Television

ABC Gives Pilot Commitment to Sci-Fi Drama Set In the White House

In a Deadline exclusive it was
announced that ABC has given a put pilot commitment to a project that
brings a little science-fiction into the Oval Office. Ex-Comm
is being described as a drama with plenty of humor infused into its
sci-fi based storyline. Seth Green, Michael Dougherty, Roberto Orci,
and Jon Favreau(who is also set to direct) will write the pilot.

Ex-Comm is centered on a
recently elected president and his secret agency of America’s top
minds responsible for investigating the more bizarre threats facing
the nation. The series will follow this “Executive Committee” as
they hunt down the “conspiracy theory truths” that endanger
national security. As the premise implies, the show will be
lighthearted, but creators also claim it will remain grounded in the
realm of possibility.

How I Met Your Mother – The Stinson Missile Crisis

How much do you buy into Barney and Robin? That’s the question that might divide fans of How I Met Your Mother the most this year. In Season 7’s fourth episode, “The Stinson Missile Crisis,” Robin’s rediscovered feelings for Barney take front and center as she begins a series of court-ordered therapy sessions with a psychiatrist played by Kal Penn of “Harold & Kumar” fame.

Sellouts – Compromising to Survive

Talking
about a particular television show “selling out” is a sensitive
subject. Sellout shows probably compromised their standards in order
to achieve greater popularity, and so talking about them negatively
isn’t going to go down well. Unfortunately, popularity doesn’t
usually equate to excellence.

Examples
of selling out in other mediums abound. In music, Greenday and
Lost Prophets have often been accused of selling out, due to
their sound changing to something more palatable to the masses, and
closer to pop-music. In video games, Assassin’s Creed has been
accused of the same thing, due to its publisher, Ubisoft, churning
out regular sequels, focused too heavily on popular characters and
action at the expensive of a quality story. In film, there is George
Lucas and his repeated attempts to beat the dead horse which
is the Star Wars universe, with many prequels, gap fillers,
cartoons and story changes. All of these have one thing in common:
the desire to make as much money as possible.

Arrested Development to Return to TV!

It was confirmed yesterday that Arrested Development is set to return to TV with a mini-season of new episodes before the highly anticipated and much talked about movie will hit theaters. The series’ creator Mitch Hurwitz has confirmed that the comedy, which concluded its three-season run in 2006, will film nine or ten episodes before production on the feature gets underway. 

Hurwitz announced the news while attending the cast’s reunion at the New Yorker Festival yesterday. Will Arnett, who played George Bluth II on the show, later confirmed via Twitter: “I’m peeing with @batemanjason at the moment..and we can confirm that we are going to make new AD eps and a movie.”

Dexter – Those Kinds of Things

After almost ten months off our screens, Dexter returned on Sunday with “Those Kinds of Things,” an episode that just about perfectly set up the season ahead, while remaining thoroughly funny and dramatic throughout. Taking place around a year after the events of last season’s finale “The Big One,” the episode picks up with Dexter in high spirits, with basically everything in his life going right for once. Admittedly his wife is still dead and his next love Lumen is gone, but things really are on the up for everyone’s favorite serial killer. Although I knew the time jump was going to happen, I was pleased to see that it was well executed. It would have been easy to have season six come back just a few months or even weeks after season five and have Dexter be depressed and kill-crazy, but instead, the writers took a leap with all of the characters and it worked very well.

The opening scene should also be commended for showing us what has to be the coolest way that Dexter has ever attacked his victims. With Dexter dialing 911 claiming to have been stabbed, there was a moment of genuine worry that things really weren’t going so well for him. That is, until the two paramedics who came to his aid got a shot of M99 in the neck for their troubles. Both being part of an organ harvesting ring, Dexter quickly disposed of them and on went the show. Back in the real world, we were introduced to Dexter’s new babysitter (Batista’s sister, Jaime), and also to the knowledge that Dexter had bought the apartment next door to his own. Whether the two apartments are to keep the two halves of Dexter separate is unclear, but as Batista himself pointed out, it makes it very easy for him to come and go unnoticed. 

Person of Interest – Ghosts

With some room to breathe after a jam-packed pilot, new CBS crime thriller Person of Interest found its groove this week in “Ghosts,” a case-focused episode, but one that continued to highlight some long-term questions about our future crime-stopping duo, Reese and Finch.

The see-all know-all machine, whose past we get to see a little of in this episode, wastes no time making things interesting when it churns out the Social Security number of a girl believed to be several years dead. Reese (James Caviezel) and Finch (Michael Emerson) start digging up the past to see if the machine is right and the girl is, in fact, still alive. Not only must they solve what happened to her several years ago, but also what might happen to her in the near future.

Supernatural – Hello, Cruel World

Following a semi-game changing premiere last week, Supernatural had its work cut out for itself when “Hello, Cruel World” came along. After spending four months thinking that Castiel was going to be the new big bad for the year, as a ruthless god-like figure, mostly all viewers would have been shocked when that story was put to bed by the premiere’s end. Instead, we learnt that Purgatory wasn’t just a hang out for the souls of evil, but rather some of evil itself. More specifically, the Leviathan. Touted by Death as the first monsters ever created, the exceptionally powerful Leviathan took control of Castiel at the end of last week and that is where we picked up this week in the third part of an ongoing arc.

Much like the souls previously held within Jimmy’s body, the Leviathan found themselves unable to be effectively contained and vowed to return to finish off Dean and Bobby before leaving to find somewhere else to go. Regrouping, Dean and Bobby quickly found the previously missing Sam, who was in the midst of another Lucifer induced hallucination, and caught up with the Leviathan just in time to see Jimmy’s body disintegrate and the evil creatures make their way into the local water supply. Dean had a short moment of grieving for his almost certainly dead friend before the three headed back to Bobby’s home to formulate a strategy. With Leviathan feelers out there in the hunting world, everything slowed down a bit while Sam explained what was going on in his head.