Dexter
Even after six seasons, Dexter still botches a kill now and then. At the moment, he's trying to take out a nasty-looking thug, but the blade in Michael C. Hall's hand won't flip into position. He flips once — nothing. Again, nope. Third time, Hall just flings the thing and starts laughing. Which gets the thug laughing, which gets everybody on the Dexter set laughing, too.
"You'd think I'd know how to slash a throat," Hall says, breaking character. You'd think. But you'd also think meticulous Dexter would have locked the cathedral door behind him last season before plunging a sword into poor Colin Hanks' chest on the church altar. In Season 6's unholy finale, Dexter offed Hanks' Travis "Doomsday Killer" Marshall with his trademark efficiency and calm. Only this time, there was a witness — Dexter's saucer-eyed sister, Debra (Jennifer Carpenter).
For Dexter, Deb and breathless fans alike (not to mention shrink-wrapped Travis), it was a stunning twist — years in the teasing — that instantly reinvigorated a so-so season just as it ended. It also sets up the series for its conclusion next season. As Hall says, "It was, like, knife-in-chest, Debra sees it, reset-button-on-the-show. Everything is suddenly reframed, recontextualized, more complicated and more layered, not just for the audience but for us as actors."
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Lukas Haas
"All those equations add up to something, I'm guessing," Lukas Haas says of the chicken scratch behind him. "Just don't ask me what it all means."
Haas joins the cast of Touch (returning Oct. 26 at 8/7c on Fox) this season as...
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The Newsroom
Jeff Daniels storms out of the glass-walled conference room for the fifth time in 25 minutes. Apparently, Nancy Grace can do that to a man. Take after take, her Southern-fried commentary on the Casey Anthony murder case has been blaring on multiple television monitors around the set of a TV newsroom, and her "Oh, God, will you look at that" attitude is more than Daniels' character, Will McAvoy, can bear.
McAvoy is a veteran anchorman unraveling before our eyes on The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's new HBO drama about...
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Hatfields & McCoys
For Kevin Costner, the beard was probably the toughest part. "It went on one hair at a time, singly laid in," he says of the old-man whiskers he wears for Hatfields & McCoys, an epic three-night miniseries beginning tonight on History. Costner plays Devil Anse Hatfield, patriarch and neighbor-from-hell to Randall McCoy (an equally fuzzy-faced Bill Paxton). "My chin would...
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Hugh Laurie
After eight seasons and 177 episodes, House ends with an outbreak of poignant goodbyes. In the emotional run-up to the series finale — the episode, titled "Everybody Dies," airs May 21 at 9pm on Fox — each shooting day brought cheers, standing Os and misty-eyed send-offs. "A succession of daily memorial services, it was," as Hugh Laurie puts it. "Someone would yell, 'Hey, everybody, this is Omar Epps' last scene!' 'This is Jesse Spencer's last scene!' 'This is B camera operator's last scene.' The art director's. The sound technician's. It became hard to process all the finality."
It's amusing to imagine...
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"The last few episodes of House are all about House and Wilson, but we bring back some old friends as well," says creator David Shore. The May 14 penultimate episode sees the return of...
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Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander
After last season's cliff-hanger on TNT's Rizzoli & Isles (the BFFs were at a major crossroads), executive producer Janet Tamaro wanted Season 3 to start with a bang. Then it hit her: Who would be disappointed at seeing Angie Harmon (Rizzoli) in a hooker outfit? "The story line just crackled from there," Tamaro says. "The only problem was, we couldn't get her out of character!"
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Mad Men
It's been so long since Mad Men was on the air that it feels as though the show actually shot in the 1960s. We don't care to dwell on the contract negotiations that delayed it. What's important is that Don, Roger, Peggy, Pete, Joan, Betty, Lane, Sally and the rest of that impeccably groomed, highly dysfunctional crowd are back. With Season 5 premiering in a two-hour episode on March 25, TV Guide Magazine sat down with the cast — and creator Matthew Weiner — in Los Angeles to try to pry some secrets out of them and chat about why the wait was worth it.
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Kiefer Sutherland, Touch
Inside his trailer on the set of his new Fox series Touch, Kiefer Sutherland can't stop thinking about numbers: 12,000,000... 318... 100...
"It boggles the mind," he says. "It's become a huge part of my life."
No, Sutherland hasn't become obsessed with patterns like his son on the show. Touch tells the story of Martin Bohm (Sutherland), a once promising journalist who's now a widower unloading baggage at JFK. His 11-year-old special-needs son, Jake (David Mazouz), scribbles strangely prescient numbers into notebooks but has never uttered a word. In each episode of the drama, Jake connects those numbers to...
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