'ER'-Rejecting George Clooney Leaves the TV Slumming to Tim Roth
The prospect of someday appearing on the World's Greatest Awards Show has proven quite the lure to big-screen stars in recent years, who've increasingly forgone the fool's errand of mainstream cinema for the more temperate waters of episodic television. A pair of stories making the rounds today, however, suggests the threshold between the two as a point of no return for those who dare to cross, starting with George Clooney, who yesterday turned down the prospect of a guest stint during ER's final season: "[H]e is not coming back," his publicist said. "It is something he has already done. He is busy making movies." Indeed, Men Who Stare at Goats just ruined your ER series finale. We apologize on his behalf. Meanwhile, Tim Roth is hoping the grass — or at least the money — is greener at Fox, where he's aboard Brian Grazer's Lie to Me, about a FBI-recruited scientist "with the innate ability to read whether people are telling the truth":
Net has officially picked up a 13-episode order. Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, a specialist who can read the human face, body and voice and determine, more accurately than any polygraph, whether the person in front of him is lying. [...] Imagine TV and 20th Century Fox TV are behind the show, which is loosely based on the real-life exploits of psychologist Paul Ekman, who's considered an expert in the science of facial micro-expressions. Brian Grazer said he's been fascinated by Ekman since reading about his work. Baum, meanwhile, had also been doing his own research about so-called human lie detectors.
That's... it? No chain-smoking, ad-selling prowess or terminally ill meth manufacturing? Where's the show? Still, we're optimists; here's hoping Roth falls on the right side of the crossover spectrum, more Alec Baldwin than Christian Slater, more Martin Sheen than James Woods. And that the door swings back the other way — may Roth, too, someday have the opportunity to reject his tired old terrain of "human lie detecting." Seriously, that shit will never beat James Spader.
