My loyalties are so divided on Friday nights. I want ABC’s so-so new crime drama Women’s Murder Club to do well enough to bring some much-needed eyeballs to the charming romantic comedy Men in Trees, which finally returns from a cruel nearly eight-month hiatus. With James Patterson’s name as a selling point for Murder Club (though he’s not writing this series any more than he appears to be penning half of the books that go out with co-writers’ names on his ubiquitous book jackets), the show certainly has a shot at commercial success, even on a night that’s widely considered a graveyard. Remember: This same night, and this same time period (9 pm/ET), is where the original CSI launched to even less fanfare, and the rest is TV history.But I also don’t want anything to take audience away from Murder Club’s competition, most notably NBC’s ever-fragile Friday Night Lights, which offers another superb episode this week. Even if like many observe...
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Within the strange, genius-populated little Northwestern town at the heart of Sci Fi Channel's Eureka (Tuesdays at 9 pm/ET) resides Jim Taggart, the off-center "dogcatcher" who specializes in the critters, creepies and crawlies born of the burg's bizarre scientific experiments. TVGuide.com spoke with Matt Frewer (aka Max Headroom for my fellow children of the '80s) about his stay in Eureka and the series' "aggressive multiplatform media initiative." (He has no idea what I just said.)
TVGuide.com: It's always a pleasure — if not a little bit clumsy — to interview another person named Matt.Matt Frewer: Oh, well, just pretend I'm wearing a name
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Question: I've always been curious as to why networks never air traditional 30-minute sitcoms (Friends, Will & Grace, Two and a Half Men, etc) between the hours of 10 and 11 pm?
Answer: The networks don't do anything without a ton of research, and I'm sure experience and testing (and a few failed experiments in continuing comedy blocks into the last hour of prime time) have shown that comedy works better in the earlier hours, and given the state of TV comedy nowadays, there are diminishing returns the more you air and the later you go. The networks also tend to get darker, more serious and more adult as the night goes on, which also works against comedy. In some time periods where there's a dominant drama, it would be interesting to see one of the Big Three (Fox and CW don't program in that hour) step up with some comedic counterprogramming, if not an actual sitcom. Northern Exposure, for instance, did quite well in that hour for several seasons. (That's why I'm curious about ABC's
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The tucked-away town of Eureka may not be on a map, but you can't miss it. Just turn left at the second wormhole.
What's strange is commonplace in Eureka (Tuesdays at 9 pm/ET on Sci Fi, premiering July 18), a divertingly original but awfully precious comic fantasy that brings science fiction back to Earth. The setting: a quirky Northern Exposure-like burg in the Pacific Northwest where every basement seems to be hatching a mind-blowing (and potentially cosmos-shaking) experiment, courtesy of a local population of obsessed geniuses.
Many of the classified secrets behind the town's origins are revealed in this week's two-hour pilot, in which U.S. Marshal Jack Carter (gangly, goofily charming Colin Ferguson) stumbles into Eureka just as a secret project goes awry and beg
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On the hit CBS drama Numbers (Fridays at 10 pm/ET), Rob Morrow plays Don Eppes, an FBI agent who is constantly picking his math-genius brother's brain in order to solve cases. Well, when TVGuide.com spent a few minutes picking the actor's brain for a change, the down-to-earth Morrow happily chatted about Numbers' Emmy chances, his golf game and all that math jargon.
TVGuide.com: Numbers always seems very intense, with a lot of locations and running around.
Rob Morrow: Definitely, and I like that. We set the bar. I don't think the show was intended to be that, but we just got into the action side of it and dec
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