Naval Murder Spree Continues at Alarming Rate
Just so very many people in the Navy seem to be murdered, every week. And you all can't stop watching it. Also today: three rich girls do rich things and want to be congratulated for it, plus casting.
Let's talk about ratings! New shows premiered last night and how did they do? Eh, they did all right. Fox unrolled two new comedies right after Glee, the badly titled quirk-coms Raising Hope and Running Wilde. Hope, which is done by My Name Is Earl's Greg Garcia and features a star turn by Martha Plimpton as a trashy mom, pulled in 7.5m viewers. Wilde, from Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and suffering from a too-earnest premise, dipped down from that, with 5.9m. ABC's new murdah show Detroit 1-8-7 didn't do too bad at 9.8m, though that's lower than last year's the forgotten in the same slot, and that fizzled out pretty quickly. Amidst all this uncertainty, you'll be happy to hear that NCIS started its eighth delightful season off with a bang, raking in nearly 19m viewers. Good to see quality rewarded, isn't it? Sigh. NCIS is the worst. [Variety]
Emmannuelle Chriqui — star of Lance Bass's 2001 masterpiece On the Line, sufferer of by far the most gruesome death in 2003's seminal horror work Wrong Turn, current Entourage arm candy — is going to take off the hoop earrings and put on a hoop skirt. Well, actually, she's going further back in time than the hoop skirt era. She's been cast in three episodes of Showtime's upcoming The Borgias, about the powerful Italian family that partly ruled the Renaissance. She'll play a sexy Neapolitan princess who marries one Borgia brother, even though she has the hots for another one. So it's like if she married Drama but still liked E or if she gave Turtle a handy out in one of the cars, all the while staring at Adrian Grenier's rippling physique. God, Entourage is the worst. [THR]
Conservatives have secured another victory! Something that changed will go back to the way it used to be in the good old days. Namely, Kathryn Erbe and the notoriously difficult Vincent D'Onofrio are returning to Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the franchise's oddly unwatchable basic cable iteration. Who knows why they're back, or why they left even (I thought D'Onofrio was sick of doing TV?), but that's just how it is. They'll have a new cast of friends around them, and Jeff Goldblum is gone for good. As is Julianne Nicholson, I guess. Ah well. I will continue to not watch it, even when there is nothing else on and a Law & Order is usually entertaining enough. It is that oddly unwatchable. And I'll never know why. I'll just never know why. Someone get Goren and Eames on the case! I suspect that in the end they'll determine that, in fact, Law & Order: CI is the worst. [Showbiz 411]
The first post-Lost casting item! Well, sort of the first. And sort of a casting item. I dunno. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, cut me some slack. Anyway, Jorge Garcia, Hurley himself, will guest star on Lost fan Matthew Perry's upcoming sitcom, Mr. Sunshine. He'll play an employee at the stadium that Perry runs. That show looked funny in brief clips I saw ages ago, but now they're doing the dreaded "retooling", so who's to say. Hopefully "retooling" means it's going to be about Olive from Little Miss Sunshine growing up and getting a sex change procedure. So it wouldn't be "retooling" so much as just "tooling." (...) Really as long as it has nothing to do with Sunshine Cleaning, I'm happy. Man that movie was the worst. [EW]
ABC has picked up a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced pilot based on the book The Lost Girls, about three friends "who had been climbing the corporate ladder of Manhattan media, left their jobs, boyfriends, apartments and everything familiar behind to embark on a year-long search for adventure and inspiration". The book was based on a blog! So, great. It's Eat Pray Love only it's about three self-involved rich women instead of one and also has the joy of a blog thrown in there and it's not just a two-hour jerk-off of a movie, it's a whole TV series about how amazing these three corporate white women are for quitting their jobs and going on vacation for a year. That's exactly what we need right now, in this economy. Thanks everyone! Rich lady travelogues are the worst. [Deadline]
Hm. This is odd. Jack McBrayer, better known as Kenneth the Page off 30 Rock, has been cast in a reading of Larry Kramer's groundbreaking AIDS-themed play The Normal Heart. He'll be directed by Joel Grey and will be joining theater heavyweights like Patrick Wilson, Victor Garber, Joe Mantello, and Michael Stuhlbarg. ??? So you might could go see Kenneth being all serious and dramatic? That is rather intriguing, no? I mean, the play isn't all serious, not at all, but it's about pretty serious stuff. So. This is seems odd. But odd in a good way! Let's all go. Though it's a benefit so the tix are probably really expensive. Isn't that the worst? [NYT]
And now for something completely different, well actually not that different, John Goodman has joined the cast of Kevin Smith's horror-comedy (homedy? chorror? horcom?) Red State, about a Fred Phelps-esque preacher who decides to be real nasty to some kids. Budding horror movie legend Kyle Gallner (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer's Body, The Haunting in Connecticut) is also in the movie, alongside Michael Angarano, Melissa Leo, Kevin Pollack, and the always marvelous Stephen Root. They will all die by righteousness, one assumes. Hopefully this will be more Dogma and less Jersey Girl, or any other movie Smith has made recently. They are, almost all of them, the worst. [TheWrap]