Pee-wee Herman's ballsy bid for a comeback launched last night with the debut of a Twitter feed (one lucky follower will receive a Picturephone call from Pee-wee today), and a visit to The Jay Leno Show that can only be described as strange -- just not the right variety of strange. The star of the brilliant Pee-wee's Big Adventure and equally brilliant children's show Pee-wee's Playhouse emerged in his gray plaid suit looking oddly of-the-moment -- Mr. Herman wouldn't be out of place strutting through the halls of Sterling Cooper assessing workplace productivity.
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Steven Spielberg is following up his Emmy-decorated United States of Tara with another Showtime scripted venture that will chronicle the development of an original Broadway musical. To see whether the Hollywood legend is recruiting Mickey Rooney, a rag tag group of underprivileged urban youths or musical vets to carry Spielberg's tuner from inception to an actual Broadway debut, join us after the jump!
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Fun Fact about network medical dramas: We apparently need more of them! Did you know? I didn't, but NBC had an inkling and will premiere its new nurse-focused hospital show Mercy tonight. A majority of critics have noted how Mercy pales in comparison to Showtime's compelling Nurse Jackie, but the only real problems with this watchable melodrama are its complacency with piling on cliches (prepare thy jazz-hands for... a defibrillator mishap!) and its shameless retooling of Grey's Anatomy characters as homogenized, dysfunctional romantics.
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By now, you've likely heard the incredibly gross news about what Mackenzie Phillips's "BOMBSHELL SECRET," as it's been teased for a week, will be when she detonates this atomic taboo bomb on The Oprah Winfrey Show later today. But before we do a swan dive into that muck, I'd like to back up a bit. I did something recently that I'd never done before: I added Oprah to my DVR queue. Her two-part season opener interview with Whitney Houston wasn't a letdown. On the contrary, it was something of a triumph for Winfrey, who'd gotten her elusive subject to snap back from the cracky abyss and reflect on the circumstances that led to her flash-and-burn marriage and astonishing fall from grace.
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Sometime after guest-starring on My Name Is Earl, Christian Slater was bit by the network television bug and premiered his own NBC series, a short-lived, psychological thriller series called My Own Worst Enemy. Tonight, Christian Slater gets anther shot to cash in on small screen work with his premiere of ABC's The Forgotten. Let's hope The Forgotten is more easily remembered than My Own Worst Enemy, or else Slater might be having to stretch his Curb Your Enthusiasm check.
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Don't buy into the critics' fuss over the title of Bill Lawrence's latest ABC sitcom. The only show with a well thought-out title in history was Cheers; it was the name of the bar but it also indicated the jovial nature of the show and implied a level of camaraderie directly related to sharing a drink with your fellow man. Most programs rely on the main character's name (Will and Grace, The Simpsons), jokey wordplay (Accidentally On Purpose, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gary Unmarried) or are too simple for analysis (Friends, ER). At some point, Bill Lawrence had a whiteboard full of titles that would have evoked less critical debates about the word "cougar," but he opted for the most sensational name. Let's get past it and look at the actual program.
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Kevin Federline has been added to the cast of Celebrity Fit Club and will be competing against his ex, Shar Jackson, TMZ reports. The great thing about Federline's style is that after slimming down, he will still be able to wear all those XXXL polo shirts. [TMZ]
Seems like every episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show's new season features an exotic locale or exotic former crackhead, but for her show tomorrow, Oprah's spicing things up with a more recently practicing junkie. Mackenzie Phillips was arrested last year at LAX for possession of heroin and cocaine, but now, the former One Day at a Time actress is telling Oprah (just in time for her new memoir High on Arrival!) that she has a 31-year-old "family secret" to reveal. There's no telling yet what the secret will be, but if this Oprah episode is going to be worth the hype and the cameo from Valerie Bertinelli, there are plenty of things it shouldn't be. The main blacklisted topic is discussed after the jump.
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In addition to pulling off one of the most coolly executed guest segments in Late Show history last night, President Obama attracted the largest Letterman audience in the span of a full presidential term. With a 14 share, CBS clobbered NBC's Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien by nearly 200% more viewers and out-finished the Jay Leno Show by 27% among households. The last person to garner a larger audience for Letterman was Oprah in 2005. [Hollywood Reporter]
The CW has announced that Heather Locklear will reprise her role as Amanda Woodward on the reboot of Melrose Place. Locklear follows in the footsteps of fellow original cast members Daphne Zuniga, Thomas Calabro, Laura Leighton, and Josie Bissett, who have all signed on for recurring roles. But how well will the dastardly, hard-strutting Woodward fit in with the new cast? We investigate the potential for slap fights and smart blazers after the jump.
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In anticipation of tonight's Dancing With the Stars premiere event part deux, when the female celebrities take their inaugural spins and trips on the dance floor, we spoke to one of the program's professional dancers, Louis van Amstel. The Dutch ballroom dance champion has partnered with the likes of Priscilla Presley, Lisa Rinna, Monique Coleman and hopes to win his first DWTS title with this season's unlikely double, Kelly Osbourne.
En route to practice last week, van Amstel told us about his favorite partners, the strapless bra mishap that threatened ABC censors, Priscilla Presley's nerves and what to expect this season.
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Last night, the sitting president visited the Late Show With David Letterman to promote his health care plan, but as any television-saavy politician knows, talk show segments don't have to be all business. The president demonstrated this point so well and with such ease, that if you suffered retrograde amnesia in the past week and just happened to tune into CBS at midnight, you would have thought Dave's guest was busy promoting his latest Michael Bay flick. The president's keys to great after-hours interviews and video after the jump.
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During today's Mad Men-themed episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the host raked her hair up into a beehive, dressed her entire audience in '60s-era outfits and summoned Don and Betty Draper to set. Just when America's housewives didn't think their living rooms couldn't get any more swingin', Oprah revealed her Favorite Things From The '60s. To see the complete list, which curiously excludes the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans, join us after the jump.
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Last week, we explored a Kanye West conspiracy theory regarding the rapper's now-historic "Imma Let You Finish" VMA stunt and today it seems there is another award show curiosity to entertain. During last night's opening segment of the Emmys, Neil Patrick Harris sang about a series of television networks during his opening "Put Down The Remote" number, but one channel was mysteriously missing.
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Tonight brings the second season of Castle to ABC, returning Nathan Fillion to his titular role as a crime novelist who shadows NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) on the trail of killers and (hopefully) his next story. Their chemistry recalls the flirty crimesolving of Moonlighting with grisly doses of CSI gore, establishing the grounds for a dark comedy whose cult following overlaps that of Fillion's career-making work with Joss Whedon on Firefly and, later, the film Serenity.
Or at least it overlapped last week when Fillion and I chatted at SoHo's Apple Store with a few hundred of his local fans on hand (and some not-so-local; one couple said they'd driven 17 hours from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to see Fillion). An edited version of our conversation follows the jump; a full podcast will be available from Apple later this week.
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