In other pilot news, Skeet Ulrich will star in Jericho, CBS' drama about a small town isolated from the world after a nuclear disaster.... Gail O'Grady has joined Kevin Williamson's CW sudser about a teen whose family moves to Palm Springs, while Hot Properties costar Sofia Vergara has been cast on ABC's new comedy from Donal Logue.... John Billingsley (Star Trek: Enterprise) and Owain Yeoman (Kitchen Confidential) have been added to ABC's Nine Lives, about strangers who bond during a bank robbery.... John L. Adams (The Dead Zone) will play newscaster Angie Harmon's cameraman in Secrets of a Small Town, from Charles Pratt Jr. (Desperate Housewives).... And, in short order, Mark Feuerstein (Good Morning, Miami
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Nothing puts a damper on your workplace Halloween festivities quite like an imminent firing — although I do have a fun story about a woefully interrupted Chrismukkah luncheon I should probably save for another forum. It's a credit to this show that in the midst of all my chuckling over Dwight's costume and the unfortunately vacuumed-up party decorations, deep down I was pretty darn nervous about possibly losing one of these characters. Which is why that cliff-hanger of a commercial break that made it look like Jim was on the chopping block led to this living-room scene: me staring slack-jawed at the television and demanding aloud, "So help me, Michael Scott, if you fire Jim I will storm out of this office so fast it'll make your head swim." And then I remembered that I don't actually work at Dunder-Mifflin, got embarrassed, and went to the fridge for a composure-regaining soda. (While we're at it, let's just get all my humiliating Office-watching quirks out on the table.
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Star Trek: Enterprise is now history, but it wasn't the only thing that died the night of May 13. Cmdr. Trip Tucker, one of the UPN show's most popular characters, set off an explosion in the series finale that was meant to kill evil aliens, but he wound up killing himself as well.
"At first I was shocked and a little miffed at the choice that was made," says Connor Trinneer, who played Trip. "But, selfishly, things worked out for me. I'm the only one who went out with a bang... no pun intended. I got the goodbye no one else did."
Most of the
Enterprise regulars were cheated out of airtime to make room for juicy, highly hyped guest stints by
Jonathan Frakes and
Marina Sirtis of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. "I wanted us all to have the big
M*A*S*H moment — the really memorable farewell," Trinneer says. "Sadly, it just didn't happen. That's not where the writers and producers wanted to focus."
The deadly p
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Not even Captain Kirk could have saved Star Trek: Enterprise.
The UPN series (Fridays, 8 pm/ET) will end its four-year run May 13 due to a steep drop in viewers (just 2.9 million this season). "And I don't think an appearance by
William Shatner would have mattered," says executive producer
Rick Berman. He'd been
in talks with the
Trek icon, hoping that a guest shot would lure lapsed Trekkers.
"But the writing was on the wall last year," he explains, "when UPN moved us to Friday nights and the network began skewing in a different direction." (That would be toward young female viewers.)
On the bright side, Berman promises that Enterprise will end with "a little valentine to all Trek fans. I will say that the finale is surprising — something we've never done before — and it might involve people fro
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What do you do when your intergalactic starship almost crashes and burns? After UPN came thisclose to canceling his space opera, Enterprise executive producer Rick Berman wisely reached back into the Star Trek franchise's glory days for inspirational fuel. And you won't believe what he dug up. Hold on to your phasers, Trekkers...
Remember the Eugenic Wars that spawned the evil Khan (aka Ricardo Montalban) and his followers in the camp classic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? That ancient conflict is back. And for an extra bonus, so is Next Generation star Brent Spiner, who not only played the adorable android Data, but also his genius creator, Dr. Soong.
In a three-episode story arc this season, Spiner will play Soong's great-grandfather, "an almost Hannibal Lecter-like bad guy," Berman previews. "He's a brilliant and dangerous scientist who messed with some genetically enhanced and outlawed Eugenic em
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