8 posts tagged “scrubs”

South Park has its midseason premiere on Wednesday night. Since animation isn't covered by the WGA, they weren't out on strike, so this was a planned break. It just happened to coincide with the strike. For as much noise as I make about the fact that I don't like cartoons, South Park is consistently one of my favorite shows.

Also returning this week: Reaper. There are a few episodes left from before the strike and they're producing a few more episodes before the end of the season.

Of course, Lost is still new, as is Law & Order, I believe, and possibly, Smallville. I've got to check again.

Other stuff:
In an attempt to keep interest in the show, Fox is doing a 24 movie before the next season kicks off next January. One of 24's co-creators Joel Surnow, has left the show.

Bubble show Friday Night Lights has apparently been renewed with the help of DirecTV.

CW has announced Smallville has been renewed. I guess that's the good news. The bad news would be that Lex and Lana are both leaving the show. They'll be back for bits, but not regulars. Reaper has not yet been renewed.

CBS has renewed a bunch of shows including all three CSIs. How I Met Your Mother is still not officially renewed, but expectations are that it will be. There are rumors swirling that Alicia Silverstone will be the mother. Take that for what it's worth.

Starbuck's husband Anders (actor Michael Trucco) is going to star in a new NBC comedy called The Man of Your Dreams. It's expected it will be on in the fall. Anders has been a favorite of mine on BSG, so I'll probably watch this one.

Former Doctor Who Christopher Eccelston has joined the cast of G.I. Joe.

The first three Replacements albums and an EP will be reissued in April.

Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons passed away last week.

Reason number 412 why I hate George Lucas. Lucasfilm is reissuing the three original Indiana Jones movies on DVD. There are special features that weren't on previous views. Gee, where have we heard this song and dance before? Jackass.

NBC's handling of Scrubs has always been ham-fisted. It's supposed to finish this year. Except because of the strike, they might not get to finish the show. Now ABC is making noises about picking up the show for the next season. For a whole season. Even though it was supposed to finish. Of course, NBC is more than a little pissed that ABC is making announcements like this since they still own the show.

Saturday Night Live returned a couple weeks ago. It's still bad, but at least the musical guests have been good. Last week was Wilco, this week was Vampire Weekend.

I just started watching another BBC miniseries. This one's called State of Play. I don't know how I missed this one. It's incredible. TV on DVD will eventually be the death of me. I was just going to watch the one episode and go to bed. Now I'm about to finish the disc and I want to finish it the whole series right now. It's going to take at least two more days to get the second and final disc of the series from Netflix. The cast is amazing. Lots of BBC regulars like John Simm (love him) and Philip Glenister (also from Life on Mars with John Simm), people who are now much bigger like James McAvoy, and a few already big stars like Bill Nighy. I think my current obsession with John Simm is responsible for me finally discovering this gem. With his Life on Mars being a favorite of mine and his guest shot on Doctor Who, I'm now finding I want to go back and watch the things I now know he was in that I've already seen, like Human Traffic and 24 Hour Party People. Full review of State of Play to come once I've finished it.

Another random bits and pieces catch up post.

Jesse L. Martin is leaving Law & Order. This is too bad because this is the first year since we lost Jerry Orbach that he's got a partner that's working well. The whole cast is quite good this year. NBC is planning on doing 5 new post strike episodes that will air starting in April.

HD-DVD is dead. Long live Blu-Ray. Toshiba finally waved the white flag and gave up. All the major studios are moving to Blu-Ray. Looks like there's a PS3 in my future.

The J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie has been moved from a Christmas 2008 release to summer of 2009.

FX has confirmed that rather than produce any post-strike episodes, the season of The Riches will just be seven episodes long.

Craig Ferguson will host the White House Correspondents Dinner. I can't imagine he'll be as offensive to the President as Stephen Colbert was, but he's a funny guy and I'm sure he'll get his digs in.

The deal isn't done yet, but it looks like NBC will let Scrubs finish in the way it intended.

Lots of announcements about the upcoming Wolverine movie, but the only one I'm going to mention is that Dominic Monaghan has joined the cast.

CBS is moving How I Met Your Mother to 8:30 on Monday. Shows what I remember from before the strike, I thought it was there already. It also wasn't in the list of renewals that CBS put out earlier this week, but it seems most people think it will be back. I'll be disappointed if it isn't. They're expecting to shoot nine new episodes this season that will start airing March 17.

Leonardo DiCaprio is producing a live action version of Akira.

Bionic Woman was officially canned. I deleted the unwatched shows off my Tivo a long time ago.

Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell have all signed on to take over Heath Ledger's part in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Since it's a Terry Gilliam movie we already knew it was going to be strange, this just makes it odder.

There's a special Aerosmith only Guitar Hero coming in May. It also looks like I'll be able to get a stand-alone guitar for the Wii in a couple weeks.

The first official trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie is out. It looks ok.

Apparently, there's a vampire movie in production called Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Undead. With a title like that you shouldn't need Sean Lennon doing the score, but it's got him.

Molly Ringwald recently turned 40. I feel very very old.

An Arrested Development movie might be in the works. For me, this show rode right up to my threshold of embarrassment humor and occasionally crossed it, so I'm not dying for a feature-length episode.

Among many other names added to the cast of G.I. Joe, including Dennis Quaid, Doctor Who number nine, or Claude the invisible man from Heroes depending on who you are, Christopher Eccelston has signed on.

We're getting reissues of three Replacements CDs and one EP in April. The rest of their catalog should be available by the end of the year. I may have to check these out. I love these guys.

In other music news, Thriller celebrated its 25th anniversary while I wasn't looking.

Harold and Maude finally got an official soundtrack. Seems a little silly since you can just pick up Cat Steven's greatest hits, but I guess there was never a proper soundtrack. Don't tell Jim, but I love this movie. He made me watch it one too many times before I was old enough to appreciate it, I think. But it's brilliant.

This is a great list of 48 unanswered questions on Lost. Speaking of Lost, it will produce five more episodes this season, bringing the total to 13 of the 16 they were supposed to do, and when it returns for those episodes it will be at 10 on Thursdays following Grey's Anatomy.

BSG tidbits: Season 3 will be out on DVD March 18th. Season four will premiere on April 4th, with two catch-up specials showing March 28th. The writers are back at work on the show and it looks like they'll actually get to finish it. We'll get everything they shot starting in April, and then we might not get the second half of the final season until 2009. Yikes.

I don't understand the Jane Fonda on the Today Show controversy at all. She said a naughty word, but in fairness, it was the title of one of the Vagina Monologues, so I don't get how that's so bad.

Mitch Peleggi, aka Walter Skinner, will be in the new X-Files movie. Yay! I thought he was great on the series.

The Smurfs in 3d? I just...have no words.

Looks like the Justice League movie is moving forward without Batman or Superman, since they're both currently engaged in their own movie franchise. But I ask you, is it worth seeing a Justice League movie without them?

Transformers 2 is a go. Hm. I think maybe one was enough.

Turns out we'll be getting *both* Coreys in Lost Boys 2. Thank god for that. For a while it looked like we'd have to survive with only one, and that just won't do.

J.J. Abrams new show on Fox, Fringe, has added Joshua Jackson to the cast. OMG Pacey's back on TV!

Disney Interactive has announced Discs of Tron for the XBox.

I think I might have mentioned this earlier, but SciFi announced they're going to show The Sarah Jane Adventures and the new season of Doctor Who starting in April. In fact, they're going to be on Friday night right before BSG. Sounds like we're going to get the good Doctor in a similar fashion to the way BBC America is airing Torchwood, with only a small lag between airing in the UK and airing here. The Beeb hasn't actually announced when this show is starting in the UK, a peculiarity of UK TV that they do that a lot, but it's starting on SciFi on April 18th, so one would assume it's starting sooner than that in the UK.

The Knight Rider movie did well enough that NBC is considering making it a series. Ugh.

The new Clone Wars animated series got picked up by Cartoon Network. I like the look of it. I wonder if the stories will be any good.

Ok, enough of that. I'll put all the returning show info I can find in the next post.

Well this is just sad. All of the networks have announced their winter schedules. All of the schedules assume the strike will continue and there will essentially be no more new shows produced this season.

The breakdown of shows I care about is as follows:
ABC: Lost starts in February and will run eight episodes. There are rumors that the start could push until March or April. It also changes nights and will be on Thursdays at 9:00.

CBS has the CSIs until they run out of episodes, which will be very soon, in their usual times and will then go in to reruns. Jericho returns February 12.

NBC is bringing back Law&Order on January 2nd with a two hour premiere. They will run original episodes on Wednesday nights a 10:00. L&O:CI comes back on January 9th at 9:00. Scrubs will continue on Thursdays at 8:30 until it runs out of episodes.

Fox has House on its regular Tuesday night slot until they run out of episodes. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts on January 13th and airs on its regular Monday night slot after that.

The CW has Smallville in its regular Thursday at 8 slot until they run out.

Cable stuff of interest includes Reno:911 returning on January 16th. BBC America has Torchwood back on January 26th. The glorious Life on Mars has five episodes left after tonight. Tonight's episode will repeat right before next week's in case you missed it.

You know how I mentioned that Studio 60 returned this week? Forget I said anything. That was a horrible hour of tv. Truly bad. First off, where were the three main characters? Nowhere. Aaron Sorkin must have called in a favor to get Allison Janney to be the "host" of Studio 60 for the week. What a train wreck. Allison Janney and Timothy Busfield had such great chemistry on The West Wing. The ease with which they work together might have been this episode's only saving grace. I think it was supposed to be a screwball comedy, but it just didn't work. I honestly don't know how many episodes are left, they're just showing the rest of the ones they filmed, but I think I can safely say you won't miss anything if you don't watch.

I spent a chunk of this grey Sunday catching up on the rest of the shows I had on the tivo. So now I'm caught up on Scrubs and The Riches. I really enjoy Scrubs, but for some reason it's always the last thing I watch. Every time I watch The Riches I almost shut it off after 20 minutes, but for some reason I keep watching. I think Eddie Izzard is really doing an amazing job with this show. I still don't quite get what it's doing, but I apparently can't stop watching. I think tomorrow's episode is the season finale. Scrubs is done for the season. I'm ambivalent about the path it took. I think they've been picked up next season, but for a shortened order. I can't imagine it going another season after that, so my guess is that they'll actually try to wrap it up next season.

Now I've really got nothing to watch. Maybe I'll actually get, you know, life stuff done for once. Nah. That'll be the day. I'm down to things like the shows about the Knights Templar that Tivo records for me. The one I've got right now is narrated by Leonard Nimoy. I feel like a child watching In Search Of... again.

It looks like Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii might become a huge time suck. I also just got Zelda for the Wii, but haven't dared get it out yet. Mario Party 8 comes out next week as well. I'm going to hold out on that one as long as I can.

Now I know it only takes three inches of snow to paralyze Portland.  They drive around on studded tires all winter long up here, but apparently that's just for the ice storms.  The media coverage was fantastic.  KATU channel 2 did something like four hours of live weather coverage.  Pretty much all the schools closed.  It's quite pretty.  Here's the view from the back door of my cousin's house (where I am comfortably ensconced):

IMG_0189

I took advantage of the day today to get caught up on Smallville.  It's really a silly, cheesy show, but I can't help myself.  I'm still really enjoying the Green Arrow subplot.

I'm almost caught up on 24 as well.  If we can't make it out of the house to see Children of Men tonight, I have a feeling that's what we'll be doing instead.

Saw Stranger than Fiction last night at one of the local McMenimans theaters.  Good movie.  Meta in that same sort of way that Adaptation was, but I liked Stranger Than Fiction more.  My only question is, was the movie so meta that they meant to have the boom mic in as many shots as it was in?  Or was it just sloppy filmmaking?  I'd like to think they meant to do it, but I'm really not sure.  I've already seen two movies in a theater in 2007, putting me about halfway to my total for last year.  Admittedly, both were in pub theaters but maybe that's what it's going to take.

The Bagdad in SE Portland is a really beautiful old school theater with the balcony intact and not turned in to a separate theater like many of the theaters of its day.  I think they had four or five or the McMenamins beers on tap there.  Oregon really is a beer heaven.  I've been drinking nothing but local beers since I got here on Friday and I don't think I've had the same thing twice.  (Shameless Plug) I also went to the Lucky Labrador brewery/resaurant in NW on Quimby between 19th and 20th yesterday for lunch.  The manager is none other than my cousin Lauren.  The beer is fantastic and all brewed on site.  Yummy.

Other random tidbits to make the post vaguely relevant: The latest rumor about Drive is that it will be on Monday nights at 8.  Which is a way better timeslot than Thursdays at 9.  Maybe Fox realized it was a bad idea?  That would be a first.  I'd still rather the show was on later so that it could get as interesting as possible, but if it has a prayer of not getting cancelled in a different timeslot, I'm all for it.

Alexandra Pelosi (yes, that Pelosi), who made the documentary Journeys with George about the last presidential campaign is taking on evangelicals in her latest project for HBO called Friends With God.  Popular topic these days.  It premieres on January 25.  Not enough to make me get HBO, but I'll look for it on dvd.

The Lost guys claim they have an endgame and are thinking about ending the show at 5 seasons.

The Golden Globes were on last night.  I didn't watch, and it appears the only thing I care about at all is that Hugh Laurie won for House.

Bill Lawrence, the creator of Scrubs, claims there might be a seventh season after all.  With Zach Braff, who has been saying for months that this is the end.

Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has been cancelled.  I honestly didn't even know it was still on.

Sting is seriously mulling a Police reunion for this year.  30 years already?  Wow.

A sequel of Alien vs Predator is in the works.  Then again, there's also a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie on the way.

I can't believe I haven't mentioned this yet, but 24 returns this Sunday with a two hour premiere followed by two more hours on Monday night.  It resumes its regular Mondays at 9 schedule after that.  Yes, it's up against Heroes.  Hmm.  Glad I don't have to choose.  Last season of 24 was soooooo good.  I'm really looking forward to this.

And since it's about that time, a couple of people have asked me if there are any new midseason shows that I'm interested in.  Pretty much no.  There's a show called The Black Donnelys that looks interesting, but it doesn't yet have a premiere date.  It's waiting for something else to be cancelled, I suppose.  I haven't really heard anything good about any of the other new shows yet.  I think the EW that's supposed to have arrived already is the winter tv preview, but the Berkeley post office is enjoying it first, I guess.

Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek has a new show coming up.  It's called Hidden Palms.  Doesn't really matter what it's about, it's Kevin Williamson, so it will be teen angsty and too smart for its own good.  Will I watch?  Maybe.  Probably will check it out and then get hooked.  Curse you Kevin Willamson!  It's also not yet on the schedule.

And of course I'll be watching Drive when it comes out in March.  Fox, in its infinite wisdom has put this show in the death slot on Thursday nights against CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Supernatural and Scrubs.  The OC lasted, what, 4, 5 episodes in this slot before it got cancelled?  And it was a succesful show before.  Way to go Fox, once again throwing your weight behind a Tim Minear show.  I hope after you cancel Drive he'll be done with his contract with you so he can go make a show that will last someplace else.  Of course, I really hope it'll be a good show and do well in the slot after American Idol on Thursdays.  That was the timeslot that launched House, after all I think.  But House wasn't competing with that lineup at the time.  It only had to face CSI.  I hope at least some of those shows are in repeats when Drive launches to give it a fighting chance.

Scrubs returns tonight during the most congested night of tv of the week.  NBC has done nothing but jerk this show around, and now they're trying to use it to reclaim "Must See Thursday".  Sheesh.  It's up against CSI and Grey's Anatomy, and whatever else is on at 9:00.  And I'm pretty sure I forgot to check the tivo to make sure it's going to record.  Oops.

NBC shuffled some of their schedule around but didn't make some of the changes I thought they would.  Specifically, they're leaving Studio 60 where it is.  As none of the changes have any impact on me, I officially don't care.

Here's the opening scene of The Big Lebowski courtesy of the Nintendo Wii.  Not as good as it should be, but still pretty funny.

And along the Lebowski theme, here's a video somebody bothered to make called the Short F*cking Version of The Big Lebowski.  It's every single one of the 281 f-bombs in 2 minutes and 41 seconds.  Wow.

Apparenty, Eddie Izzard isn't going to be on 24 this season.  I just read that somewhere today and now I can't find it again, so I hope it's not the crack talking.

NBC ordered more scripts for Studio 60.  Not a full season order yet, and no guarantee that they'll air the ones they've ordered.

NBC is changing up their Thursday lineup.  They've pulled 30 Rock from Wednesday.  The new Thursday night lineup is going to be My Name is Earl, The Office, Scrubs and 30 Rock.  leaving Thursday as the only night NBC isn't going for the "cheaper" reality/game show programming from 8-9.  20 Good Years appears to have been pulled for real.  So it looks like Scrubs is coming back earlier than we thought, which is great news.  I love Scrubs, and NBC has been jerking them around for years.  The good news is they're bringing it back, the bad news is they're putting it in the death hour of Thursday at 9 up against Grey's Anatomy, CSI, etc.  I hope it does well and I'm glad I only have CSI as one of my shows so I can record Scrubs too.  Scrubs returns November 30.

Nightmare Before Christmas is airing on Cartoon Network tomorrow night.

ABC has set the return date for Lost.  It's coming back Feb 7th.  In it's absence, ABC is airing a new show called Daybreak.  It's like Groundhog's Day but set as an LA cop show where the central character has to stop his girlfriend's murder.  So not with the funny.  Daybreak stars Taye Diggs and has another Joss Whedon alumnus in the cast in Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Angel).  I like Taye Diggs.  Someday he'll have a show that stays on the air.  Maybe this one's the charm.

Liev Schreiber is joining CSI in January.

There was a whole to-do this week about Michael J Fox doing ads for candidates in favor of stem cell research.  Isn't he Canadian, anyway?

These short stories are great.  Because everything relates back to Joss in some way.

We were right.  After the Borat movie, that character is spent.  And there's a bidding war going on for the Bruno movie, which doesn't exist yet.  Bruno is the third character Sasha Baron Cohen played on Da Ali G Show.

I think I mentioned this already but I'm too lazy to go check. Nathan Fillion (Captain Mal from Firefly/Serenity) will be on Lost November 8th.  It's a good week for former Firefly peeps as Alan Tudyk (my pilot) will be on CSI November 2nd.  Which just happens to be the same night the Parkway is doing a screening/sing-along of Once More With Feeling, the Buffy musical episode.  More Joss related goodness for everyoine.  And since we're already here, Nathan Fillion's latest movie, Slither came out on dvd this week.  Not that I'm dying to see a gross out horror movie, but it's still relavent.

Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 came out this week too.  So if you're dying to have the old pinball counting video on dvd, now's your chance.

For you How I Met Your Mother fans out there, there's a contest to submit your own Barneyism.  I think this will be more fun than the Transformers' Optimus Prime dialog contest.

I have watched this week's BSG, but that's for another time.  This one's already too long.  And a new record for 5 Joss references in one post.  Ha!