NBC Extends Prime Suspect, CW Extends Everything

Big day.

So maybe this is what Robert Greenblatt meant about giving his shows time: NBC is ordering six extra episode scripts for Prime Suspect, following up on a similar order it made for Harry’s Law yesterday. Meanwhile, the CW picked up another nine episodes of  its three new dramas, Ringer, Hart of Dixie and The Secret Circle.

Prime Suspect seems to have inherited the magic of its creators’ previous show, Friday Night Lights, producing weak ratings and great television. But NBC is letting the show air reruns in The Playboy Club‘s old timeslot, so it looks like somebody wants the show to succeed.

Ringer, meanwhile, has okay ratings and got introduced as part of the CW’s effort to expand beyond teen soap operas. (Never mind that it’s practically become one.) The show has hinted at ramping up the intensity and finally got its ratings to stop sliding this week. Hart of Dixie and The Secret Circle were both in stronger positions than Ringer been losing viewers since they premiered, but both score better demographics than Ringer.

The CW is now close to matching NBC’s record for show pickups — since Harry’s Law and Prime Suspect just have script orders for now, NBC has technically only picked up three shows itself — and Parenthood only got two extra episodes. The CW has also (blessedly) canceled H8r already, rounding out its entire lineup of new shows.

News Roundup: Endings and Beginnings

More on the way.

Evening, all. Here’s some news:

• Fox orders a third season of MasterChef.
• And a ninth season of So You Think You Can Dance.
• The CW cancels H8r, doing the world a favor.
• Connie Britton says the Friday Night Lights movie is totally happening, “for realizes.”
• Glee‘s Harry Shum, Jr. was an iPod dancer.

Prime Suspect: TV’s Best Endangered New Show

I seem to have this tendency to only like the cop shows that are too clever for network TV. I think by biggest success was Life, which at least got two seasons, but lately I keep landing on stuff like The Chicago Code that lives its entire short life on the bubble. Not a good way to enjoy a show.

Prime Suspect looks like the show that’s going to agonize me the most this fall, as it’s both the best new show I’ve seen this far and also in the most trouble. Which is probably to be expected, since it comes to us from former Friday Night Lights executive producers Peter Berg and Sarah Aubrey and takes the same sort of uncompromising look at big-city policing that  FNL did with small-town football.

And for viewers trying to recover from the lack of new FNL on television (or those of you who never watched it but totally should have), this is absolutely the show for you.

Maybe There’s More to Life than HBO

Probably the weirdest Emmy reaction I shouldn’t really have been surprised by comes from TV Guide‘s Michael Schneider, who wonders if HBO is “Losing Its Touch” because it only won nineteen Emmys this year.

To be fair, ABC Modern Family broke HBO’s eight-year streak at the Primetime Emmys, winning five awards on Sunday to edge out HBO’s four. But HBO’s total still puts it on top for the awards overall, and the supporting actor win for Game of Thrones was one of the big surprises of the night.

It takes some serious acrobatics to turn that into a story about a network that’s losing it’s edge. When discussing Boardwalk Empire‘s “heartbreaker” on Sunday, Schneider is reduced to saying that the show — the most-awarded of the year, with eight Emmys overall — came one Emmy short of tying The West Wing‘s nine-win record. Pathetic, right?

News Roundup: Post-Modern Family Awards Edition

Totally deserved it.

Hi, folks. How was your Emmy night? I found that subjecting myself to the whole experience was a weird kind of emotional roller-coaster: We begin with Modern Family winning everything, which I don’t begrudge it but it wasn’t especially suspenseful, and move on to infuriating crap like Louie getting shut out and The Big Bang Theory winning over Steve Carell. Then, just when your faith in humanity (okay, in the TV Academy) is almost beyond repair, they give Peter Dinklage the award for Game of Thrones and Friday Night Lights wins twice. HBO didn’t even have a lock on the miniseries this year!

Then, just when you think the night might have been saved, they give an award to The Kennedeys. Seriously, what the hell? Then we round up with Modern Family winning everything again.

But now it’s Monday, so let’s all move on. Here’s what else is going on:

• Showrunner Chad Hodge has kind of given up on trying to have us take The Playboy Club seriously. (Now it’s just “a sexy, fun soap,” a pitch that at least has the virtue of making sense.)
• Netflix doesn’t own the Quikster Twitter feed.
• And their stock is still tanking.

Friday Night Lights gets Humanitas Prize

Texas forever.

I’ll still be disappointed Friday Night Lights gets stiffed at the Emmys on Sunday, but it’s encouraging to see The Humanitas Prize honor the (awesome) series finale, “Always,” as one of the 11 winners announced today.

The awards also continued The King’s Speech‘s pattern of winning everything it might conceivably apply for, plus Modern Family scored wins in both the 30 minute category — which writer Abraham Higginbotham won for “The Kiss” — and the David & Lynn Angell Fellowship in Comedy Writing went to Robin W. Morton at UCLA for the Modern Family spec script “Life is Beautiful.”

News Roundup: In Development

We'll fill the rest in later.

Hi, folks. NBC wants Ricky Gervais to host the Golden Globes again.  Now for the stuff that’s actually news:

• NBC has picked up a comedy project from Caprice Crane based on her first book, Stupid and Contagious. The project does not appear to be autobiographical nor using Crane as the star, so I kind of like it already.
• A&E has ordered 10 episodes of Longmire, which stars Battlestar Galactica‘s Katee Sackhoff as presumably someone other than the widowed Wyoming sheriff whom the show is based around. Stargate Universe‘s Lou Diamond Phillips is in there, too.
• Oh, and the Friday Night Lights gang — specifically, producers Peter Berg, Sarah Aubrey, and Liz Heldens — are developing a female-centered western for NBC. That one hasn’t gotten very far yet, but it had better.

Flashpoint: Out With A Bang

Why can't anything be simple?

Whilst it ordinarily does its best to portray itself as an action drama, Flashpoint is never quite on top of its game until there is a bomb involved and this week, we got three. Continuing to shine its crown as the king of procedural cop shows on the air, Flashpoint came to us this time in the form of “Shockwave,” an intense and emotional episode with just dash of drama, suspense and well, everything that you could possibly want out of a show like this.

Starting in a calm manner relative to what was to come, the episode began with Spike visiting his father in a hospital bed. Whilst their relationship throughout the show has been less than good because of Spike’s job and the dangers involved with it, the scene avoided any bickering and simply set the tone for the episode when a soccer analogy from Spike’s dad cleverly aligned the moment with the broader theme of the episode for Spike: knowing where you need to be. After getting the news that all is good with his father, we followed Spike straight into the action as he joined Team One to inspect a suspicious package found in a trash can in a downtown high-rise.

That Friday Night Lights Movie is Really Happening

Gentlemen, I am looking forward to it.

If, like me, you’ve been intrigued and cautiously excited about the possibility of a movie version of the TV version of Friday Night Lights (and if you aren’t, you absolutely should be), then some awesome news just dropped: Peter Berg, who directed the first movie and executive-produced the series, told Collider that he’s been working on a script with former showrunner Jason Katims for a couple of weeks now.

Unlike the original film, which was an adaptation of a nonfiction book about a real football team in Odessa, Texas, the new one will continue the story of the TV series, featuring Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton and presumably chronicling Eric and Tami Taylor’s adventures as East Coast people. “The goal would be to focus the film around Kyle and Connie, and bring in some new characters, and then bring in some of our familiar faces,” Berg told Collider. He hopes to shoot it next year.

Seriously. This news could not be more awesome.

Friday Night Lights: Texas Forever

We're home.

Five years. Seventy-six episodes. One town.

Friday Night Lights came to an end this week with “Always”, an extended goodbye to the East Dillon Lions and Dillon, Texas as a whole. Although it was about state, in as much as the the entire show is about football, it focussed on the characters that got us there.

Bringing Zach Gilford’s Matt Saracen back into the fold, a substantial portion of the episode was devoted to the Taylor’s eldest daughter Julie. Throughout the season and the entire show, Julie has had her moments, but none quite compare to what the finale brought us. After reconnecting in Chicago following Julie’s college meltdown, Matt asks her to marry him, to affirmative response. With a combined age of just thirty seven, the Taylors have some reservations and what unfolds was pretty spectacular viewing. With Julie pointing to her a parents as a prime example of how young marriage can work out, there is a pretty big emotional punch to be packed by the whole situation. Still subtly fighting over their respective job offers, Tami and Eric are really on the brink of what a marriage can take, and whilst their daughter looks at them as the perfect couple, they’re far from it.