Inside the Actors Studio (Monday, 7/6c, Bravo)
Even in those moments when it succumbs to fawning self-parody, there's something about James Lipton's craft/career-focused Q&A's that I find irresistibly endearing. (May have something to do with my nostalgia for what Bravo was like before all of those heinous Real Housewives took over the network.) This week, this marginalized show — notice how it airs outside prime-time parameters — welcomes its first-ever graduate from the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University. Said successful alum being Bradley Cooper, beloved by TV fans for his work on Alias but now busy with a film career including The Hangover, Wedding Crashers and the new Limitless opposite Robert De Niro.
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Anna and her amphibious minions returned on V last night and wow, did those scaly freaks launch Season 2 in fittingly cold-blooded fashion. There were crazy acid-rain nightmares. A hybrid baby that looked like a floating Yoda. A V skeleton. Oh, and there was a death that has got to beat The Bachelor's "bat wing" body-waxing conversation for grossest moment of the week. In other words, while it wasn't exactly bliss, the season premiere was pretty great.
More so, it was a lot of what we spent last year waiting for and never got...
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Talk about mommy issues! When V returns for Season 2 tonight at 9/8c on ABC, we learn that Anna (Morena Baccarin) has been imprisoning her equally sinister reptilian mother, Diana (Jane Badler, from the original V), in a dungeon aboard her spaceship for the past 15 years. We asked Baccarin to quiz Badler about lizards, family values and her new incarnation.
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First Jane Badler, and now Marc Singer! The '80s hunk, who played the original V's strapping lizard slayer Mike Donovan, will appear in the season finale of ABC's updated V as all-new freedom fighter Lars Tremont.
"It was an inevitability," says the confident star, now 62. "You have to include the personalities who started this dynamic. As V grows, it becomes like a big, hungry animal needing nourishment to grow more and more muscle." Whatever you say, Marc, although I might have gone with a reptilian analogy...
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Even though she played lizard leader Diana to wicked perfection on NBC's original V from 1983-85, Jane Badler tells me she had to fight fang and nail to get cast as an all-new version of Diana on ABC's reboot. "From the moment I heard V was coming back, it was something I was hoping to be part of, but they tested a lot of people for this role," confides Jane from the Vancouver set. "A lot of years have passed, so it feels good to win something." While this is an entirely different take on Diana...
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