TV has really put the “labor” in Labor Day week. It’s only the third day of September, and what is many years a sleepy week has already seen the premiere of six major series (network and cable), with roughly four more (if you count Bravo’s Top Design) on tap for tonight. I dealt with several of these shows already in my Roush Review column—FX’s The Shield and Sons of Anarchy, Fox’s Prison Break, TNT’s Raising the Bar and HBO’s True Blood—but here are some more thoughts on a week so busy it’s hard to fathom that the official network premiere week is nearly three weeks away.Gossip Girl Rocks. Some of the most fun I’ve had in front of the TV in the last week or so (when I’m not absorbed in U.S. Open tennis play) was zipping through the first three episodes of Gossip Girl’s hilariously sizzling second season. On Monday night, we learned that mopey Serena was getting through her summer-without-Dan by watching The Close...
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That big-screen version of Dallas is inching closer to reality. Variety reports that the cast is starting to fill out — particularly in the backside, one might say, with Jennifer Lopez being offered the role of Sue Ellen Ewing (played by Linda Gray on the long-running CBS serial). Luke Wilson is in talks to play Bobby, and Shirley MacLaine is being eyed for Miss Ellie, while the most plum part, J.R. himself, is still earmarked for John Travolta (production on Dallas would begin in October, after he's done filming Hairspray). You can practically hear Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson catfighting over the role of Lucy.
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Now Patrick Duffy fans don't have to settle for watching his daily Dallas reruns on SoapNet. The artist formerly known as Bobby Ewing reported to the Bold and the Beautiful set this week to start playing the contract role of Brooke's father, Stephen Logan. (The part was previously played by Robert Pine.) Duffy — who first airs on April 18 — isn't the first big Dallas alum to do B&B. Last year Linda Gray (aka Sue Ellen) played Priscilla, the meddling mother of Sydney Penny's Samantha.
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Whatever you do, don't turn this TV Guide Online interview with Linda Gray into a drinking game. If you took a swig every time the actress, best known as Dallas's liquor-lovin' Sue Ellen Ewing, revealed something shocking about the long-running prime-time soap, you'd be halfway to pickled before your three-martini lunch even arrived. And by the time you caught the 62-year-old knockout ruminating with her cast mates on Sunday's all-star get-together, Dallas Reunion: The Return to Southfork (9 pm/ET on CBS)? Please! You'd be passed out cold. Just look at the alcohol equivalent of the tidbits she shared with us:
Champagne — the good stuff, too! Newhart innkeeper
Mary Frann was originally supposed to play Sue Ellen. "She had the part," Gray confirms. "
Victoria Principal was a brunet and so was I, and Mary was a blond, and [the producers] wanted that [visual] contrast. But the casting director [who had only recently tappe
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