Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

Reuters: Taliban insurgents have ordered residents of a province near the capital Kabul to stop watching television, saying the networks were showing un-Islamic programs.
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It’s the time of year when all the casting news starts trickling out of our favorite scifi shows and scifi shows to be. Today, two tidbits from The Scifi Channel:
"Eureka" will be picking up the lovely and talented Frances Fisher. Fisher ("In The Valley Of Elah") will be playing Samantha Thorne, a Global Dynamics "fixer" who will appear for an eight-episode plot arc. No doubt she’ll be on hand to sweep up the many, many complicated messes that the residents of Eureka manage to make. I bet she and the sheriff will get along just fine.
"Battlestar Galactica" fans are waiting with bated breath for any news on the upcoming "Caprica" prequel. Will it be awesome? Will it suck? Will it have Eric Stoltz? The last question, at least, can finally be answered. Stoltz will play Daniel Graystone, a filthy rich computer engineer with a terrible tragedy in his history. I’m […]

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Fans of Jennifer Love Hewitt and ghosts rejoice, the show made just for you will be in reruns on The Scifi Channel. Scifi has inked a big juicy deal with CBS to rerun "Ghost Whisperer" along with some other favorites from the CBS catalogue including; "Star Trek: TNG," "Charmed," "Early Edition," "Highlander," "Mork & Mindy," and "Friday the 13th: The Series." "Ghost Whisperer" will begin airing in four-hour primetime chunks in the Fall of 2009; this year, "TNG" will re-premiere on Monday, June 2nd. No word on when or if any of the other properties will make it to the airwaves.
It may be wrong, but I’m tickled pink about the potential return of "Friday the 13th." "Ghost Whisperer" is fine and dandy, but "Friday the 13th" is the flavor of a youth misspent watching too much scifi and horror. Did anyone else love this series? Maybe "Mork & Mindy" is […]

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After seven seasons of bald, handsome villainy, Michael Rosenbaum is ready to take a break from playing the Junior Miss edition of one of the most famous supervillains. In a press release Thursday, Michael announced his plans to leave "Smallville" and the character of Lex Luthor behind him, which might be good for his career but leaves the poor boy of steel in a bit of a lurch. Will Superman without Lex be like Sonny without Cher, or will the show soldier gamely on without him? I’ve never been a religious follower of "Smallville," but it always seemed to be that Luthor was one of the best elements of the show. The producers seem willing to hint that he’ll at least be back around for guest spots, however, so at least there’s some hope.
Along with the bad news, we get a bit of the good. A few new villains are […]

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At this point, there is basically no parody of reality television so broad that we can trust that someone won’t think it’s a genuinely good idea. Just a few weeks after the brilliant "30 Rock" had a gag show-within-the-show called "MILF Island," TV Land has announced its plan to create well, almost exactly that. The as yet unnamed project will center around a bunch of young men who will try to win the heart of a "sexy and accomplished mature woman." Since there’s no mention of her children, I suppose technically she’s a cougar and not a MILF, which is way classier. I have no doubt that TV Land will give this topic the sensitive, tasteful treatment that it deserves.
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Don’t look now, but David Blaine has performed another pointless stunt of human endurance/freakitude. Today on "Oprah," the Blainester held his breath for just over 17 minutes, breaking the world’s record and realizing what only he would call a lifelong dream. Will someone please tell me why he won’t just go away? Does anyone remember "David Blaine: Street Magic?" That brief moment when David Blaine’s cleverness outweighed the massiveness of his ego seems long, long gone now. Now, all that remains of the card-tricking, levitating weirdo is a bloated self-image and a freaky stare.
Funnyordie.com has a whole series of videos that lampoon Blaine with painful accuracy - they’re screamingly funny. But be warned, they are only safe for work if your work is okay with people screaming obscenities at the tops of their lungs.
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Everybody’s got a few pet shows that were cancelled too soon. They make us raise our fists to the sky and curse network execs everywhere, but thanks to DVD they live on in our hearts forever. "Sports Night" is one of those shows for me, as well as many other fans of the fast-talking, fast-walking style of Aaron Sorkin. There was a no-frills DVD package put out in 2002, but it’s out-of-print and impossible to find. Fortunately for us True Fans, there’s a rumor that we’ll get a 10th anniversary edition.
The 1998 series only lasted a season and a half, but unlike "Studio 60," Sorkin’s other short-lived behind-the-camera series, it was really excellent television that didn’t deserve to get chased off the screen. Set in a "Sportscenter"-esque late night sports news show, the show was a little too serious for its half-hour format and a little too funny for […]

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AMC scored a surprise critical hit with their first original series, "Mad Men," a lush period piece about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the ’60s. Like just about everyone else who saw it, I fell in love with the tense, quiet drama of "Mad Men" and the exquisitely crafted recreation of a place and time full of cigarettes and sexism. Luckily for me, and you, AMC knows which side its bread is buttered on, and they’ve announced that the show will return sometime in July. AMC hasn’t given us a specific date for the premiere, but the season 1 DVD - with its super sweet packaging - will be in stores July first. If you missed the first season, catch it on DVD, "Mad Men" is just swell.
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The boat flooded in September, but the roughest seas were from October, and "Deadliest Catch" post-production editors spliced them together to make it look like they’d happened at the same time. Scandal! Sort of. Those crab-fishermen are still out there, there are still waves, and there is still flooding. Only the order and dramatization are in question. Still, people seem outraged that a bastion of honesty in entertainment would have used post-production editing tricks  to punch up the drama, instead of relying on the more conventional "somber narrator and tendentious music" strategies that at least are obvious.
Nobody, however, seems to be surprised that the Pentagon paid analysts to punch up the drama before and during the most recent US invasion in Iraq, and to soften criticisms of American human-rights violations. Those analysts, of course, didn’t disclose their conflicts of interest, and even if they had, mere disclosure doesn’t stop an […]

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It looks like "Battlestar Galactica’s" Ron Moore (right) is jumping on board the FoxWagon. Moore is reportedly developing a series called "Virtuality," and can I be the first to lodge a "that’s a stupid name" complaint? It’s about a dozen deep space astronauts who are stuck in space for ten years and turn to virtual reality to keep themselves entertained. So basically it’s "Star Trek: Holodecks Gone Wild."
They’ve got a word for scifi shows on Fox that aren’t "The X-Files," and it’s not a nice one. No fan hears the words scifi and Fox in the same sentence without starting to twitch and mumble about "Firefly" under their breath. It looks like this fall Fox is turning its attention to scifi in a big way, so we can look forward to at least a couple of brilliant shows that we pick up the "complete series box set" for a couple […]

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