TV-Archived

I think I’d subconsciously buried the existence of MTV’s upcoming Teen Wolf series, because if I made a list of 80′s movies I never wanted to be converted into TV shows, that would probably be pretty high on the list (obviously, cartoons don’t count).

Because, really, how can you top this?

Well…maybe by switching out basketball for boxing, and Michael J Fox for Jason Fucking Bateman*.

Anyway, now that your nostalgia is over, I present the trailer for MTV’s Teen Wolf.

It’s amazing. It’s like the creators looked at everything that made the first Teen Wolf almost watchable – like a sense of humor, a likeable lead, and a popular sport, and replaced it with a sinister tone, a dull lead, and lacrosse.

Aside from the name of the show and the basic ‘I was a teenage werewolf’ concept, there’s not a lot of the original Teen Wolf here, and it seems obvious that the creators looked to The Vampire Diaries pretty heavily for inspiration; there’s a bad boy Wolf type who really won’t be anything at all like Damon Salvatore, a pretty girl who tucks her hair behind her ear who drives our hero to wolf out a little when he gets too close, a secret group of people hunting vampires wolfy types, and a knowledgeable best friend (sadly a guy and not someone who is, say, an attractive witchy type). Oh, and lots and lots of shots in the woods at night.

They probably looked to theTwilight books and movies too, but I’m happy to report that I haven’t read or seen any of those.

On the other hand, if Teen Wolf is actually a bit like The Vampire Diaries, it could end up being actually rather good and kind of addictive, which would be a bit annoying.

On a vaguely related note, I remember when the ‘M’ in MTV used to stand for Music…

*I’m pretty sure Jason Bateman’s middle name is actually Fucking. Or it should be, anyway.

EW has the first photo of Adrianne Palicki in costume as Wonder Woman from the new pilot.
(Now clickable in hires thanks to Bleeding Cool)

Now, I like Palicki, and I think she has the acting chops to pull this off – but I’m not too sold on the costume here. Maybe it’s one of those things where I have to see it in motion.

If you add a leather jacket it looks kind of familiar (well, with some extra pants detail)…

…and possibly just in time to be out of sync with the comics again.

That said, it could have been a lot worse…

Edit: Actually, you know, this costume is really growing on me.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s promotional push for Paul is in swing and as part of it they’ve put out a little video of them re-enacting Star Wars on College Humor. Well, kind of…

I read the script for Paul a while ago and loved it, although it did seem full of in-jokes to the extent that it may be impenetrable to non-geeks. Luckily, I don’t fall into that category, and as I love Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (and the last of those is probably the best of these, the most approachable and the most underrated) I’m going to try to go and see this at some point.

As it happens I’m also reading Pegg’s autobiography, Nerd Do Well that the better half bought for me in the UK at Christmas (it’s not out here till the summer, apparently).

It’s lightweight but entertaining – although if I’m perfectly honest, part of me could have probably done without the tale of how 14 year old Pegg got his first gobble.

Hee. ‘Gobble’.

Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdown has been all over the news this week with barely a day going by without his definitely-not-drug-fuelled-honest rants getting just a little bit crazier.

I had an idea last Friday – which I joked with a friend about – for a site with a revolving quote every time you refreshed it. Of course, I did nothing about it and on Monday I found the Live the Sheen Way site and cursed myself.

Always one to act a little later than I should, today I put up the Motivational Sheen site, with some of Sheen’s quotes as little t-shirt designs…

…and of course there’s a matching t-shirt sale site via spreadshirt.

Now, it’s not funny to take advantage of people who are mentally ill, obviously. But if they’re living Charlie Sheen’s bitching life, it seems easier somehow, so go on over to the other site, like it, tweet it, and make me happy.

Please?

I may not be particularly partial to what I hear about David E Kelley’s Wonder Woman pilot – but as far as I’m concerned he nailed the casting – the usually blond Supernatural and Friday Night Lights alum Adrienne Palicki has been cast as Diana, Princess of Themyscria.

For those not in the know, check out the first two seasons of Friday Night Lights.

I’m pretty sure Palicki was mentioned in the casting of the mooted-then-abandoned JLA movie back in 2007 – and although at the time I would rather have seen her as Supergirl (in fact, she was the first Supergirl in an episode of Smallville back in season three, and also the female villain in the Aquaman pilot), I approved of the idea.

Damn – I just got interested in the Wonder Woman show.

Blastr lead me to this excellent site with little pictures of bridges from various Star Trek shows and movies which are really rather nice, if completely useless to me.

So, just because I can – Jim Kirk’s original USS Enterprise 1701 (unfortunately there doesn’t appear to be a plan of the Enterprise’s bridge from the 2009 reboot, although there is an article on it):

Picard’s Enterprise-D:

And the Enterpise-E:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Ops:

And finally, a personal favorite (on account of it being a tough little ship), the USS Defiant:

Anyway, tons more over at Ex Astris Scientia – worth a browse if you’re a Trek fan.

Mid-season TV dramas are a mixed bag; for every good one there are half a dozen that you wonder how they made it to the screen at all. Luckily, Shawn Ryan’s The Chicago Code, which premiered last night on Fox is one of the good ones. In fact, it’s the best new show I’ve seen in a while.

Ryan’s had a good track record of morally ambiguous shows and characters. Vic Mackey and his Strike Team in The Shield; Hank and Britt in Terriers; hell, he even ran Tim Roth’s creepy lie guy in Lie to Me for a season. And, of course, he had Angel feed a bunch of lawyers to Darla and Drusilla because he just couldn’t seem to care.

The Chicago Code – so far at least – seems a little more cut and dried. Jennifer Beal’s crusading Superintendent Colvin is a straight down the line cop intent of rooting out corruption in the city. Since the corrupt Alderman Gibbons (Delroy Lindo) controls the department’s budget and refuses to fund her program for obvious reasons, she ropes in her former partner Detective Jarek Wysocki (Jason Clarke), sticks him with a brilliant young partner Evers (Matt Lauria), and sets him to work off the books. Just because every network show needs more than four main characters, Wysocki has a niece on the job, Vonda (Devin Kelley) who has the hots for her reckless partner, Joiner (Isaac Williams). Oh, and there’s an undercover agent in the Irish mob, too, played by Billy Lush, who’s trying to get close to Gibbons.

Every character’s motivations seem pretty much clear and its easy to see which ones are on the side of right – but it doesn’t matter; the stakes are high, as illustrated by the perfectly-timed gunning down of two major characters before the end of the episode. Lindo oozes more oilskin than John Shea, chewing up every scene he’s in with insincerity, while Beals is reliable as the steadfast straight arrow cop. Clarke has the more showy role as the honest but tough streetwise detective, but it’s Lauria’s performance as Evers that I was really impressed with; he was good in Friday Night Lights, but he’s really good here.

The show is off to a great start – and I’m looking forward to the next twelve episodes. You can catch up with the pilot on Hulu here.

Apparently, there’s a new series of Red Dwarf in the works. I didn’t see the recent special (or was it specials?) and heard they weren’t too good, and even dropped away in the last few years of the series as quality dropped off – but I have a huge fondness for the first five or six years of the show – so in celebration, I’d like to offer you this…

Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.

Fringe is back in a timeslot which is definitely not death for it, honest, and Fox have released a music video recapping the season so far to a song called Echoes by a band called Klaxon. I think they released it a few weeks ago, but whatever.

The first Friday episode, oh-so-wittily entitled ‘Firefly’ airs tonight on Fox.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of Christopher Jones’ ‘Most Heinous’ etsy print (just $20 in his store), it’s worth an entire mini-series worth of words.

Marvel, if you still have a certain movie license, time to make nice with IDW and make this happen…

Found at

There’s nothing new about credits mash-ups – hell, I can’t count the number I’ve posted here before (with the Star Wars/Dallas one probably being my favorite). Even so, there’s something extra cool about this Fringe/Firefly mash-up.

It’s not that Fringe is moving to Fox’s fabled Friday deathslot, the one that killed Firefly, with an episode actually called Firefly.

It’s not that the creator of this managed to get poor ol’ Kirk Acevedo and Michael Cerveris on the credits (and also made me question how little we’ve seen of Blair Brown recently).

No, it’s the fact that they got Pansy the cow in there as Gene. Awesome.

Thanks, Adam. Via

…a Pop Idol, that is.

That’s what the UK version of American Idol was called, way back before there was an American Idol. Remember before there was an American Idol?

I digress.

Anyway, according to Bleeding Cool who are reporting on a BBC America press release, Will Young – the winner of the first Pop Idol – is starring in a UK supernatural show Bedlam alongside a bunch of other people from shows you may or may not recognize, including Gavin and Stacey‘s Joanna Page (the Stacey of the aforementioned stars of the comedy, definitely an acquired taste that I’m still unsure on) who may be better known as the woman who played the body double Love, Actually character who simulated movie sex scenes with Martin Freeman, formerly Tim of The (far superior UK) Office, currently Watson of the brilliant Sherlock, and the man who will be Bilbo.

Everything’s coming up a bit Love, Actually around here at the moment isn’t it?

And again, I digress.

Because the point of this post was Will Young. He won Pop Idol, released some technically quite good but aurally excruciating albums, came out to nobody’s surprise, then vanished before cropping up in some TV shows and movies that didn’t do much over here. But now he’s going to be on a supernatural show on BBC America which means it may get watched.

So I thought you should know what you’re in for:

David Gallaher knows. And he’s probably crying right now.

Incidentally, buried in that mammoth press release that Bleeding Cool runs is the news (well, it’s news to me anyway) that the next season of Doctor Who will be split into two blocks in Spring and Fall with a cliffhanger between them. Dammit.

Well, dammit. The only Stargate I ever gave a rat’s ass about, Stargate: Universe has been canceled after just two seasons by SyFy, presumably to make way for more wrestling shows.

Alright, I know that’s kind of unfair as the channel still airs various other shows I don’t watch (Eureka, Warehouse 13, Haven) and is bringing on some more shows I’m not that interested in (Being Human, and Alphas) as well as their latest attempt to recapture the Battlestar Galactica audience, Blood and Chrome, but even so this leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

SG:U may have some problems – such as a couple of pretty unlikeable main characters, a few cases of dodgy acting, and a really fricking irritating plot device in the communication stones – but the central pairing of Robert Carlyle and Louis Ferrera has been pretty damn entertaining. Neither character likes each other but their twin descents into very different types of madness over the past two seasons has been entertaining as hell.

From what I can gather, SG:U has been dismissed as trying too hard to be like BSG by hardcore Stargate fans, and was dismissed as being part of the oftentimes light and fluffy Stargate franchise by hardcore BSG fans, when the truth was it was neither of those things.

Yes, there was a core cast of characters thrust together through circumstance who didn’t necessarily like each other, and yes, it was a lot more serious than the previous Stargate series were – but it was good and it was the only true science-fiction show left on television. (EDIT - and by ‘true’ science-fiction I mean with space ships and the like; obviously Fringe is true sci-fi, is not canceled, and is still awesome!)

The last ten episodes air early next year – I can only hope that there manages to be some closure for the passengers of Destiny.

You have to give the Fringe team credit (and Fox too, if this is actually a real trailer) – they’re not about to shy away from people’s reactions to the show’s new Friday scheduling…

Via

This Dr Who/Star Wars mash-up doing the rounds is pretty good – but honestly, it’s worth watching for the bits in the credits alone.

Via

You probably didn’t notice, but I stopped my weekly updates of Lost from the Start a few months ago. I’ve had a couple of emails and messages about the site since but the short answer is that I simply underestimated the amount of time the updates would take every week.

All in all, doing a post for one episode and updating the timelines, character pages and various other pages was taking over four hours a week, and that’s time I just don’t have right now between work, parenting, being a bit under the weather and so on.

It’s a shame, because I still think the idea of the site was sound, and I liked the design of it – not to mention the awesome timeline site I found, and the web-diagram site I was going to use for character connections once I hit season two.

For now, though Lost from the Start is dead, alas.

Just because I could. And because I amuse myself sometimes…

According to MTV Splashpage (who link to a Variety story I can’t see because of the paywall), DC Entertainment and the CW are developing a Raven TV show.

Raven’s a Teen Titans staple and I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective – the character was featured in the animated Teen Titans Go! show of a few years ago, and having a high school age protagonist with a lot of angst over her demon father certainly fits in with the kind of show that the CW tends to go for.

That said, I don’t believe that they could possibly have gone for a more boring character to adapt. She’s never had a storyline that wasn’t concerned with her demon father, is pretty much a cipher, and has never worked well as a solo character.

Personally, I think that if DC wants a female character to front a teen show, there are more interesting ones to use – such as Wonder Girl, Ravager, or even Bombshell. Now that I think of it, actually, I’d pay good money to see a Ravager show. But maybe that’s just me.

The project may not even come to fruition – much like The Graysons, which was announced a few years ago but never made it to air. Early days.

I make no pretense at understanding what this is for, or who the three people in red t-shirts are, but I don’t think you really need to know. All you need to know is that you’re about to surrender six minutes of your life to the most absurd collection of celebrities, has-beens, almost-weres and Dolph Lundgrens from both sides of the Atlantic singing ‘Let it Be’ – or at least lip-synching to it.

Even the late Leslie Nielsen makes an appearance.

As a Brit, it was especially gratifying to see Bergerac, Rene from ‘Allo, ‘Allo, Right Said Fred, Paul McKenna, and a few others pop in there.

But wait there’s more…because this isn’t the first time they’ve done this…

Dear God, who are these people?!?

Found at via

There…are no words.

Thanks to Citizen Tim for finding this!