Laurie Metcalf by Kevin Mazur/WireImage.com
Get Mega Buzz on Trace, Kyle XY and more here!Roseanne's sister, Laurie Metcalf, has been tapped to play matriarch to a family of loan sharks in Easy Money, the new hour dramedy premiering this fall and airing Sundays at 9 pm/ET on the CW, says the Reporter.Penned by Sopranos scribes Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Easy Money is part of the Sunday lineup being developed and programmed for the CW by Media Rights Capital. — Matt MitovichRelated:• Official CW Sunday Sked: Laughs, Love, Loan Sharks• CW's "Outsourced" Sunday Lineup Is Set
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Drew Carey host of The Price Is Right by Monty Brinton/CBS
Giggling at the antics of the slap-happy contestants who “come on down” at what he calls “the happiest place on Earth,” Drew Carey looks like he’s having a blast, and looks right at home, on the spiffed-up set of The Price Is Right as he takes over as host today. There’s no fuss and no ceremony, and outside of the introduction telling us we’re at the Bob Barker Studio in Television City, and that one of the games is still called “Barker’s Bargain Bar,” and that Carey chooses to sign off with the traditional plea to have your pets spayed, there’s no actual homage to the former host as the new Price era begins.And yet, probably the greatest tribute to Bob Barker is that the show goes on, and goes on effortlessly with its funny-looking new ringleader, who appears to be genuinely tickled at the breathless excitement of the frantic folks who come to play the game. When one of the contestants does a cartwheel after taking the stage, C...
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Kyle Chandler in Friday Night Lights by Van Redin/NBC Photo
Remember how Charlie Brown used to end up on his back every time he went to kick the football after Lucy pulled it away? Well, that was me, in the pre-dawn of Thursday morning at the TV Academy building in North Hollywood, as the first Emmy category (for best drama series) was read aloud. Amid a gaggle of impatient media crews and anxious publicists, I once again felt sucker-punched by the cluelessly inexplicable whims of the Emmy nomination process. (Go here for a list of nominees.)The football analogy applies because, once again, the Emmy system dropped the ball, failing to acknowledge NBC’s critically worshiped freshman underdog Friday Night Lights, instead finding room for ABC’s cartoonishly lurid freak show Boston Legal (on the basis, so I hear, of a rare detour into quality with a post-Katrina episode). A chagrined Academy source tells me that Friday Night Lights came close, but speculated that it may have flown too far under the radar in a way overcrowded field. Hea...
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Heroes "flying man" Adrian Pasdar will take a different leap of faith this winter as the book writer for Marcus Hummon's new musical Atlanta, at Los Angeles' Geffen Playhouse, says Playbill.com. Grammy-winner Hummon has penned hits for a host of Nashville acts, including Mrs. Pasdar's (aka Natalie Maines') Dixie Chicks. Other Hollywood hotshots gracing the Geffen next season include Emmy winners Christine Lahti (in the West Coast bow of Wendy Wasserstein's final play, Third) and Laurie Metcalfe (in Quality of Life), and Annette Bening (in The Female of the Species).... Florence Henderson bares all in the New York debut of her autobiographical show All the Lives of Me: A Musical Journey, a one-night only event at Joe's Pub on June 11, and featuring a "no-holds-barred Q&A segment." But please, don't trot out that "Brady incest" query again. — Reporting by Raven Snook
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The latest fall-pilot developments, as recapped by our pals at Variety:• Laurie Metcalf has joined the cast of Lifetime's The Virgin of Akron, Ohio, playing the mother of the title character, a young model who returns to her hometown and, after surviving a car crash, is believed to have been sent by God. I'm sorry, a model who's a virgin? Aren't we already having trouble believing Adriana Lima?• ABC has picked up See Jayne Run, a comedy about a woman juggling motherhood and a career, and a sudser set in D.C. Also, it's now "official": ABC has cast Jordana Brewster as Jane in its Mr. & Mrs. Smith series — but TVGuide.com told you that yesterday.• Fox has picked up The Beast, about a veterinarian who can't stand animals, and a comedy about four post-college single women.
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Laurie Metcalf is a great guest star, and who didn't love her as wacky Aunt Jackie on Roseanne? I love how she's basically an older P.J. Quirky, funny, sitting at Crowley's with her niece's dopey friends. Welcome, Aunt Phyllis! Even better? Andy's reaction when he sees her: "Oh, no." And he was right.... Uh, good morning, Kenny. How awkward! But let me just point out... totally something Aunt Jackie would have done, too. Does Laurie just play crazy people? (Remember her psycho supermarket holdup on Desperate Housewives?) I felt very uncomfortable on behalf of P.J. and Andy — to have to watch their aunt groping their friend in public. Ick. Wait, wait... Wendy's ringtone is "Here Comes the Bride." I honestly think the cell phones are hilarious. But I love that Brando wants P.J. to be his best man. I mean, they've been best everythings since forever ago, so it's only appropriate. And I still maintain that they should end up together, so I feel a wedding-turned-disaster coming on....
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Question: How about last week's hostage-taking episode of Desperate Housewives? Pretty good, eh? Writer Joe Keenan deserves a writing nomination for making me laugh (Susan's megaphone declaration), cry (the beautifully shot dream sequences) and think (how will Lynette's life change?) all in the same hour. Brilliant stuff all the way around, and definitely the best episode since the pilot aired way back in 2004. What did you think?
Answer: If you read my Dispatch earlier this week, you know I feel pretty much the same. Laurie Metcalf was just amazing — funny and scary at the same time — and it was Felicity Huffman's best work since her first-season meltdown, which probably won her the Emmy. Just about everything clicked in that episode, reminding me what we loved about Desperate Housewives in the first place. Hope they can keep it up ...
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While some of us still miss Grey's Anatomy on Sundays, a perfectly entertaining bit of escapism to charge our batteries for the week ahead, ABC's new Brothers & Sisters has been growing on me. Week by week, culminating in this Sunday's most enjoyable episode yet, the show has become both lighter in tone and more emotionally compelling, proving to be a suitably compatible companion piece to Desperate Housewives — which, by sweeps coincidence or not, also enjoyed on Sunday its finest hour since the heights of its first breakthrough season.Housewives' much-touted supermarket-hostage crisis lives up to its billing, in no small measure thanks to killer performances (in one case literally) by Laurie Metcalf as a deranged wronged wife who takes over her cheating husband's store at gunpoint, and by Felicity Huffman's Lynette, whose final hysterical showdown with the mad Carolyn Grisby in the wake of Nora's fatal shooting (Yay!) was the sort of galvanizing moment we'd long been wait...
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I read a lot of advance press about this action-packed sweeps episode, and let me tell you, all the hype did not let me down. I laughed, I cried, I was on the edge of my seat, and I screamed "Shut up!" so many times I lost count. Definitely one of the best episodes ever, so I must first give kudos to the writer — Joe Keenan (writer/executive producer of Frasier) — and the director, Larry Shaw. The entire cast did an outstanding job, but the three powerhouses were Felicity Huffman, Laurie Metcalf and Marcia Cross.Several of my coworkers had given me the big spoiler a few weeks ago regarding who was going to die, so I was already prepared for Nora's demise. What I wasn't prepared for was the feeling of sadness after she got shot. I was one of those "Nora-haters," so hearing that she was gonna bite the dust made me happy. But here I was tonight crying during her death scene! I really lost it when Nora told Lynette to please watch over Kayla, since she was "the only good thing...
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Question: I know you love Grey's Anatomy and don't really like Desperate Housewives, and last season I shared that opinion. This season, though, I feel as though Desperate Housewives is a great show, while Grey's Anatomy began to slump during the Izzie and Denny story line. What made for an exciting finale with Izzie cutting the LVAD (a term I never want to hear again) has now turned into the Grey's Anatomy version of the Moldavian Massacre. It made for great viewing, but I don't think that creator Shonda Rhimes thought ahead to the fallout from this action. Izzie's being allowed back into the program in any form is a "shark-jumping" moment for me. This is not to say that I don't still like the show. I just think that it's going through a downturn. My friends are starting to leave it, especially after viewing the amazing season premiere of The O.C. I think that an audience backlash is the one thing that seemed to shake up Housewives. I kind of hope Grey's goes through one, so Shonda ...
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