The latest pilot updates, from our friends at the Hollywood Reporter and Variety:• Kirstie Alley has collared the title role in The Minister of Divine, Fox's take on the Britcom The Vicar of Dibley.• Martin Henderson (The Ring) will play Brad to Jordana Brewster's Angelina in ABC's Mr. & Mrs. Smith. (If you are dating either of the leads, please think very carefully before splurging on the Valentine's gift.)• Brian White (Stomp the Yard) is Kyle in ABC's Football Wives.• Lee Pace (The Good Shepherd) has landed the lead, as a man who can bring the dead back to life with but a touch, in ABC's Pushing Daisies.• Mark-Paul Gosselaar will star opposite Janeane Garofalo in CBS' public-defenders comedy.• Cole Hauser will star in K-Ville, Fox's New Orleans-cops drama.• Colm Feore is the police-department captain in ABC's Judy's Got a Gun.• That '70s Show's Kurtwood Smith is a justice in Supreme Courtships, Fox's look at a half dozen clerks and judg...
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• ABC ordered a quintet of pilots on Tuesday, including The Call, a single-camera comedy from 24 gurus Joel Surnow, Bob Cochran and Howard Gordon, and focusing on "two offbeat L.A. paramedics who save people's lives while messing up each other," says Variety. The series is likened to a mash-up of Emergency!, M*A*SH and Seinfeld — but not Saved. No, not a hint of Saved. Also greenlit by ABC: Sam I Am, in which a woman awakens from a coma with amnesia, yet determined to atone for her supposed bad-girl past, and The Middle, a dysfunctional-family sitcom fancied as "Roseanne meets Little Miss Sunshine."• Fox has added SNL alum Cheri Oteri and That '70s Show's Kurtwood Smith to the voice cast of The Life and Times of Tim, and ordered the pilot Deeply Irresponsible, in which an uptight family is shaken up when their free-spirited grandpa moves in.
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As you undoubtedly first read on Sunday in the never-sleeping Ausiello Report, Grammy-winning recording artist Dave Matthews is being admitted for a House call, guesting on a March episode as a savant and virtuoso pianist who suffered a neurological impairment as the result of a childhood accident. That '70s Show's Kurtwood Smith plays Matthews' father — a former physician, natch — who is faced with a potentially life-altering decision about his son's treatment.
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