The talk show host trade school Lorne Michaels has been quietly running from Studio 8H has found its second successful alumnus in Seth Meyers. With Jimmy Fallon taking over The Tonight Show next year, NBC has made official their long-rumored plans to move SNL's Weekend Update anchor into a weekday slot, making Meyers the host of Late Night.
Confirming earlier rumors, The New York Times has revealed that NBC is planned to smash the glowing purple void Jay Leno emerges from nightly, banishing him from The Tonight Show and ushering in a new era of Jimmy Fallon.
If another season of Celebrity Apprentice hadn't already made it clear, NBC is definitely investing heavily in human depravity. In just a few weeks, they'll be hoping to finally have a new hit with Hannibal, the latest re-hashing of the Hannibal Lecter story, which sees Hugh Dancy in the Clarice-like role of manipulated investigator and Mads Mikkelsen as a pre-conviction Lecter. Here's the first full trailer, promising gratuitous gore and even more-gratuitous scenes of eating dinner. Chewing is exciting when laced with dramatic irony! Or so NBC hopes, lest they be forced to label all the food as animal penises and call this a Fear Factor spin-off.
Having failed his Wipeout addition, John Malkovich has been forced to settle for some other waterlogged summer television, taking the lead role in NBC's upcoming pirate series Crossbones. TV Line reports Malkovich would be playing Edward Teach, better known as the pirate Blackbeard, in the 10-episode series, which is being written and co-executive produced by Luther's Neil Cross. Though described as a "summer" series, Crossbones does not yet have an official start date, nor definite point when NBC will give up and try refashioning it into a celebrity sailing competition.
In a rare questionable headline to not give Jay Leno the giggles, The Hollywood Reporter claims "NBC Discussing Jay Leno Exit Plan," beginning new rumors that the longtime Tonight Show host could at last be passing on the torch, again.
- British actor Tom Mison will reportedly star as Ichabod Crane in Fox's pilot for Sleepy Hollow. The show of course modernizes the tale, but probably not the way you're thinking: Crane somehow time-travels to the present day, where he joins the modern Hollow police force and at last gives Washington Irving's tale of a decapitated ghost jockey the few extra levels of convolution it always needed.
- With several networks already interested, Maya Rudolph is reportedly working on bringing back and hosting a variety show, before NBC ends up turning Up All Night into one.
- Scary Movie 5 will for some reason not be the last time we see Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan reclined together outside a funeral parlor. Lohan has now signed on for a guest appearance on Sheen's Anger Management series, where she'll play his patient-cum-love-interest and, naturally, herself.
- Alicia Silverstone has joined Lifetime's pilot for HR, a series that would see her as a human resources director who "inspires the business to strive for new ambitions and profits" following a personality-altering head trauma. See? There's a way through the glass ceiling. Concussion.
- AMC's Revolutionary War-era drama Turn has found a lead in Jamie Bell. He'll play a black market cabbage farmer captured and turned a Patriot spy, because originality is dead.
- Chris Onstad's cult-adored webcomic, Achewood, might be becoming a series. Here's some test footage:
Joining a prestigious group that is in this case not 'N Sync, Justin Timberlake on March 9th will become a part of The Five-Timers Club of hosts, taking on double-duty as both host and musical guest next month. The appearance comes just before the release of his latest album, The 20/20 Experience, and precedes a solid week of scheduled appearances on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. It follows a month in which NBC finished fifth in sweeps, behind Univision. So they're really hoping you like it when Justin Timberlake sings a novelty song.
Running Wilde didn't last long on Fox, and Up All Night is violently mutating itself to death over at NBC, so now Will Arnett is following the sound of laughter over to CBS, where they have a button that produces that laughter. (They also have a button that produces investigable crime scenes.)
With their Jekyll-and-Hyde drama Do No Harm coming and going over the span of two episodes and about thirty "looking into the mirror and seeing his duality" shots, NBC is quickly moving on to their next dismal offering of a doctor with a cartoonishly-dark side. As such, here's the first promo for the struggling network's Hannibal, the Hannibal Lecter-based series that will take over this April, even as those ubiquitous Do No Harm posters still hang to forlornly gaze at their lost Thursday night timeslot.
The series stars Hugh Dancy as Will Graham, a criminal profiler that seems a lot like he's just Dancy's head pasted on another generic procedural guy's body--both figuratively and quite literally. Laurence Fishburne co-stars as the FBI's Dr. Jack Crawford--who is definitely a different character than his CSI guy, Dr. Raymond Langston--while Casino Royale's creepy villain Mads Mikkelsen takes on the cannibalistic title role. As you'll see below, the part is mostly chewing-based:
This Thursday brings the bittersweet return of Community, finally back on the air but now without creator Dan Harmon running the show. Can you feel the ambivalent electricity in the air, not sure exactly how enthusiastic to get about this? Well, maybe now you will, because there's a new, two-minute trailer for the upcoming season to tease all the adventures and spell-out the character growth that we may later decide shouldn't count as canon. So get excited! (But bear in mind you may ultimately be let down.)
Breaking free of the pigeonholing and pigeon-rearing that has long left him resigned to mostly playing himself, Mike Tyson will flex his dramatic acting muscles with a guest role in an upcoming episode of NBC's Law & Order: SVU.
Imagine all the period melodrama of Downton Abbey transplanted across the Atlantic, and filled with the scowls of whoever is the closest American equivalent of Maggie Smith (Ellen Burstyn? Cloris Leachman?). You've just imagined The Gilded Age, the drama NBC is going to pay Julian Fellowes to make!
Like it never left--except that it was gone for quite a while, mishandled, and now its guiding creative force has been replaced, making everyone sort of dubious about the whole thing-- Community will return to its old Thursday night, 8PM spot starting on the new October 29th, February 7th. 30 Rock is currently in that time slot, but by then will have completed airing its final season; Parks and Recreation is moving up a half-hour to be the 8:30 follow-up, while Whitney, which was originally scheduled for the 8 o'clock spot, will instead bring its hilarious observations about relationships and just being Whitney to Wednesday, replacing the already-canceled Animal Practice. Non-Canadians may now stop caring about when Canada gets their Community.
Staying true to their identity as a network, NBC has balanced out their one good decision with a couple terrible ones.
Though NBC gave Community's fourth season an October 19th premiere date, if you checked the network's schedule, you'd see that you and your TiVo should tonight be preparing for a disappointing evening of pure Grimm. As the cast of Community explains in the video below, it turns out October 19th is not happening tonight, and it's not yet clear when it will. But when it does, that's when there will be more Community. Get it? Here, just let them explain it. And happy October 19th!
- Bryan Fuller's Munsters reimagining, Mockingbird Lane, is probably not moving beyond pilot. Unless it is. While Deadline reports NBC is looking very likely to pass on the project, Fuller himself claims, "NBC just informed me the Deadline article regarding #MockingbirdLane was Dead Wrong." The series was set to star Jerry O'Connell as Herman, so rest assured, no matter what NBC decides, the show will still happen in at least one of O'Connell's Sliders-verses.
- What is happening for sure is another season of Boardwalk Empire. In light of consistent ratings for the latest season, as well as recent recognition by the Children's Television Workshop, HBO has ordered a fourth run of the show.
- Television ratings measurer Nielsen has unveiled a new, expanded system to account for audiences watching programming across various digital platforms. It's presumably called "a view counter."
(Thanks, Lisa)
Showing little reverence for history--save for their own rich tradition of making bad decisions about what should be on television--NBC and Sony Pictures Television are developing a series in which a young Thomas Alva Edison will be re-imagined as a man patenting inventions for the benefit of crime-busting.
- 23 years after leaving the network, Michael J. Fox is returning to NBC with a 22-episode commitment for a new sitcom in which he'll play a New York City-based father of three who, sort of necessarily, is dealing with the challenges of Parkinson's. 23 years after also leaving the network, Michael J. Fox's Family Ties co-star Brian Bonsall has a butterfly tattooed on his neck and was last arrested for "menacing."
- Kelly Ripa's permanent Live! co-hosting spot has been given to former NFL star Michael Strahan, the Regis of defensive ends.
- The upcoming ninth season of The Office has been revealed to be its last, with executive producer Greg Daniels saying, "This year feels like the last chance [for The Office to have] an artistic ending [before having a less-artistic re-beginning as a wacky spin-off]."
- And here's a compilation of Community and Mad Men star Alison Brie rapping, just because:
If Larry David is going to get up in the business of the improvised movie scene, then so shall improv movie demigod Christopher Guest dance his way onto the unscripted HBO stage. Or the Netflix or Showtime stage, if HBO was sort of bored by For Your Consideration.
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I Watch Stuff is a movie and video blog dedicated to bringing you the best and worst that Hollywood and the Internet have to offer and then, more often than not, making fun of it because it sucks.
