is right, of course… Still, I feel I need more evidence before I can bump my hypothesis up to the status of theory. And ‘Law’ is going to be a long time coming, I suspect.
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