Why doesn't anyone seem too worked up about Jay Leno leaving The Tonight Show? Maybe because he's only kind of leaving. Come fall, fans will still get to see him five nights a week, 90 minutes earlier. As we look ahead to the start of a new Tonight Show era Monday, with Conan O'Brien behind the desk, let's also look back on the most memorable moments of Leno's 17 years with the show.
Show minus stars equals different show: It's one of the mantras of Jump the Shark, and it's true — unless, maybe, the show is The Tonight Show. The Tonight Show is an institution that has had only four full-time hosts in more than half a century. Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno all made their own imprints on the show, but in the way a minister does a church. Whether or not congregants like his or her personality or jokes, the basic religion stays the same. Leno is...
Networks' spring presentations to advertisers are scripted affairs. At TNT and TBS' announcements last week, known as "upfronts," stars major and minor walked onstage in a hall filled with advertising executives to deliver carefully worded talks about their shows. Almost all read from prompters.Until Tyler Perry took the stage.The playwright, filmmaker and actor spoke with no notes about his two series on TBS: House of Payne and Meet the Browns.
To some fans, One Tree Hill without Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton sounds kind of like Seinfeld without Seinfeld... and Elaine.The CW's plan to replace the leads with three new characters has elicited skepticism from fans who consider the show's heart to be the dynamic between Murray and Burton's characters, Lucas and Peyton. (A TVGuide.com poll found that nearly half of respondents will take a "wait and see" approach to the revamped OTH.)They may be right to hold off on a decision, because these types of major cast revisions can go either way.
Patrick Fischler grew up around stars when he worked in his father's Malibu, Calif., restaurant, Patrick's, which bears his name. Today, he's the envy of many an actor, thanks to his roles on three of television's most acclaimed shows: Lost, Mad Men and Southland. Fischler spoke to us before Phil, his Lost character, came to a grisly end, and was impressively tight-lipped about whether Phil or Jimmy Barrett, his insult-comic Mad Men character, might return next season. Looking ahead to Southland's finale (Thursday, 10 pm, NBC), the brand-new father of a baby girl also talked to us about his role on the acclaimed cop show, the other dream shows on his list, and the trouble with Lost.
Tweets of Patrick Swayze's death have been greatly exaggerated.A false report that the Dirty Dancing star had lost his battle with cancer burned quickly through the Twitter-sphere early Tuesday, forcing his publicist to issue a statement confirming that he remains alive.
Just as the latest Survivor celebrates his victory, a previous winner is sharing bad news: Soccer player Ethan Zohn, who won Survivor: Africa, tells People he is battling cancer."This is the ultimate game of Survivor," Zohn said, "and there's really only one outcome, and that's to win. There's no other option."
As the final two Survivor contestants argued before their fellow players about who should win the game — and the million-dollar prize — the long-running partnership between James "JT" Thomas, Jr., and Stephen Fishbach looked frayed. JT had chosen Stephen over the less-formidable Erinn Lobdell to join him in the final two, but Stephen admitted under questioning that he might not have done JT the same favor. "I just feel like a fool," JT said, looking hurt. The other players sided with him, unanimously making the 24-year-old cattle rancher, from Mobile, Ala., the winner. (Don't feel too bad for Stephen; he still gets $100,000 for being the runner-up.) Now though, JT tells us his hurt wasn't totally authentic — and helped him lock up votes.
Survivor's Benjamin "Coach" Wade doesn't sound crazy on the phone. Yes, fellow Survivors have said he isn't "grounded in reality" and accused him of being "off the reservation," and even Survivor host Jeff Probst has questioned his claims that he's survived a shark attack, a hurricane, and being abducted by Amazonian tribesmen who, Wade says, considered eating him. (Allegations of cannibalism aren't unheard of in the region.) Wade, a soccer coach, composer, and the show's self-proclaimed "Dragon Slayer," was voted off after the once-united J.T. and Stephen split their votes, setting up an anything-can-happen showdown between J.T., Stephen, Taj and Erinn. Check back with us Monday for a recap of Sunday's finale and an interview with the winner.
Look, we have unrealistic dreams of our own. We don't need to see the unrealistic dreams of the imaginary people on TV, too. That's just too many steps removed from anything we might ever care about.So we're underwhelmed by the new hallucinatory sex trend sweeping this season: House and Cuddy and Bones and Booth ended the will-they-or-won't-they speculation in their respective finales, and Grey's Anatomy introduced Izzie's brain tumor by having her have sex, loudly and often, with the very-dead Denny. (In so doing, the show also made the first-ever argument in favor of cancer. Bad.)All the sex was pretend. Or set in an alternate dream-world. Or something.
A&E's new slate of original programming doesn't include The Beast, the Patrick Swayze FBI drama imperiled by the health of its star.That doesn't necessarily mean the end of the show — a rep for the cable network says no decision has been made about the its future — but it comes as a disappointment to Swayze fans who hoped The Beast might appear on A&E's schedule, which was released Tuesday. Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2008, and shot most of the first season of The Beast while battling the disease.A&E's sole returning scripted series, the Benjamin Bratt-starrer The Cleaner, returns June 23.
Brand-new Bachelorette Jillian Harris says a hot tub scene with The Bachelor's Jason Mesnick made her father's jaw drop, but she's opting not to clear the air about what happened — and called a query about the liaison "probably the most inappropriate question ever."The hot tub hookup was one of three close encounters Mesnick shared with the final competitors on The Bachelor. He later said goodbye to Harris to choose — kind of — between Melissa Rycroft and Molly Malaney.
Miss California is keeping her crown.Donald Trump, owner of the Miss USA pageant, announced Tuesday that he didn't object to semi-topless photos of first runner-up Carrie Prejean that recently surfaced online. Prejean charged that some of the photos are fake, and denounced pageant judge and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton for what she called a "self-promoting and hateful" campaign against her.
Kiefer Sutherland's attorney says the actor was "neither the instigator nor a wrongdoer" in the incident that led to a misdemeanor assault charge against with the 24 star, who is accused of head-butting a fashion designer. "We are troubled by the untruthful and self-serving information circulating regarding Kiefer Sutherland and events of last Monday evening," attorney Michael C. Miller said in a statement.
Debra "Debbie" Beebe was the latest victim of the J.T.-Stephen alliance on Survivor, but only after an emotional episode in which competitors were given $500 to take part in a food auction and got to see their families thanks to a sacrifice by Taj. Beebe, a middle-school principal from Auburn, Ala., talked to TVGuide.com about what auction items were cut out of the episode, losing 15 percent of her body weight, and what her Timbira teammates have done wrong.
Kiefer Sutherland was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of third-degree assault after turning himself in to police Thursday.The 24 star, who is accused of head-butting fashion designer Jack McCollough, will not be jailed as he awaits a court hearing. Instead, he was given a desk-appearance ticket requiring him to appear before a judge in about a month, police told TVGuide.com.
How optimistic is Michael J. Fox? So optimistic he found a silver lining in Rush Limbaugh accusing him of faking his Parkinson's symptoms.Fox, whose ABC special Adventures of an Incurable Optimist features Lance Armstrong, Bonnie Hunt, Bill Murray, Tracy Pollan and others talking about hope, said on The View that Limbaugh's 2006 comments proved to be a boon to stem cell research."He did us a great favor because he put a lot of attention on the conversation," Fox said Thursday. "We could hijack the last two weeks of the political season."
Kiefer Sutherland's widely reported scrap with a fashion designer in New York City could violate the terms of his DUI probation in Los Angeles, a prosecutors' spokesman tells TVGuide.com.New York police are investigating a complaint from designer Jack McCollough, who says Sutherland head-butted him at a party and who was spotted Wednesday with a cut on his nose. No charges have been filed, but New York's Daily News reported Wednesday that the actor will surrender in the next few weeks to face a third-degree assault charge.
Tim Roth understands victims and victimizers alike. As a child, he was abused by someone he won't name, except to say it wasn't either of his parents. Throughout his career, he has played both brutal victimizers (in his Academy Award-nominated turn as Rob Roy's villain, for example,) and the horribly victimized (most notably as a cop in Reservoir Dogs and a home-invasion victim in Funny Games).Roth has a strange gift for making both extremes empathetic: Is there a more Rothian character than Pulp Fiction's would-be stickup man, Pumpkin? At first he earns our revulsion, but by the end of the film, as he looks down the barrel of Samuel L. Jackson's gun, we fear for his life.The actor's exploration of victims and victimizers continues in his first television series, Lie to Me, which airs its penultimate episode Wednesday (9 pm/ET, Fox) and concludes its first season next week. The show offers an alternative to 24's violent interrogation scenes and those of other more standard crime procedurals. Roth plays Cal Lightman, an expert at reading emotions who gets suspects to confess to even the worst crimes without laying a hand on them.
Dom DeLuise, the jovial comic who enlivened such madcap films as Cannonball Run, Blazing Saddles, and Spaceballs, has died. He was 75.Often working with Burt Reynolds or Mel Brooks, the bearded, roly-poly actor was known for a sharp, distinctive, almost howling laugh that fills the outtakes reel of Cannonball Run — a testament to the joyous time he had with Reynolds."I was thinking about this the other day," Reynolds said in a statement released to TVGuide.com. "As you get older, and start to lose people you love, you think about it more, and I was dreading this moment. Dom always made you feel better when he was around and there will never be another like him. I never heard him say an unkind word about anyone. I will miss him very much."DeLuise's death was confirmed Tuesday by a representative for his son, David DeLuise.
Will the new season of Jon & Kate Plus Eight address the scandal over photos of Jon Gosselin leaving a bar with another woman?It could: TLC says the season is still shooting. Which means it's up to the Gosselins and the show's producers to decide how much to show of any talks between Jon and his often critical wife, Kate.
Henry Rollins' neo-Nazi movement on Sons of Anarchy has some reinforcements: Adam Arkin will join the FX series as another white supremacist this fall, TVGuide.com has confirmed.Arkin will play Ethan Zobelle, a small business owner who arrives in Charming, Calif., and soon clashes with Ron Perlman's Clay Morrow.
