Behind The Scenes TV - The Making of New Movies, TV Shows and DVDs» TV

Jay Leno back on ‘Tonight Show’ as TV landscape changes

Behind The Scenes TV — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:22:08 +0000

Jay Leno returns to “The Tonight Show” berth Monday night, but the late-night television landscape has changed dramatically since the last time he ascended to this coveted seat back in 1992, when Johnny Carson departed.

Cable, Internet, and the DVR have fragmented audiences. A whole new generation of media consumers has grown up with little, if any, broadcast-network loyalty. And comics such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher have moved comedy light-years past the amiable PG-ness of an earlier era.

NBC, now mired in fourth place among networks, has suffered more than most. And the perceived nastiness of the tussle between Mr. Leno and Conan O’Brien for the 11:35 p.m. slot has not helped the network.

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The Groundbreaker: TV Showrunner Shawn Ryan Searches for the Truth

Behind The Scenes TV — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:38:08 +0000

Who would have guessed the man who created Vic Mackey began his career on My Two Dads? Shawn Ryan went on to create CBS’ The Unit, and is now the executive producer of Fox’sLie to Me. But his biggest gift to television has been The Shield, which set the standard for basic cable drama and proved cable dramas could be not just as good as network shows, but better.

The Shield paved the way for Mad Men, Damages, and Battlestar Galactica’s basic cable-success, but Ryan insists that if his show hadn’t, another would have. “Cable TV was ready to explode like that,” he says. Ryan, one of the influential television industry players interviewed for TVGuide.com’s Best of the Decade section, talked with us about The Shield’s influence, the cable-drama boom, and how TV audiences have changed forever.

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Fox’s ‘24′ is put on hold while Kiefer Sutherland has surgery

Behind The Scenes TV — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:48:49 +0000

No one can stretch a day out like ‘24′, where no one ever has to eat or use a bathroom. But it seems some things are worth halting for: Fox has temporarily suspended production of the hit show because star Kiefer Sutherland has to have surgery.

Details of the nature of the surgery were not instantly available, but Fox is referring to it as a ‘medical procedure’ so as not to alarm the cult of fans whose lives depend on the well-being of Sutherland. Word on the streets, also known is the Los Angeles Times, is that he’s having a cyst near his kidney removed. Not the kidneys! He needs those to drink! The surgery will not change the schedule air dates for the show.

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Storyboard TV launches website and script contest for TV writers

Behind The Scenes TV — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:12:01 +0000

Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, television producers, and TV enthusiasts, launches its website today with a script contest awarding a $5,000 prize to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share TV scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging enthusiasm for their story. Membership to Storyboard TV is free and open to all, and all members will be able to read, critique, and vote on their favorite TV scripts.

The script contest, which begins February 1^st and runs through March 31, 2010, is open to anyone with a TV script for an original one hour series. After a month of peer review, ten semi-finalist scripts will be forwarded to a panel of writers, producers, and directors which will in turn narrow the field to three. The three finalist scriptwriters will receive an industry reading of their television dramas in New York City in June 2010. The winner of the script contest, announced on July 1, 2010, will be chosen from the finalists exclusively by Storyboard TV’s membership community. In addition to awarding $5,000 prize, Storyboard TV will option and develop the winning TV script for possible production.

“I started this script contest and website with the ridiculously lofty goal to ‘save fiction television,’” says Rachel Levy, Storyboard TV’s founder. “We’re seeing more and more long-form fiction replaced by sitcoms and reality programming on the network schedules. I’m hoping that Storyboard TV will be a place where scriptwriters and their audiences can nurture the television drama while we search for new ways to affordably produce and distribute it.”

Storyboard TV believes in the power of the television drama to document, enhance, and transform people’s lives for the better. Storyboard TV’s mission is to move show selection and pre-production away from the networks and directly to the web. Established in 2009, Storyboard TV endeavors to cultivate new writers and TV scripts, to nurture the connection between the scriptwriter and the fan, and to shepherd new television drama into production during the Internet age.

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Steve Sabol’s NFL Films has every angle covered

Behind The Scenes TV — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:00:47 +0000

Steve Sabol, the easygoing president of NFL Films and one of football’s great storytellers, has a handwritten sign on his desk that reads, “The buck doesn’t even pause here.”

Like his father Ed before him, Sabol wants his company’s filmmakers to spread their creative wings, take risks, find new ways to tell stories.

It’s that creativity that helped build NFL Films into the empire it is today, changed how we watch football, and has left a significant imprint on Hollywood.

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Decade of TV: Future adrift in turbulent waters

Behind The Scenes TV — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:07:28 +0000

This last decade of TV has added more excitement to our lives than most other decades of TV ever has.

It has been a decade that included saying goodbye to “Friends” and hello to the 22nd season of “The Real World” and 19th season of “Survivor.” A period of time in which “The Shield,” “Monk,” “The Closer” and “SpongeBob Squarepants” proved cable could draw viewers and, with them, real Nielsen ratings. When “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” series that debuted in the late-late ’90s, came into their own in the last decade and drew droves to premium cable where it wasn’t just TV. It was HBO.

When the explosion of reality TV and its cheaper production costs started filling network schedules with shows that ask the questions — so you think you can dance, sing, survive, scheme, design, back-stab, swap and win the money or the grand prize or the girl and 15 minutes of fame. That move portended the decline of scripted programming on broadcast TV.

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10 Best TV Shows of the Decade

Behind The Scenes TV — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:28:20 +0000

It was a banner decade for TV, especially the rocket boom of cable TV. With more promising writing and characters on TV than the movies, the TV landscape has attracted some big name talents to shine as regulars from the silver screen.

From 2000-’09, we spent quality time with cops and robbers, singers and Sopranos — a brilliant class of new classics.

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Steven Seagal returns as cop in A&E’s “Lawman’

Behind The Scenes TV — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:23:38 +0000

As a “lifelong practitioner of the martial arts,” Steven Seagal says he is trained to remain calm in the face of adversity and danger.

“When the world is speeding by for others, I see things for what they are,” the aging action hero intones in an episode of his new A&E show, “Steven Seagal: Lawman,” which premieres tonight. “A cock of the head, a foot planted forward or back, a flick of the wrist — they all tell me something.” Yeah, well, as a lifelong practitioner of journalism, I’m also trained to see things for what they are. And for what they’re not. And Seagal’s new show seems almost as far-fetched as his movies, which include “Under Siege,” “Hard to Kill” and “Above the Law.”

The show’s conceit is that Seagal the movie star has also been Seagal the cop for the last two decades, working “major cases” in Jefferson Parish, La. This is no publicity stunt, promoters say. Seagal wore the badge with a quiet pride, “under most people’s radar.”

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AMC’s ‘The Prisoner’ Escapes From the Ordinary

Behind The Scenes TV — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:23:31 +0000

AMC doesn’t do a tremendous amount of original programming, but when it does, it does it well. After two critically acclaimed series, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the network is broacasting its second miniseries, a six-episode remake of the 1960s 17-part series The Prisoner, originally broadcast on ITV in the UK.

In the update, James Caviezel plays a man stranded in a surreal town called The Village, where everyone is a number, no one has knowledge of the outside world, dreaming is a crime, and there’s nothing in the surrounding landscape but desert. His memory is nearly blank, and he’s told his name is Number 6. His captor, the leader of the Village is Number 2, played by Ian McKellen.

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Robert Sean Leonard on ‘House’ and the movies

Behind The Scenes TV — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:26:49 +0000

Fans of Dr. James Wilson, Robert Sean Leonard’s character on “House,” have a lot to look forward to in the Nov. 30 episode – titled “Wilson.” Leonard’s screen time has increased this season, since Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House moved in with Wilson, but that’s nothing compared to the upcoming episode.

“He’s examined more,” Leonard said, in a phone interview Tuesday morning from Hidden Valley. “You see my assistant, who you’ve never met. You see the oncology floor; you see where I work. I have my own patients, my own assistant and my own day that doesn’t include House. So you basically follow Wilson around for a few days and see what his life is like.”

The episode features “The West Wing’s” Josh Malina as Tucker, a cancer survivor and an old friend of Wilson’s. After Tucker experiences partial paralysis, Wilson seeks out the help of House’s team in diagnosing Tucker’s condition. However, when Tucker takes a turn for the worse, Wilson struggles to separate his work from his personal connection with the patient. “I’ve got some moral decisions to make,” Leonard said of his character. “Any time the character is in a moral quandary is interesting. That’s been true from the Greeks on down.”

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