Just three days before its September 22 premiere, ABC's new Charlie's Angels finally settled on an actor to replace Robert Wagner as the voice of detective agency owner Charles Townsend — former Alias star Victor Garber. "They were in a panic. I think my agent was negotiating with someone in the Emmys audience," says Garber, who has the same gentlemanly grace as the late John Forsythe, Charlie on the original series and in two feature films. "This is an out-of-the-blue, out-of-body experience. I'm just happy they settled on me."
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When ABC premieres its new Charlie's Angels tomorrow night, the voice of Charlie will sound awfully familiar to fans of another female-driven ABC adventure series.
Victor Garber, who starred opposite Jennifer Garner as Alias' Jack Bristow from 2001-2006, will take over the...
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Who says nothing happens on the weekend before Labor Day? (And we're not talking storm preparations on the East Coast — at least not in this space.) Nowadays, TV almost never takes a holiday, and such is the case this weekend. A few highlights:
Torchwood: Miracle Day (Friday, 10/9c, Starz) I wish I could report that last week's terrific episode (Jack's 1920s flashback, which went from romantic to disturbing in a bloody flash as he was revealed as "the blessing") represented a return to form for this otherwise woefully uneven season of Torchwood. But I'm afraid we're back to the present day this week, and the action is just as ridiculously clumsy and the characters (Rex and Esther in particular) as aggravating as ever. Still, with only two episodes to go after this, I'll watch to the end.
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Escapism is USA Network's specialty, especially in the busy summer season, and rarely achieved more effortlessly than in the appealing Tuesday night combo of White Collar and Covert Affairs. Tonight's unusually ambitious Affairs episode (10/9c) is a great escape for several reasons. It takes us far away, to exotic Istanbul — filmed on location (not exactly an everyday occurrence on a basic-cable budget), and having just returned from that region a week ago, I assure you it's as fabulous as it looks here — and as an added bonus, we're in very good company, because the story focuses on the show's not-so-secret weapon, scene-stealer Christopher Gorham's affable blind CIA agent Auggie Anderson...
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Fiona Wallice is affected, self-entitled and narcissistic. She is a former businesswoman who stumbled into therapy and then when she found other people's lives too tedious to tolerate, she modified her job into a new "treatment modality," she calls "Web Therapy." Give her three minutes and she'll give you ... something, even if it's just further confusion.
Fiona is the character Lisa Kudrow developed alongside Don Roos and partner Dan Bucatinsky for Web Therapy, an Internet series that bowed on L/Studio in three-minute bursts in 2008, and has now been converted into a cable series for Showtime by combining webisodes and fleshing out previously unseen aspects of Fiona's personal life.
At the show's heart is Kudrow, who spends nary a minute off-screen. Web Therapy (Tuesday, 11/10c, Showtime) finds Kudrow doing that thing that is uniquely hers...
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