Rueben's Ramblings

Hey All,

Here is the first entertainment news update for 2012; and my first update in several days due to the loll in news between the holidays. I hope that everyone had a great Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. And now for the news:

TELEVISION

The Canadian series Flashpoint, which has become a hit both in its native Canada but also here in the States has been picked up for a fifth season. The series will air on CTV in Canada and on ION here in the States. (TV Done Wright)

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

Actors James Murray (Primeval and Chaos) and Patrick Heusinger (Royal Pains) will co-star in the NBC drama pilot called Beautiful People that is set in the near future in a society where humans co-exist with mechanical androids that look like people but are treated like second-class citizens. It centers on the very wealthy Lydia whose late husband founded the firm that makes Mechanicals. Murray will play her son, a handsome and very successful attorney who’s lived a rich and privileged life but makes a name for himself by publicly suggesting that Mechanicals might have civil rights — a notion that’s largely scoffed at. Heusinger will play a family man employed as a servant in Lydia’s home who is in fact a Mechanical, but after one of his daughters is killed in a car accident, he proves to be “defective” as he’s plagued with forbidden emotions like grief and loss. (Nellie Andreeva at Deadline)

BOX OFFICE NEWS

Here are the top 10 box office films for this past holiday weekend courtesy of Exhibitor Relations and E! Online:

1. Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, $29.6 million
2. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, $21 million
3. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, $16.4 million
4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, $14.8 million
5. War Horse, $14.4 million
6. We Bought a Zoo, $13.2 million
7. The Adventures of Tintin, $11.4 million
8. New Year’s Eve, $6.4 million
9. The Darkest Hour, $4.3 million
10. The Descendants, $3.4 million

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

Question: Smash is a show that sounds like something I would be interested in, but why on earth is NBC pitting it against not one, but two hit shows (Castle and Hawaii Five-O, respectively)? Shouldn’t they try to cultivate an audience on a softer night? It just seems like another example of why NBC has fallen so far from what it used to be. — Dan

Matt Roush: Hey, they’ve got to put it somewhere, and from NBC’s perspective, using one of its few hit franchises (The Voice) as a logically compatible (as in musical) lead-in is about as good as Smash could hope. Getting massive promotion throughout the Super Bowl the night before its premiere isn’t going to hurt, either. But there really is no such thing as a safe time period anymore, and any show on NBC is going to face an uphill battle to break out of the pack. I hope Smash succeeds, obviously, and while Castle and Hawaii are formidable competition, neither show is a runaway NCIS-level smash, and being from the same crime genre (although very different in tone), there’s conceivably room for smart counter-programming against them. Smash is a risk, no question (so was Glee), but on the front end, NBC is doing everything it can to get this high-profile, high-quality, Broadway caliber production noticed and sampled.

Question: I wanted to ask your thoughts about Touch. It marks the return of Kiefer Sutherland on TV, and the trailer of the show is amazing, but it really doesn’t explain the story of it. Is it about preventing events or what? Also from the trailer, it looks like it has some of the elements of 24, which is by far the best show I have ever seen. No show has ever come close to 24, so can you suggest a show that is as good? Many people have suggested Person of Interest, but what do you suggest? — Ishaan

Matt Roush: Expecting any show to be the next 24 is setting yourself up for disappointment, and that’s certainly the case with Touch, which only shares with 24 the sense that I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I’ve only screened the pilot (which will air Jan. 25 as a sneak preview before returning for a regular run in March), and it’s a difficult premise to explain. Kiefer Sutherland is excellent in this show, but he’s playing pretty much the opposite of Jack Bauer, a very ordinary man (not a super-agent) caught up in an extraordinary situation when he realizes that his gifted but emotionally closed-off (think autistic) son is making connections through complicated mathematical patterns that predict interlocking events in the future, and it becomes the dad’s job to somehow make things right. In that respect, it’s not so much different from the missions the heroes of Person of Interest go on to prevent crimes “the Machine” intuits. But Person is primarily a procedural-with-a-twist whereas Touch is a much more emotional experience, weaving a fantastical landscape in which random characters are destined to have a profound impact on other strangers’ lives, and only Kiefer’s boy can see it coming. Regarding “the next 24,” my best recommendation (if you don’t subscribe to Showtime) is to mark time until the first season of Homeland comes out on DVD. It’s just as intense, but isn’t as trapped by the format, which was always a blessing and a curse for 24. I miss it, too, and hope that if the movie does ever happen (Kiefer insists it’s still a go), it lives up to our expectations.

That’s it. Enjoy!