Ron Livingston
Fox TV Studios is teaming with several international broadcasters to produce Defying Gravity, a 13-episode adventure drama series starring Office Space star Ron Livingston.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Fox will join Canada's CTV, Germany's ProSieben and the BBC to produce Gravity, a series from creator/exec producer James Parriott (Grey's Anatomy). The show is set in the near future and revolves around eight astronauts ...
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Justin Timberlake by Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
Justin Timberlake will play a professional hockey player who is romanced by teammate Romany Malco's missus in the Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru.... Also per the Reporter, Carla Gugino is a CSI who woos Robert De Niro in the crime drama Righteous Kill, also starring Al Pacino.... David Schwimmer is Kate Beckinsale's hubby in the political thriller Nothing But the Truth.... Ron Livingston is Eric Bana's bud in The Time Traveler's Wife.... Jason Isaacs and Melissa George are John Cusack's nemesis and girlfriend, respectively, in the thriller Stopping Power.... Per Variety, Eva Mendes has joined Frank Miller's The Spirit.
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As The Class awaits word on a possible second season, Jesse Tyler Ferguson is keeping busy, reprising the role he created on Broadway of Leaf Coneybear, for the Los Angeles premiere of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The musical's four-week run begins May 27.In other stage news, Ron Livingston (Standoff) and Jason Patric (yep, Speed 2) are two-thirds of the cast for Neil LaBute's In a Dark Dark House, world-premiering May 16 off-Broadway. Also, the New York Post hears that Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to visit the GWW this fall as the star of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, which Al Pacino fronted 30 years ago.
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Question: I was very upset to hear that Fox is canceling Justice, one of my favorite shows. One of the unique parts of this show is that at the end you are given the details on exactly how the person was killed. While at the end of other crime drama episodes, you still wonder exactly how "it" happened. Why is it that Fox is dumping Justice while going all out to save Standoff? I have tried to watch Standoff on three different occasions and have only found poor acting and even worse story lines. I feel that Fox has not even tried to help Justice with promos and advertisement but is continually doing this for Standoff.
Answer: The fact is, Fox had another lousy fall, with not even a Prison Break-sized breakthrough this year. Justice was given two chances. When it was clearly getting clobbered by Criminal Minds on Wednesdays (don't ask me why — that's the most inexplicably popular show on TV), Fox moved it behind Prison Break, which was about as good a shot as Justice was going to get.
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Wow. Tonight was hostage-tacular. We had Anya and Eddie, the mother and son at the church, the man on the bus, and then Anya and Graham. It was an outright action bonanza!I have to confess, I jumped the gun and was disappointed that the Anya storyline appeared to be morphing into a Fatal Attraction situation. Luckily, it took a relatively fresh turn. The hostage became the hostage taker. Interesting. It surprised me that I’ve never really wondered what happens to the victims after each ordeal we witness in these episodes. But, yeah, it’s not hard to see how the victims could come undone after all the dust settles. I found myself thinking, “Poor Anya,” which was a lovely break from my usual “Poor, tormented HT” thoughts. (Though I should point out that by the end, Anya was the hostage taker, so I guess I really couldn’t go a whole episode without feeling sympathy for the criminal.) I’m still not entirely sure that Graham wrote that m...
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As a ramp-up to the Oct. 31, post-baseball return of Fox's Standoff, TV Guide Channel will air the first four episodes of the freshman drama this Sunday from 3 to 7 pm/ET. The mini-marathon will be hosted by series stars Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt.
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Question: I normally really enjoy your column, but how could you label Standoff a loser? It's clearly one of the best new shows of the season so far. Ron Livingston proved himself worthy of leading-man status long ago with Office Space and Sex and the City, and he has great chemistry with Rosemarie DeWitt, who has already been labeled "the find of the season." The show is both funny and suspenseful with strong characters and an interesting premise. What's not to love?
Answer: Let's start with the premise, which pretty much exhausted itself in the pilot episode. Wouldn't it have been more interesting if their relationship hadn't been exposed in the very first scene? Then the situations, which get more ridiculous by the week. I won't argue that Livingston is a major star waiting to happen, but I can't imagine this will be the vehicle. Fox is getting off to a pretty rocky start again this fall, and I would imagine either Standoff or Justice will be gone before the new year. I'm sorry to
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Ron Livingston, Nightmares & Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Some actors possess an Everyman quality that gives them the versatility to take on any role. Ron Livingston is that type of guy. After gaining notoriety as a member of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn's crew of Swingers, he went on to play a conflicted World War II captain in HBO's Band of Brothers. This fall the Iowa native gets his first opportunity to play a series lead on Fox's hostage-negotiator action-drama
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Brad Garrett, 'Til Death
After attending the networks' upfront presentations all week, the Biz has this analysis of the coming season. (Click here for next fall's grid and new-show descriptions.)
CWYou've got to wonder what went wrong in CW's new-series development process if the network had to bring back 7th Heaven — even though the show lost a reported $16 million for WB this past season.
But the decision to have CW's inaugural schedule made up of established shows from WB and UPN may end up being a blessing. Many of the shows have small but rabid followings, and promoting new shows on a new network will be tough. The fans of shows like One Tree Hill and Veronica Mars will track them down on their own. Viewers in the 18-to-34-year-old demographic that CW targets don't watch networks, they watch shows. (According to recent survey, only one in four 1
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Angie Harmon, Secrets of a Small Town
It's that time of year again: Network executives are spending these lovely spring days in dark screening rooms, searching for next fall's big hit. As we approach the mid-May unveiling of the new 2006-07 prime-time schedules, the Biz is here to provide you with an early glimpse of which drama pilots are heating up. We'll report on the sitcoms next week.
ABC: Secrets of a Small Town — a drama starring Angie Harmon about a small town whose residents have plenty of skeletons in the closet — is believed to have the inside track for the Sunday-night slot after Desperate Housewives. (It's now a given that the network will move the superhot Grey's Anatomy to another night where it can help launch a new show.) Also hot are Six Degrees — another ensemble soap about six strangers whose lives intertwine in New York — and Traveler, about three graduate students involved in a national-security emergency.
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