I think he’s in love.
Wednesday’s “Ben Stiller’s Arrested Development, Kathy Bates joins American Horror Story and dancing with Starz” news
UK TV
- Paul Nicholls quits Law & Order: UK
- Monday ratings: Arrow gets nearly 600,000 viewers
US TV
- Sunday ratings
- Monday ratings: 2 Broke Girls, Mike and Molly hit season lows
US TV show casting
- Kathy Bates joins American Horror Story
- Ron Livingston joins Boardwalk Empire
- Ben Stiller returning to Arrested Development
- Jill Flint to guest on Elementary
New US TV shows
- Starz developing ballroom dancing drama Blackpool
- Anger Management producers to adapt Radio-Canada’s Adam & Eve
- Karl Sutter developing horror drama for FX
New US TV show casting
- Michael Stahl-David and Patrick Heusinger to star in Fox’s Boomerang
- Brittany Snow to star in Fox’s To My Future Assistant, Troy Gentle joins ABC’s How The Hell Am I Normal
- Stephen Root to star in Fox’s To My Future Assistant, Delory Lindo joins NBC’s Believe
- Patrick Flueger to star in NBC’s Hatfields & McCoys, Pablo Schreiber to co-star in NBC’s Ironside
- Stephen Louis Grush joins ABC’s The Syndicate remake Lucky 7, Johnny Simmons joins The CW’s Blink
- Toby Regbo to star in The CW’s Reign + other pilot casting
- Patrick Fugit to star in ABC’s Reckless + other pilot casting
- Jay Hernandez joins Fox’s Gang Related, Ana De La Reguera joins ABC’s Big Thunder
- Casting on NBC’s Rand Ravich pilot
- Lee Pace to star in AMC’s Halt & Catch Fire
- Cam Giganet to star in CBS’s Reckless. Yes, there are two Recklesses
- Lindsay Sloane to co-star in NBC’s Sean Hayes comedy, Colin Salmon and Robbie Kay to star in Bravo’s Rita
- Tom Mison to star as Ichabod Crane in Fox’s Sleepy Hollow
Tuesday’s “Sky Living acquires Hannibal, Peter Capaldi to star in BBC1’s The Three Musketeers and Lindsay Lohan’s Anger Management” news
Happy Birthday, Lovely Wife!
UK TV
- Peter Capaldi to star in BBC1’s The Three Musketeers. No sign of Grégory Fitoussi, malheureusement
- Sky Living acquires Hannibal
- Trailer for BBC3’s zombie show In The Flesh
US TV
- Trailer for season 2 of Veep
US TV casting
- Someone upped to regular on Supernatural [spoilers]
- Lindsay Lohan to guest on Anger Management
- Emily Procter to do two episodes of White Collar
- Alan Ritchson to guest on Hawaii Five-0
- Jamey Sheridan to guest on NCIS
- Jayma Mays to return to How I Met Your Mother
New US TV shows
- Only one new season for Arrested Development
New US TV show casting
- Alicia Silverstone to star in Lifetime’s HR
- Hamish Linklater to co-star in CBS’s Crazy Ones, Tim Pocock joins NBC’s Camp
- Daren Kagasoff to star in Fox’s Delirium, Aldis Hodge et al to feature in NBC’s The Sixth Gun…
- …Laura Ramsey to star
- JB Smoove joins CBS’s Greg Garcia comedy plus other pilot casting
- Janet Montgomery to star as Grace van Helsing in ABC’s Gothica
- Greg Grunberg joins ABC’s Doubt + other pilot casting
- Kelli Garner to star in Fox’s Two Wrongs + other pilot casting
- Rachel Griffiths to star in NBC’s Camp, Brent Sexton joins NBC’s Ironside remake
- Moshe Kasher joins ABC’s Spy remake + other pilot casting
- Gillian Anderson and Rachael Taylor to co-star in NBC’s Rand Ravich pilot
- Jamie Bell to star in AMC’s Turn
- Majandra Delfino and Jane Seymour join ABC’s Keep Calm, Billy Brown joins CBS’s Hostages remake
- Christine Lahti to co-star in CBS’s Beverly Hills Cop + other pilot casting
- Devin Kelley to star in ABC’s The Returned
French TV
Review: Engrenages (Spiral) 4×5-4×6 (France: Canal+; UK: BBC Four)
In France: Last autumn
In the UK: Saturday 23 February, 9pm, BBC Four
Well, we’re halfway throughout season 4 already. How distressing is that? Bloody BBC, burning through these things as if there’s an unlimited supply. This is France’s answer to The Wire, we’re talking about, and there’s not a lot on TV to rival it.
A more even affair this, following last week’s mix of not-so-cracking and cracking, with shocks aplenty. And for those who think I’m kidding about that comparison with The Wire, this week, on top of the usual less-than-complimentary look at French society, we had a police officer’s gun stolen and him going all out to get it back, a bunch of high-up police officers more concerned with the stats than getting to the root cause of crime, and a mysterious Greek with criminal connections turned up.
One unshocking thing we learnt this week, too: Ms Rullsenberg should be writing these reviews…
Continue reading “Review: Engrenages (Spiral) 4×5-4×6 (France: Canal+; UK: BBC Four)”
US TV
Review: Cult 1×1 (The CW)
In the US: Tuesdays, 9pm ET/8pm CT, The CW
In the UK: Mysteriously acquired by an unnamed network
Cults are really big right now on TV. The Following is on Fox and now we have Cult on The CW. Intriguingly, both shows were thought up years ago, The Following as the script for Scream 3 and Cult as a show for the now-defunct predecessor to The CW, The WB.
The two shows both have good pedigrees. The Following comes from long-time writer Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek and The Vampire Diaries) but Cult comes from the even older pen of Rockne S O’Bannon, who started out on The (New) Twilight Zone, before going on to create Farscape, Alien Nation and seaQuest DSV.
So perhaps it’s appropriate that Cult is a trickier, more knowing beast than The Following. The Following, of course, has all kinds of degrees of Scream-esque meta, but Cult takes things a step further. It begins seemingly as a somewhat stupid, tacky The CW show in which a young blonde cop, Kelly Collins, (Alona Tal) and an older, fatter, blacker cop have to investigate the cult run by Billy Grimm (Robert Knepper) to which Collins used to belong.
But just as they find somewhat buried in a wall and he utters the somewhat ludicrous and unfathomable “‘Well hey. These things just snap right off,” we discover we’ve been watching a TV show within a TV show. Collins is really actress Marti Gerritsen and Knepper is actor Roger Reeves and they star in The CW’s Cult.
With me so far? Good. Anyway, so far, so Pulaski/30 Rock. But rather than being a spoof or send up of the making of a TV show, Cult is a far darker creation that focuses on the nature of cult television and its fans. This Cult has fans and it’s created web sites and all kinds of other clues for them to seek out to discover more about the show. Except perhaps it’s not all fiction. Because when one fan seems to work it all out, he disappears. When his journalist brother Jeff Dean Sefton (Matthew Davis) comes looking for him, he starts to discover the same messages in the show that his brother did, and with the help of a researcher on the show, Skye Yarrow (Jessica Lucas), they begin to investigate Cult, to see if they can find out what’s really going on and what’s happened to his brother.
Here’s a trailer that gives away all the good bits from the first episode.