Imagine a world in which the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball all decided to move their seasons to the same time of year. It would be chaos, for fans and the professional sports business alike. And yet, in television, that's essentially what happens during pilot season.
The broadcast networks traditionally order pilots during the first few months of the year. From there, it's a race to find the best actors, hire a crew, build sets and produce a show before May, when the upcoming fall schedules are announced. The field has always been crowded, but this spring, several cable networks and online retailer-turned-programmer Amazon are also developing new shows that they hope will go to series (cable networks typically produce pilots throughout the year, usually avoiding the spring).
read moreOscar-nominated actor Tim Roth has been cast in David Cronenberg's Knifeman, Deadline reports.
Roth will star in the series, based on Wendy Moore's biography of John Tattersall, an 18th-century self-taught surgeon, whose methods were unorthodox to say the least.read more
Lie to Me's third season finale Monday and the uncertainty of its future left fans hungry for more — more criminal psychology, more romantic tensions and more of Tim Roth talking with his mouth full.
In the Fox drama, the Lightman Group specializes in interpreting microexpressions and body language, and leader Cal Lightman (Roth) is an expert at manipulating his own body's language to fluster and confuse people into inadvertently revealing their true motives. Executive producers Alexander Cary and David Graziano explain that Roth deliberately created Lightman's odd food mannerisms as part of his character's work strategy.
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