Rueben's Ramblings

Hey All,

Here are the news items for today:

TELEVISION

Breaking Bad has been picked up for a 16-episode fifth and final season by AMC. (E! Online)

Actress Jessy Schram (Falling Skies) will appear as Cinderella in an early episode of Once Upon a Time, the new ABC fairytale series that will debut on October 23 at 8 PM. Actor David Anders (The Vampire Diaries) will also appear as a doctor who dates Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin). (Zap2It)

Actress Nathalie Kelley (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) will have a recurring role on Body of Proof when it returns to ABC on September 20. She will play Dani, the confident, street smart driver of the M.E. van who has a real interest in forensics and ultimately wants to be a part of the team. (The Futon Critic)

The Secret Life of the American Teenager will complete its summer run on ABC Family on September 5 at 8 PM with the new ABC Family series The Lying Game taking over that time slot starting on September 12 and continuing through October. Meanwhile, Pretty Little Liars will air its mid-season finale on August 30. (The Futon Critic)

Actor Josh Duhamel has joined the cast of the Disney Jr.’s flagship animated series called Jake and the Never Land Pirates. He will voice the recurring role of Captain Flynn, a dashing young pirate who is well-known for his legendary adventures on the Never Sea with his boat The Barracuda. (Deadline and Dark Horizons)

Actor William Sadler (Roswell) will return to Fringe as Dr. Sumner in the third episode of the fourth season. (Give Me My Remote)

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

Actress Julianna Moore is considering to appear in the potential HBO mini-series based on the Sara Gran novel called Dope. The story takes place in New York around 1950, centering on a woman who re-enters her life after being away at the farm to treat her heroin addiction and becomes a private eye. (Deadline)

The show-runners behind the short-lived ABC series Detroit 1-8-7 are working on a pilot project for ABC Studios called Two Roads, which centers on a young woman who struggles with doubt on her wedding day whether to go through with it or not. (Deadline)

A script written by Josh Berman (Drop Dead Diva) and Peter Tolan has been picked up by ABC Studios. The story is about a female FBI profiler who teams up with a homicide detective for the first time since he left her at the altar after coming out of the closet. Tolan also has a script in play at FOX for an ensemble comedy with producing partner Michael Wimer and DJ Nash. (Andrew Wallenstein at Variety)

BOX OFFICE NEWS

British singer Cheryl Cole has landed a role in the upcoming film What to Expect When You’re Expecting starring alongside the likes of Jennifer Lopez and Cameron Diaz. There is no word what character she will be playing, though. (E! Online)

Aussie actor Sullivan Stapleton (Strike Back) has joined the cast of the upcoming film Gangster Squad where he will play a mob enforcer-turned-police informant who is the childhood friend of the character to be played by Ryan Gosling. (Heat Vision and Dark Horizons)

It looks like Disney has shut down production on The Lone Ranger, which was set to star Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer. It seems the remake was dumped due to the film’s $250 million budget. (Deadline and TV Guide)

Here are the top 10 movies for this past weekend, according to Exhibitor Relations and E! Online:

1. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, $27.5 million
2. The Help, $25.5 million
3. Final Destination 5, $18.4 million
4. The Smurfs, $13.5 million
5. 30 Minutes or Less, $13 million
6. Cowboys & Aliens, $7.6 million
7. Captain America: The First Avenger, $7.1 million
8. Crazy, Stupid, Love, $6.9 million
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, $6.88 million
10. The Change-Up, $6.2 million

NOTE: The Glee movie placed in 11th place on its opening weekend, earning only 5.7 million in the box office receipts.

Q&A SECTION (with Matt Roush at TV Guide)

Question: I just finished watching the season finale of Falling Skies and I am very happy the show got renewed for another season. I just hate that we have to wait until next summer before the show comes back on again. I have seen where people have described the show as boring. Did you think it was boring? I found it interesting and suspenseful that the audience did not know any more than the characters did about what was going on in their world. When we saw the bipedal aliens for the first time, it was a shock. We thought the Skitters were in charge, but it appears they were just drones. That was shocking to me. What did you think? The cast is great! Noah Wyle did an excellent job as Tom Mason. Colin Cunningham was perfectly cast as Pope, who’s such is an interesting character. I was so happy to see Fringe’s Blair Brown on the show. I hope Falling Skies continues for a long time. The summer shows are so good. I am not nearly as excited as I once was about the fall shows coming back. Which shows do you look forward to more, summer or fall? — Susan

Matt Roush: Let’s start with Falling Skies, which I never found boring. Overly earnest and preachy at times, yes, but there was always a tension afoot given the way the series was set up, thrusting us directly into the resistance movement against the aliens, and not stalling in the build-up to the attack the way V did. I agree that the reveal late in the season of the new aliens (presumably in charge) and the harnessed nature of the Skitters were good surprises. I was even OK with the Close Encounters nature of the season cliffhanger, though I gather some were put off by it. And you called out my favorite characters. This is by far Noah Wyle’s best TV role since the glory days of ER, and Pope is a great foil. Hoping in Season 2 for there to be more unsettling cameos like the one Blair Brown performed so memorably. As for summer-vs-fall, it’s not really an issue for me, because TV pretty much goes year-round anymore with barely a pause (except around the holidays), and there are high and low points in each period of the year. Summer is especially critical for cable networks to present many of their best signature shows while attempting to launch new ones, and there was a glut of them this year, while network TV takes a step back with very little to recommend. But soon, network TV will be back in full force, and as much as I enjoy many summer series, I’ll be happy to welcome back the shows (from Modern Family to The Good Wife) that take us through much of the rest of the year. But back to Falling Skies, which has been especially prominent in my mailbag lately.

Question: The more I watch Falling Skies, the more excited I get about its future. The way the first season ended opens a tremendous amount of potential directions for this show to move towards. I still believe that, at its heart, it’s a mediocre show that is elevated by some wonderful performances and a creative over-arching storyline. Most of the supporting characters are one-dimensional archetypes: the empathetic doctor, the motorcycle chick, the hardened criminal who’s never at a loss for clichéd wisecracks, etc. But at the same time, I can’t imagine a better pick for the heart of the show than Noah Wyle. His character and performance are the highlights of the series. And surprisingly, I find myself enjoying Will Patton’s Capt. Weaver, who at the outset looked like he was going to fall into a typical gruff commander stereotype, but was given some great development in the last few episodes. Nothing about the first season excited me enough to think that I needed to watch the entire series, but every episode made me want to watch the next one (if that makes any sense). What has been your opinion of the first season, and what is your outlook for the second? — Chris

Matt Roush: What you’re expressing here is ambivalence that accentuates the positive, and I get that. It’s pretty much how I felt about the show through most of the season. Completely agree about the wooden acting in many of the stock supporting roles, which only accentuated the hokeyness at times. This never actually became appointment TV for me — in part because I moved around a lot this summer, and there are very few shows I’ve been able to keep up with regularly — which meant I tended to watch Skies in multiple-hour blocks, like a miniseries, and in that regard, it played well for me. I’m very curious where the show will go in its second season in the aftermath of Tom’s Close Encounters experience, which I hope won’t defuse the tension in the story’s next act.

Question: I just saw the promo for ABC Family’s The Lying Game and it looks an awful lot like the storyline for the CW’s Ringer, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Are they THAT similar? And which do you recommend? Thanks! — Diane

Matt Roush: There’s no explaining it, but yes, within the space of a few weeks, two shows will premiere (The Lying Game this week, Ringer in mid-September) involving identical twins from wildly different backgrounds: one rich, one poor, and the poor one takes over the rich twin’s life, with ensuing complications. The circumstances are different — in The Lying Game, the twins were separated at birth (one adopted, one in foster care) and only just learned of each other’s existence, while Ringer’s twins are merely estranged — and Ringer is more of a mystery/suspense thriller while I haven’t quite figured out the tone or direction of The Lying Game from the pilot. They’re not carbon copies, but it’s weird for two such similar shows to arrive at the same time. Still, these things do happen. In terms of preference, both seem like solid enough melodramas, but I’m a Sarah Michelle Gellar fan and enjoy Ringer’s more deluxe and sinister tone, while Lying Game saddles its main character (well played by Alexandra Chando, a dead ringer, so to speak, for The Vampire Diaries’ Nina Dobrev) with generic clique-ish rich brats who feel interchangeable with any number of ABC Family or CW dramas. Not exactly my thing.

Question: I’ve been a fan of Eureka since the beginning. It got off to a great start, but I’m confused about the number of episodes in each season. For the last two seasons, Syfy has had 8-10 episodes in the summer and then the 2nd half of the season the next summer. Instead of calling it season 4.0 and 4.5, wouldn’t that be seasons 4 and 5 since there are around nine months between each half-season? Will they get back to a normal summer season of 13 episodes, like Warehouse 13, or 10 episodes in the summer and then 10 episodes in the winter, like the Stargate shows? — Ryan

Matt Roush: This question came in before it was confirmed that Eureka’s fifth season, currently in production, will be its last — with an extra episode tacked on to the original order to allow the writers to bring the show to a close. It isn’t yet clear when and how Syfy will present the final episodes of Eureka, but it would be nice if the network didn’t try so hard to confuse the audience with its bizarre scheduling. Syfy has done Eureka no favors in the way its last few seasons were split over such a long period of time. Ryan is absolutely correct that to run one half of a season in July of one year, and then to finish the run the following July, it’s basically two separate seasons. Which may take some of the sting out of the recent news, if we pretend that seasons 3 and 4 were actually two seasons each, that would mean next season will be in some ways its seventh. (Got that?) Either way, it has been a nice run for what is currently my favorite Syfy series.

Question: With the news of the cancellation of Eureka, it seems like Syfy is sliding even further out of its SF niche. While Eureka has had a good run and I don’t think Syfy is making a mistake with canceling it (besides not deciding a little earlier to give them enough time to wrap it all up), the lack of any news about a replacement show is concerning. For a die-hard SF geek like myself, the fact that there are only 2-3 shows on Syfy that I watch is indicative of the lack of focus from that network. I compare that to USA, which is under the same corporate umbrella, where they have put together a great track record of solid shows from Psych to Suits, and I realize I spend more time watching USA than Syfy these days. Is there any reason why one branch of the NBC (now Comcast) umbrella is doing so well with their series and another is doing so poorly? — Jason

Matt Roush: In this case, it does seem an apples-and-oranges type of comparison. USA Network is doing very well at programming for the broadest possible audience, hewing to an escapist formula popularly described as “blue sky” while working just enough tweaks in most series so it doesn’t feel like you’re sitting through the same show hour after hour (some more successfully than others). Whereas Syfy is trying to find variations within an expansive genre, with a mix of scripted and non-scripted (quasi-reality) shows that, in the scripted arena, have tended to veer toward the whimsical light-fantasy side of late, because that’s what’s been working best for them. And while the purist may be disappointed by Syfy’s current slate, from a business point of view they’re doing pretty well, all things considered. And don’t be surprised when USA broadens out to include comedy and reality in its portfolio, which will surely earn it some critics. Personally, I’m putting almost an absurd amount of hope on the Battlestar Galactica prequel (Blood and Chrome) to return Syfy to classic form and improve upon the disappointing Caprica, because I’ve also missed the weightier (read: risky), more allegorical and less earthbound dramas that some of us tend to associate with sci-fi.

That’s it. Enjoy!