Posted by Will Harris (08/09/2010 @ 1:15 am)
Much as the CBS family of networks split their efforts into two days worth of panels – one for CBS, the other for Showtime and The CW – so did Fox give us some breathing room by placing their presentations for FX's slate of new programming on a separate day. (I wish to God NBC / Universal would take a cue from their peers. I'm so sick of being rushed through a mishmosh of NBC, USA, Bravo, and SyFy series in one long can't-stop-won't-stop day.)
Executive Session
Your personal mileage may vary, but for my money, John Landgraf is one of the nicest network heads currently in the game. He's very low-key, but he's always ready to give you a quote when you're looking for one. Today, he offered up the following bits and pieces about the future of FX.
* "Louie" has been renewed for a second season of 13 episodes.
* Ben Garant and Tom Lennon, late of "Reno 911!," are going to do a pilot for FX called "The USS Alabama." It's another partially-scripted, partially-improvised series, and, according to Landgraf, "It takes place in space on the USS Alabama with a crew of spacefarers who might not be too much brighter than the cops in 'Reno 911!'"
* There are two other pilots in the works as well, the first being "Outlaw Country," which will star Mary Steenburgen. "Some really talented young actors have joined that cast," said Landgraf. "That goes into production in, I think, six weeks. It's a fantastic script. Something we're really, really excited about." The other is "Wilfred," a comedy pilot based on an Australian comedy series, which completed principal photography last week.
* The "Damages" deal done with DirecTV is different from the one that was done with "Friday Night Lights" in that FX will not be offering up the episodes after they've run on DirecTV. "The season that has aired, which was the third season of 'Damages,' is the last season it will air on FX," said Landgraf. "For us, we're also producers on 'Damages.' We've been co-owners and co-producers through FX Productions, and DirectTV felt very strongly. They were willing to underwrite it, and to a very substantial amount financially, they enabled it to move forward. That was the deal that Sony worked on very aggressively, but they wanted it exclusively, so this was really the best and only way for 'Damages' to move forward. So we stepped aside as a network entity, and we're still involved as a production entity."
I don't know that there's any series currently on the air that I feel worse about not watching than "Sons of Anarchy." Everyone tells me it's fantastic, I have every reason to believe that those people are right, and yet I just haven't had the time to go back and revisit the show's first two seasons. But that won't stop me from bringing you the info that creator Kurt Sutter and his cast provided to us during the show's panel, of course.
As far as the "big bad" for Season 3, as it were, Sutter says, "We have a couple dual storylines going in Charming and as well as in Belfast, but I guess if you had to pin it down to one specific adversary, I would say that it's probably the Titus Welliver character, Jimmy O."
What of the theme of the new season? "I don't know if there's one specific overriding theme," said Sutter. "I think the theme is always about family and Jax sort of defining his role as a father and as a partner and as a son and as a member of this club, and the Abel storyline drives us through pretty much the entire season, and…I don't want to give anything away in terms of what that means and where that takes us, but, you know, the thing is our seasons, the actual span of time within our seasons is very short. It's potentially a couple, two or three weeks. So there isn't a lot of time that passes where you can have a lot of things unfold organically. So it is a very concentrated period of time which I think helps feed, I think, the sense of urgency for the tasks that they have at hand this season."
Posted in: 2010 Fall TV Preview, Interviews, News, Pilots, Reviews, Sons of Anarchy, TCA Blog 2010, TCA Press Tour, TV, TV Action, TV Comedies, TV Dramas
Tags: Aisha Tyler, Archer, Ben Garant, Charlie Hunnam, Chase Utley, Chris Parnell, Damages, Dayton Callie, Donal Logue, Glenn Howerton, H. John Benjamin, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Jackie Marcus Schaffer, Jeff Schaffer, John Landgraf, Kaitlin Olson, Katey Sagal, Kurt Sutter, Lights Out, Maggie Siff, Mark Boone Junior, Matt Thompson, Michael Raymond-James, Outlaw Country, Rob McElhenney, Ron Perlman, Ryan Howard, Shawn Ryan, Sons of Anarchy, TCA Blog Summer 2010, Ted Griffin, Terriers, The League, The USS Alabama, Thomas Lennon, Tom Sizemore, Wilfred
TCA Tour: FX Executive Session
2010 Year End TV Review: Jason Zingale
Greetings to the New Series: "Terriers"
Greetings to the New Show: "Archer"
Winter 2011 TCA Press Tour: Day 11 – or – The Day The Tour Ended
"Inglourious Basterds" DVD launch: A less deadly Operation Kino kicks some Nazi ass
Posted by Bob Westal (12/21/2009 @ 11:13 am)
So, while I was procrastinating conducting in-depth research for this post, covering a promotional screening for the rather glorious "Inglourious Basterds," I found myself going over numerous reviews and think pieces. One piece for a very respectable and staid looking website started out normally enough but, while praising "Pulp Fiction" and other older films in the Quentin Tarantino catalogue, it quickly became unusually vicious. Tarantino is a filmmaker who has a special gift for generating a certain degree of critical anger, the cinephile hubbub kicked up by critic and film historian Jonathan Rosenbaum over the film's non-portrayal of the Holocaust being one prominent example, but this was different.
As I noted the attention this particular review seemed to be paying to the ancestry of the cast, crew, and characters, I realized that the hate was not over anything so conventional as concerns that "Basterds" might be trivializing the Holocaust or World War II. I was reading a "white nationalist" web site. Yes, even more than some overly sensitive liberals, Nazis hate "Inglourious Basterds." Considering it's a movie in which a bunch of Jews, a part Cherokee good ol' boy lieutenant, an African-French projectionist, a traitorous movie star, and a few odd others defeat the Third Reich in a painful and fiery manner, displeasing Nazis is kind of the whole idea.
Certainly, no one was feeling conciliatory towards facists or racists of any stripe as a good portion of the "Basterds" cast and crew turned up at the last of L.A.'s revival houses, the legendary New Beverly Cinema, to celebrate the DVD/Blu-Ray release of the the award-winning, genre-blending war flick. Indeed, as neighbors from the heavily Hasidic West Hollywood-adjacent neighborhood ignored the commotion, a few of us less observant entertainment scribes got the chance to talk to a select group of not-quite superstar basterds, including players in two of the more acclaimed sitcoms of all time, a personable musician and Tarantino-buddy turned actor, and a passionate producer who is not about to let any conservative climate deniers take away his Oscar…but that's all ahead.
Posted in: Action Movies, Actors, Actresses, Horror Movies, Lost, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movie DVDs, Movies, News, Sci-Fi Movies, TV, TV Action, TV Comedies, TV Sci-Fi
Tags: Academy Awards, Airplane, An Inconvenient Truth, Andre de Toth, B.J. Novak, Bridget von Hammersmark, Cabin Fever, Chuck Conners, cinematic cockblocking, Climategate, Cotton, Damon Lindelof, Death Proof, Detour, Diane Kruger, Edgar G. Ulmer, Eli Roth, Endangered Species, Freaks and Geeks, Headlines, Hornet's Nest, Hostel, Inglorious Bastards, Inglourious Basterds, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Judd Apatow, Kelly's Heroes, Kill Them All and Come Back Alone, Lawrence Bender, Lionel Chetwynd, Lost, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Caine, Minday Kaling, Mission: Impossible, Nation's Pride, Nazis, Neal Scweiber, Neo-Nazis, New Beverly Cinema, Ollie Klublershturf vs. the Nazis, Omar Doom, Operation Kino, Oscars, Paul Lieberstein, Peter Graves, PFC Omar Ulmer, Play Dirty, Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs, Rock Hudson, Roger L. Simon, Ryan Howard, Samm Levine, The Big Book of Jewish Humor, The Dirty Dozen, The Five Man Army, The Office, Uma Thurman, William Novak, Xena: Warrior Princess
Movie news for now people
It's your end of week movie news dump…
RIP Peter Graves
Some not very newsy awards news (updated)