Treat Williams in Heartland Andrew Eccles/TNT
TNT has taken Treat Williams' Heartland off the donor list after nine episodes. The med drama opened with poor retention of lead-in The Closer's audience, and only waned further when it got bumped to an 8 pm slot. Its audience also skewed a bit old for Madison Avenue's liking. Looking ahead, says Variety, TNT has greenlit production on Leverage, a pilot directed and produced by Dean Devlin (The Librarian) and concerning a team of high-tech thieves who target wealthy crooks, corrupt power brokers and slimy politicos. Ooh, it's as if Robin Hood watched those few episodes of Smith!
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Question: Do you know the fate of Heartland on TNT? Although not outstanding, I enjoyed watching it, and this week was the final show. Is that it for Treat Williams and cast?
Answer: My gut tells me the show has flatlined. The writing was probably on the wall from the time TNT bounced it from its post-Closer slot in favor of Saving Grace. But as far as I know, no official word has come down yet ...
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Question: I'm a little worried: I love The Closer and I enjoy watching Heartland right afterward. But the previews for Saving Grace indicate that it is going to go on in the Heartland time period. Have they already canceled this great show? I hope not. I hope they are just going to preview Saving Grace, then it will move to a different time period. Please don't tell me that Heartland is leaving already. It has only been on for a few episodes.
Answer: Matt Roush: You're right to be worried. The numbers for Heartland didn't hold up, and it wasn't getting much critical buzz, to put it mildly, so TNT decided to switch things around and, starting Monday, it has moved Heartland an hour before The Closer on Mondays as a lead-in. Saving Grace was originally scheduled to air on a different night of the week, but TNT is now hoping that Closer fans will stay tuned for Holly Hunter's oddball new show, which feels at times like an R-rated Touched by an Angel uneasily mixed with a procedural crime
...
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Holly Hunter in Saving Grace by Frank Ockenfels/TNT
Is Heartland not beating strongly enough? TNT has announced that Academy Award winner Holly Hunter's Saving Grace, originally pegged for a July 18 bow and Wednesdays-at-10 time slot, instead will premiere Monday, July 23, serving as The Closer's new lead-out.Treat Williams' Heartland will stay put until Grace's arrival, at which point it will air two hours earlier, Mondays at 8.
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Treat Williams, Heartland
Good ol’ Dr. Andy Brown is still putting people back together, only these days Treat Williams is specializing in cutting-edge transplants as Nathaniel Grant on TNT’s brand-new Heartland (Mondays at 10 pm/ET). TVGuide.com invited Williams to preview what’s ahead for his new surgeon, as well as reflect on Everwood’s unfortunate fate.
TVGuide.com: First off, let’s talk to the Everwood fans out there. What will they find familiar about your new doc, and what will they find different?Treat Williams: Hmm, that’s a good question. Not too much familiar, a lot different. This is the guy that Andy Brown probably was in New York, five years before he came to Everwood — very caught up in a very high-stress environmen
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We wrapped for the season late last Thursday night. Intense week, this, with our premiere on Monday and our wrap on Thursday. Well over a hundred people work on Heartland, all with very specific and important jobs. And every person who works on this show does so at an enormous sacrifice to the rest of their lives; the hours are incredibly long, the locations hard and the task at hand is measured in minutes and always under pressure to get it done and get it done well. Those of us who work in this business are really nothing like the way the magazines and newspapers and television entertainment shows depict. We are, for the most part, very workaday people who labor long hours at our very specific jobs and do our best to do them well. Everything we do is handmade; this is no production line of sorts, no template, no easy way to getting it right or to making it good. At our best, we do our work from our hearts and attempt to tell stories that are true. When we do that, keep it simple a...
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• On Sunday HBO's John from Cincinnati delivered 1.2 million total viewers in its second week, representing a drop of 65 percent from the premiere. The Season 4 launch of lead-out Entourage drew 2.2 mil, shedding 1.2 mil from its recent season-ender, while Flight of the Conchords bowed to 1.2 mil. • The Sunday finale of VH1's Celebrity Fit Club was sized up by 2.7 mil, a series high. Showtime's Meadowlands was visited by 184,000.• On Monday TNT's Heartland debuted to 4.3 mil, making it ad-supported cable's No. 2 series telecast for the year to date. Big Love (1.5 mil) got a bit less love, dropping 700K week to week.
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We premiere on Monday night. It’s kind of a strange thing; I’m directing the season finale as I write this, literally between takes. We are pushing so hard to get done on time and done well; meanwhile, we’re hiding from all the reviews and speculation that comes with the beginning of a new series. We’ve become a tight-knit family here, living in an abandoned hospital in Hawthorne, California, and shooting 13 hours a day. It’s been an incredible experience to conceive an entire season before being on the air even once. We’ve worked without knowing whether the show will connect with the audience. We haven’t been concerned with how many are watching or what the reviewers are saying. So we can only feel good about the job itself on its own merits. We can only focus on the work we’ve done. Which brings me full circle to how this all began, nearly two years ago.After my last show was canceled, I was in Maine reading a book about what happens to you...
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Check your TV's thermostat. If the temperature's rising to alarming new levels, boiling over with riotous politically incorrect humor and scorching the screen with personal drama that's as wrenching as it is raunchy, you must be watching Rescue Me (Wednesdays, 10 pm/ET on FX).
In its fourth season, FX's bravely unsparing tragicomedy about a twisted brotherhood of New York firefighters is more obsessed than ever with outmoded codes of manliness. These flawed, funny antiheroes bust each other's chops at any sign of vulnerability, but the joke is almost always on them.
Not that Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), the crew's No. 1 jokester, is in a laughing mood. He's under investigation for insurance fraud after last season's climactic beach fire, set by psycho Sheila (Callie Thorne
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The Peacock plans to discontinue its supersized sitcoms. According to TVWeek.com, the net believes that starting shows at odd intervals like 9:23 pm was frustrating viewers, not to mention confusing TiVos.... TNT and TBS will stream all of their original summer series online, says BroadCastingCable.com. Existing hits The Closer and My Boys and newbies Heartland and Saving Grace will be available the day after they're broadcast.... Literary agent Tony Cowell — aka Simon's spotlight-starved sibling — will be the head judge of Bestseller, an American Idol-like reality competition for aspiring scribes airing on British TV.... Comedy Central is developing a new slew of controversial comedies, including the bank-robbing laffer Held Up, the Arab stand-up showcase The Watch List and David Alan Grier's Chocolate News. (We miss you, Dave Chappelle!) — Reporting by Raven Snook
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