Go ahead and stare at Simon Baker. Gawk at his curly golden locks and his winning smile. He doesn't mind, really.
"It doesn't bother me because I know time is ticking," the 41-year-old Baker tells TVGuide.com. "I've been doing this for almost 20 years, and I'm able to see myself age on film. Eventually I know what I'm going to become — I've seen my father."
When Bruno Heller was looking to cast a leading man to play the role of Patrick Jane in The Mentalist, he was won over by Baker's looks as well. But he quickly learned there was much more beneath the surface. "What Jane does is get in people's physical space and inside their heads, and in order to do that, you have to be someone that people want to be close to, whether they know it or not," Heller says. "It needed a very magnetic personality playing the part.
Look back at Simon Baker's most memorable roles
"Simon has a physical and mental grace. He's always switched on — he's always alert, always alive," Heller continues. "If you watch him working on a stage, he's never just going through the lines. He's always looking for the extra grace notes. It's actually a much tougher job. Very few actors can do the hard physical work that must be done on a show like this."
But back in the late 1980s, when Baker first began acting in commercials in his native Australia, he laughed at the idea of considering acting a form of labor...
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If you're a Tim Daly fan, or if you love Leverage in part because it seems vaguely familiar, there are good times ahead.
DirecTV has inked a deal to broadcast the short-lived TV series Eyes, Smith and The Nine — unaired episodes and all.
A Ray Liotta-fronted drama about an all-star ensemble of master thieves, Smith served up just three episodes during its original CBS run. But starting April 8, DirecTV's 101 Network will unspool all seven produced episodes, airing ...
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Question: Why did NBC move The Office so it now conflicts with Grey's Anatomy? I guess putting Scrubs after it might give that show the break it deserves. And now they put Cane opposite Boston Legal. I don't have TiVo, so I guess I have to dust off my VHS. Do they really want to weed out good (old) shows or jeopardize new ones? On another topic, what happened to Shark?
Answer: The move of The Office has nothing to do with giving Scrubs a break. This is Scrubs' final season, and nothing's going to make it a breakout hit. Actually, none of NBC's comedies on Thursday are runaway hits. The move probably has to do with giving 30 Rock a more protected slot at 8:30 pm/ET, between My Name Is Earl and The Office. The fact is that some good NBC comedy is going to have to go up against Grey's Anatomy and CSI, and The Office is arguably better suited, thematically and content-wise, for the later time period. And Cane vs. Boston Legal? CBS had to put something there, having basically vamped with
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Question: So I watched the remaining filmed episodes of Smith on the Internet, and I remained as interested and entertained as I had been by the episodes that actually aired on TV before CBS yanked it. But then I read the synopses of the episodes that were not filmed. [SPOILER ALERT] According to the synopses, Simon Baker and Jonny Lee Miller's characters (two of my main reasons for watching) were to go out Butch Cassidy-Sundance Kid style in a shootout in Episode 10. By the end of the season, Shohreh Aghdashloo's character kills Franky G.'s character's girlfriend, only to be killed by him as revenge. He then manages to escape with his son to start a new life, as does Amy Smart's character after killing her innocent friend and leaving her in the desert to be identified as Amy (by pouring acid over the girl's face and hands to prevent identification). Finally, Ray Liotta's character turns himself in to save Virginia Madsen's character from arrest, in exchange for her immunity for trying ...
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Question: Perhaps you can explain something to me. CBS canceled Smith because, while it started out strong enough, it lost viewers every week thereafter. But NBC renews Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip even though, like Smith, it started out strong but has bled viewers with each subsequent episode. Huh? The situations were identical, yet the results were very different. What's up with that?
Answer: Apples and oranges, my friend. You can compare the ratings situations, but the shows are not at all alike. And the networks that each show airs (aired) on are in such different places. Smith was a departure for CBS (being about the bad guys instead of the good guys), and it aires in one of the network's few troubled time periods. (I'm not sure 3 LBS is going to fare much better as its replacement.) Several execs have gone on record saying that, given where they saw that show heading creatively, they didn't believe it had a chance to reverse the sliding ratings trend. In other words, they gave up
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