Carla Gugino
Jeers to Californication for wasting Carla Gugino.
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Showtime's smarmy sex-com strands the gifted actress with a throwaway role as an attorney defending David Duchovny's sleazy writer. It's a pale reprise of her ball-busting turn as a Hollywood agent on Entourage.
Gugino deserves a better gig...
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Question: I recently watched TV Guide Network's look at fall TV programming, and I enjoyed your commentary. But I did have a few questions: My gut is telling me to watch Moonlight, but I keep feeling that it's going to get canceled about as soon as Threshold was a few seasons back. Makes me not really want to tune in as I'm inclined to. I'm also super-excited about Bionic Woman. Do you think NBC is willing to work with the show and give it a proper chance to shine?
Answer: At this point, with the new season merely a few weeks away, I'd say go with your gut. What can it hurt, even if the shows don't ultimately make it? If you're curious to watch, what's stopping you? Of the two shows you mention, I figure Bionic Woman has a better shot than Moonlight, if only because of brand recognition and the amount of promotion the show is already getting (not all of it focused on the Isaiah Washington stunt casting), and I think NBC would be patient in letting the show find its (bionic) legs.
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Skeet Ulrich in Jericho by Robert Voets/CBS
Frankly, I was surprised and a bit dismayed that CBS didn’t have symbolic bowls of nuts in the room as the network launched its portion of the TCA press tour Wednesday morning. Which didn’t stop Jericho from dominating much of the conversation when CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler took the stage to introduce one of the more ambitious and controversial new lineups in CBS’ recent history.Tassler said she couldn’t go to a neighborhood camera store, or even a doctor’s office (where the doctor pulled a bag of peanuts out of his coat in reference to the fan campaign) without being reminded of the furor over Jericho's cancellation and subsequent renewal for seven episodes at mid-season. She says she went on message boards, read the e-mails, “and what you saw was a huge segment of the population that really felt they were not being counted, but more specifically, that they had a knowledge and an awareness of the show that was so detailed and so committe...
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Anthony LaPaglia in Without a Trace by Mitch Haddad/CBS
In years past, CBS's stability (which you've gotta know the other networks covet) has often been criticized as complacency, especially in these last few years of wall-to-wall crime dramas. Zzzzzz. That's about to change, with a fall lineup of new, intriguing high concepts that could open some eyes where the Eye net is concerned and give CBS the one thing it most desperately desires: Buzz. Let's hope some of the new stuff sticks.There is reason to be skeptical. The few shows from last season that went particularly "off brand" didn't last, most notably the serialized crime caper Smith (gone in three weeks) and the apocalyptic Jericho (canned after one season, which ended in a hail of bullets between warring towns, leaving fans on edge and up in arms themselves). The nagging question is if CBS will truly give its offbeat new lineup a chance to distinguish itself or instead will fall back on the tried and true that works so well for a network known for its satisfying, crowd-pleasing mai...
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Carla Gugino, Entourage
Now playing Vince's sexy new agent on HBO's Entourage (returning Sunday at 10 pm/ET), Carla Gugino talks to TV Guide about hanging with the boys, working with Pauly Shore and her secret talent. Hmmm....
TV Guide: How does it feel being the new girl in a boys' club like Entourage? Carla Gugino: It's the most natural thing in the world for me, actually. I've always been friends with lots of guys, and these guys have been incredibly welcoming. Sure, they're men — and good-looking men, to boot — but it's not a big testosterone fest on set. It feels like going to play, not to work.
TV Guide: You play Vince's new agent, Amanda. Will Vince be doing less "Aquaman" now and more of, say, whatever Nora Ephron's dir
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The newest pilot news, from Variety/the Reporter:• D.B. Woodside (24) has been cast as Marcus in CBS' Hugh Jackman-produced musical drama Viva Laughlin.• Marisa Tomei will topline CBS' The Rich Inner Life of Penelope Cloud, the Oscar winner's first network series since appearing on A Different World 20 years ago.• Kate Burton (Grey's Anatomy) and Camille Gauty (Prison Break) have joined Fox's Supreme Courtships, playing a justice and her ambitious clerk, respectively.• Real-life football wife Holly Robinson Peete is the mom of a star wide receiver in ABC's Football Wives.• Mae Whitman (Thief) is The Bionic Woman's younger sister. Just think of the cool hand-me-downs!• Heroes' Tawny Cypress has joined Fox's K-Ville, as has John Carroll Lynch (Close to Home).• Fox has ordered a half-hour sudser about blue-collar families, from Idol creator Simon Fuller.• Kurt Fuller (Desperate Housewives) is the title femme's boss in ABC's See Jayne Run.• T...
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Threshold
Creator Brannon Braga reveals how the team would have fought to save the world — if his show had survived.
I admit that the way we ended Threshold was much too hasty. For a show that was about an alien race’s long-range plans to alter human DNA to make us more like them, we had to wrap up quickly. So in the last of the 12 episodes we shot — only eight of which aired in America — we had this dream sequence with Dr. Molly Caffrey (Carla Gugino). She was the one who had come up with the strategy to deal with an alien invasion of Earth. In the dream, the first alien-human child born comes to her and tells her, “Your plan will work and you will not live to see it.” With only one day to come up with something, that was our lame-ass conclusion.
Fans will get to see all 12 episodes in the DVD collection we’re releasing, but we had tons of other
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TV's Blade, Batman Begins
In Part 1 of our Q&A with David S. Goyer, the producer/writer detailed the differences and similarities between Spike TV's Blade: The Series (Wednesdays at 10 pm/ET) and its big-screen begetter. Here he shares the scoop on which other Blade characters will surface on TV, status reports on The Flash, Nicolas Cage's Ghost Rider and the Batman Begins follow-up, and the sad truth about why shows such as
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Kirk "Sticky Fingaz" Jones is TV's Blade.
Producer/writer David S. Goyer is hotter than a solar flash on the big screen these days. While the veteran comic-book (Justice Society of America) and sci-fi/horror-film scribe (Batman Begins, Dark City) is currently working on, among other projects, big-screen takes on The Flash and Ghost Rider, it'
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Question: I have a comment on a topic that I've never seen you address, and I could be the only one who feels this way. With so many new shows in the fall, it's really hard sometimes to keep them all straight, and the names of the shows often make this more difficult. They're not very distinctive! Last season, there were three sci-fi shows premiering, and they all had one-word names: Invasion, Threshold and Surface. I could never keep straight which one was on which network, and even though I had read your reviews and knew that you endorsed one especially, I could never remember which one. For this coming fall I've counted eight new series with one-word titles, and none of them are very distinguishable (Vanished, Standoff, Justice, Smith, Jericho, Shark, Traveler, Kidnapped). Just a note to the networks: If I need a visual aid to remember which shows I want to check out, I'm not likely to watch — unless they become hits and the name is repeated enough to remind me. Not a very good ...
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