Madea visits Tyler Perry's House of Payne.
The cardinal rule of Hollywood: never spend your own money. But playwright turned actor/director Tyler Perry has built an empire bucking Tinseltown's conventions. So when the man known to millions as smack-talking grandma Madea came up with a sitcom idea, he didn't even try to convince network execs that it would make a great show. Instead he showed them, by using $5 million of his own money to shoot 10 episodes about a large and boisterous working-class family forced by a series of unlucky circumstances to squeeze into one very crowded house.
His gamble paid off, and on June 6 at 9 pm/ET, new episodes of that show — Tyler Perry's House of Payne — will debut on TBS. The premiere comes less than a year after Perry made one of the most lucrative deals in TV history by selling TBS the right to air 100 still-to-be-shot
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On TV, it's the summer of the wife.
Barely had Desperate Housewives wrapped its third season than a sudden blitz began: USA Network's comic The Starter Wife (Thursdays, 9 pm/ET), ABC's insipid reality show Ex-Wives Club (Mondays, 9 pm/ET) and a fifth and final season of BBC America's campy Footballers Wive$ (starts Wednesday, 8 pm/ET).
Since Lifetime couldn't possibly sit this wave out, along comes Army Wives (premieres June 3 at 10 pm/ET), a sudsy home-front drama about military families set against a current backdrop of war and wrenching deployments. It fits this network's brand like a dress
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