Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

TV News for June 30

Two interesting stories about trends in entertainment came from Variety today. The average TV viewer is getting older, probably in large part because of the growing number of baby boomers, and, despite the record summer last year, rising tickets, gas and popcorn prices, this year’s box office is doing 4% better than 2007’s.

TV News for June 27

When Jay Leno steps down next year as host of The Tonight Show Conan O’Brien will fill his chair, but no one quite knows what Leno will do. He could move to another network and still do late night, or move to cable, or maybe do stand-up, or just retire to his famous garage and work on cars until his twilight. Check out all his possible options here.

TV News for June 26

The future of To Catch a Predator is in the air after NBC settled a $105 million law suit with a woman who claimed the producers pushed police to arrest her brother after he didn’t show up for one of the show’s trademark sting operations and he killed himself. The settlement comes months after a judge said a jury could say NBC “crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.”

Tired of product placement on your favorite TV shows? Well it’s not going anywhere, if anything it’ll probably going to get worse thanks to TiVo, but the Writers Guild of America West recently talked with the FCC about the problems with product placement and how it should change. You can read a short, interesting article about it here.

TV News for June 25

Finally, in an interesting move, for the first time MTV will air political ads . The network says they’ve decided to change their policy on ads because it would “be a good fit for our audience and would compliment this year’s Choose or Lose campaign.” Considering John McCain isn’t exactly hip with the MTV crowd like Barrack Obama is (I can’t imagine McCain doing fist bumps or revealing whether he wears boxers or briefs on the network like Clinton did to compete with the Obama’s “cool” aura), it seems like, for the first time, MTV may actually have backed a candidate in a back-ended sort of way.

I’m not suggesting that they’ll only accept ads from Obama or give McCain unfair treatment, but MTV has to know how popular Obama is with its demographic and how a) more viewers will pay attention to Obama’s adds on MTV than McCain’s and b) how Obama will continue to capture that demographic and McCain will continue to rely more on the working class, middle-America non-MTV-watching old-people demographic. MTV could have done this any other election year, but it’s the year that Obama runs that they free up their restrictions. Of course, both of the candidates (or all three, if Ralph Nader is feeling crazy again) have equal opportunity to advertize on MTV, but the fact that MTV decided to allow political ads when an extremely popular candidate who would benefit more than any before from ads geared towards the youth audience runs, while the rest of Hollywood gets behind him, seems a little obvious, if you ask me.

TV News for June 24

Tom Brokow will fill the moderator chair on Meet the Press, at least until the November elections.

TV News for June 20

In other Spike Lee news, the director announced at the Silverdocs festival that he could return to the New Orleans and the surrounding Mississippi Gulf region to do a follow up to his HBO miniseries When the Levees Broke. He also talked about the possibility of doing a scripted project on Hurricane Katrina, potentially with The Wire-creator David Simon.

TV News for June 19

Matthew Perry is again returning to television, but this time on cable. The Friends alum is teaming up with Rescue Me’s coproducer Peter Tolan to create The End of Steve. Though not much has been revealed about the new half-hour, Showtime says it’s a dark comedy that will show Perry’s range.

Finally, Brian Williams will fill in for the late Tim Russert this weekend on Meet the Press. No formal replacement has been named yet though, so don’t place any bets on Williams becoming Anderson Cooper 2.0.

TV News for June 13

Not to go out on a sad note, but political news icon Tim Russert died today at 58. He collapsed in his office earlier this afternoon and was pronounced dead at the hospital. Broadcasting & Cable ran a long piece on him here, in which friends and colleagues remembered him.

TV News for June 11

HBO will be funny or die thanks to a new deal with comedy Web site FunnyorDie.com. The cable net bought a stake in the site and has ordered 10 half-hours of original programming from it. The partnership could lead to possible future partnerships, such as live comedy shows or other programming.
Viacom, which already offers CBS shows on a handful of streaming sites, is putting shows on Hulu.com for the first time. The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report are the newest additions to the NBC Universal/News Corp. site, further making the Web site a go-to for comedy shows.

TV News for June 10

In happier news, The Swayze is back. Doctors have cleared Patrick Swayze to work on the A&E series The Beast. Hopefully this also means he can reprise his classic role as Bodie in Point Break Indo.

PBS, which already offers some of its programs on Google Video, will add shows to Hulu, the popular streaming site. NOVA, Weird Science, Carrier and Scientific American Frontiers are among the shows jumping to the net.

TV News for June 6

YouTube is coming to your TV thanks to Sony and it’s Bravia HD sets. This means if you want to watch a music video or you miss something on your favorite TV show, you can now watch a fuzzy, low-quality clip of it on your TV.

TV News for June 5

If you miss any episodes of NCIS or CSI: Miami, you can now catch up on Yahoo TV. CBS, which already offers streaming video of their content on their own site and on others, including AOL and Microsoft, will offer full primetime shows on the site. NBC, FOX and a handful of cable networks also offer their programs on Yahoo TV.

TV News for June 3

In TV Land, Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall, a.k.a. Samantha, will return to New York via HBO for another single-cam sex comedy. The new series is a remake of the British program Sensitive Skin, about a middle-aged wife who rediscovers her sexuality and undergoes a midlife crisis.

But the big TV news of today is that everyone’s favorite Springfield residents will be back for a twentieth year on FOX. For the past few months, the network and The Simpsons voice actors worked on a deal to give the actors more money. They’ll now receive $400,000 per episode to the $300,000 on their old contracts and Dan Castellaneta, or Homer, will act as a consulting producer and writer. Now that the two have come to a middle ground, FOX ordered a new season, tying it with Gunsmoke as the longest-running primetime series. Eat their shorts, Law & Order!

TV News for May 28

Even though they’re disappearing from newsrooms, TV critics are appearing on your TiVo. TiVo has struck a deal with the Chicago Tribune and their critic Maureen Ryan to offer her daily TV picks. As it stands now, the service is only available to Chicago-area subscribers, but TiVo is trying to make deals with other publications.

Hollywood has almost avoided another strike, this time one that would be even more debilitating than the writer strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers reached a deal with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and will now return to talks with the Screen Actor’s Guild. Talks between AMPTP and SAG fell through earlier this month and the AFTRA deal puts increased pressure on SAG to make their own deal before the June 30 deadline. Unlike the WGA strike, an actor’s strike would end production immediately on almost anything currently being filmed.

TV News for May 21

The mastermind behind some of reality TVs biggest successes (Survivor) and even a few failures (On the Lot), Mark Burnett, has signed a deal with the animation Web site Liquid Generation. Burnett will produce original content for television by Liquid Generation, and will help bring already-existing web-series to the tube.

Get ready for America’s Funniest YouTube Clips. MyNetwork, the FOX-owned replacement for UPN in some markets, will launch two “new” series in the fall. The first is a new version of the ’90s FOX series Magic’s Biggest Secrets Revealed. The other is a Internet clip-show called Funniest Moments. The shows join reality programs JailStreet Patrol, as well as WWE SmackDown.

TV News for May 17

One of the more interesting news items that I missed yesterday comes from The Hollywood Reporter. Apparently, FOX will only be showing around five minutes of commercials when its new shows Fringe (from J.J. Abrams) and Dollhouse (from Joss Whedon) debut in the fall. FOX admits the move may be risky, but says a paradigm change has to occur in television. And the network is absolutely right. With TiVos and DVRs becoming increasingly popular, commercials are being skipped anyways, and with cable, both basic and premium, offering so much alternative programming, the Big Four networks need to find a way to compete. This might lead to more product placement to make up for the ad time, or it might just fail miserably. We’ll see come fall.

To read the Hollywood Reporter article click here .

The geek community already seems to be buzzing about Fringe and Dollhouse. You can find previews for each here and here .

TV News for May 16

If you’re already trying to figure out what you’ll watch on TV in the fall, here ’s what the line-up may look like.

TV News for Thursday May 15

In TV Land, EQAL, the creators behind Internet-phenom Lonelygirl15, has signed a deal with CBS to give the network first look at anything new from EQAL that could premiere on TV, Internet of mobile devices. CBS will also be able to outfit their existing programs with Web extensions. While might sounds a little uninteresting, the deal exhibits the continued strength of the Internet as an alternative media platform, and you can probably expect more deals to pop up like this as TV viewership continues to drop.

TNT has packed its line up full cops with familiar names and faces. On TNT, George Clooney and Grant Heslov (joint Oscar nominees for Good Night and Good Luck’s script) will produce Delta Blues, a strange-sounding project about a Memphis cop/Elvis impersonator who lives with his mom. Joel Surnow, 24 co creator, is also producing a procedural about an ATF agent. John Avnet, who directed NBC’s Boomtown, will produce Morse Code, about a DEA agent in Boston. In an attempt to continue being seriously funny, other Turner station, TBS, renewed Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, My Boys, The Bill Engvall Show and Frank TV, while Jerry Zucker will be at the head of the new late-night sketch show National Banana Already in Progress.

If you’re interested in catching about a minute of the five new CBS shows coming out in the fall, you can find that here .

TV News for Tuesday, May 13

On the TV front, ABC officially picked up Life On Mars, along with a new reality show from Ashton Kutcher. Those will be its only two new shows in the fall, but it will also be brining Scrubs to its line-up, which finished its run on NBC last week.

Other fan-favorites and award-winners returning: Reaper on The CW, How I Met Your Mother on CBS, New Adventures of Old Christine on CBS, and The Unit on CBS.

Finally, those of you frustrated with HBO’s high DVD prices and fickle On Demand availability, you can now buy HBO series on iTunes , albeit for $2.99 — a dollar more than network shows. The higher price does bring with it a bargain though; while shows like Rome and the Sopranos run about $50+ on DVD, a 10-13 episode season on iTunes will put you back less than $40.

TV News for Monday, May 12

With upfronts just around the corner, Hollywood is abuzz with TV news. Like American Gladiators and Knight Rider before it, Beverly Hills 90210 is returning to the tube on The CW this fall. It’s rumored that ABC finally greenlit Life On Mars, the remake of the BBC shows of the same name about a cop unstuck in time. The network also picked up a new Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill) animated series, as well as renewed Eli Stone for a second season.

FOX recently announced they were bringing back some of the Arrested Development crew (likely so they can cancel them again). AD’s creator, Mitch Hurwitz, is at the head of an animated show about a high-school faculty called Sit Down, Shut Up, while Michael Bluth himself, Jason Bateman, directed the also-picked-up pilot for The Inn, which was created by AD scribe Abraham Higginbotham. J.J. Abrams, of Alias and Lost fame, and his Bad Robot team will produce the sci-fi drama Fringe for FOX as well. It’s Abrams first series off ABC since Felicity.

Probably the biggest, if not entirely new news out of Burbank comes from NBC, which is expected to announce that Jimmy Fallon will officially take over for Conan O’Brien when O’Brien moves to L.A. next year to host The Tonight Show. The network seems to think that Fallon has proven himself for the job, but really, he’s a so-so comic filling in for another comic long past his prime. With Craig Ferguson slowly overtaking Conan in the ratings and Leno still on top of his time slot, things aren’t looking good for NBC’s late-night lineup.

NBC is in a catch-22 because if they keep Leno for The Tonight Show, they’d owe Conan $40 million. If they let him go, word is that Leno might follow in Dan Rather’s footsteps and head to cable or satellite, or he might jump over to ABC, push Jimmy Kimmel back an hour and compete directly with Conan. It’s just another problem Ben Silverman will have to fix quickly if he wants to get off to a good start as the head of NBC.

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