How I Met Your Mother: Season 3 courtesy Fox
New releases announced today, May 13:Animalia - Welcome to the Kingdom on DVD & Blu-ray Disc will be coming out September 23 Fat Albert's Halloween Special will be coming out August 26 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe - Volume 3 will be coming out August 5 How I Met Your Mother - Season 3 will be coming out October 14 Lonesome Dove - 2-Disc Collector’s Edition on DVD and Blu-ray Disc will be coming out August 19 Sunset Tan - Season 1 will be coming out August 5 Visit TVShowsOnDVD.com for the complete stories on these and other news items.
read more
Much like getting hooked on a TV show, it’s easy to become addicted to a favorite author. They don’t come much more different than Wild West chronicler Larry McMurtry and the 19th century’s droll Jane Austen, each returning to TV this week.
McMurtry’s epic Western Lonesome Dove ranks among the all-time greatest TV miniseries, but with the six-hour prequel Comanche Moon, he and CBS have dipped into this mythic well once too often. Perilously poky and sometimes just plain hokey, this sloppy and scattershot yarn finds Gus and Woodrow, the Dove characters immortalized in their twilight years by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, as young and restless Texas Rangers. Steve Zahn is scrappy fun as gabby Gus, but Karl Urban is a dud as the sullen, scowling Woodrow.
Through most of the meandering story, our heroes bicker, banter and woo the womenfolk they will ultimately disappoint. Meanwhile, they track clichéd foes: murderous, horse-
read more
CBS will present the final chapter of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove saga, Commanche Moon, Jan. 13-16. The cast includes Val Kilmer, Rachel Griffiths, ER's Linda Cardellini, Scrubs' Elizabeth Banks, the ubiquitous Wes Studi and pretty much everyone who's ever tried on a Stetson (except for Larry Hagman). — Ben Katner
read more
So are we supposed to think Bob Dylan is the final Cylon? Wouldn’t surprise me a bit after Sunday’s mind-blowing season finale of Battlestar Galactica. I watched a rough cut of this episode several weeks ago, in order to be able to include it in a mid-season roundup, but it feels like a year has passed, I’ve been so anxious for it to get out there so more dedicated and obssessed fans than I could ever claim to be can start weighing in. I rarely have the luxury to watch anything twice, but I decided to watch Sunday’s episode in more or less real time, so I could savor it again in a more polished version and see if it would have the same impact the second time around.Did it ever. As they say, holy frak, right?Battlestar earns an A-plus with its jam-packed finale, the last we’ll get of the show until the next calendar year. (That’s the bad news. The good: There will be at least 22 more hours of Battlestar to kick around come 2008.) Not only was Baltar’...
read more
Robert Duvall, Broken Trail
It is, as they say out on the range, a sight for sore eyes to see Robert Duvall back on TV in AMC's first-ever original movie, Broken Trail. The two-part, four-hour film (airing Sunday and Monday at 8 pm/ET) stars Duvall as grizzled cowboy Print Ritter, who leads his estranged, taciturn nephew Tom Harte (Thomas Haden Church) on a harrowing horse drive from Oregon to Wyoming.
The ragtag travelers embark on your classic Western odyssey, complete with smallpox, bloodshed and outlaws, but with a twist: Duvall, who also served as executive producer, was intent on putting people, not shoot-'em-ups, center stage. "I tried to say, 'Let's just keep this very s
read more
Hard to remember the last time I turned to AMC for an actual classic movie. So what a pleasant surprise that when this channel ponies up (so to speak) for its first TV-movie, it ranks among the best I've seen in years.
There is beauty and darkness, sentimentality and toughness, brutality and discreetness in director Walter Hill's masterfully filmed Western Broken Trail (Sunday, June 25, and Monday, June 26, at 8 pm/ET). This smaller-scale Lonesome Dove has a heart as wide-open as the plains its taciturn heroes ride upon.
read more
When I heard that longtime TV producer Dan Curtis died this week at 78, I kind of felt like a part of my childhood died as well. This showman no doubt was most proud of his epic World War II miniseries of the '80s, Winds of War, and its colossal 30-hour sequel, War and Remembrance. Yet I can't help but think fondly of the supernatural '60s soap opera he created (also for ABC), Dark Shadows, which introduced the world to that fang-tastically brooding vampire hero, Barnabas Collins.
Many was the afternoon I would hurry home from school (or, in the summer, the public pool) to catch the latest creepy installment of this Gothic soap. I had the books; I had the board game; I even sported plastic fangs and could produce a replica of Barnabas' gaudy ring upon demand. I w
read more
