How does one go from being one of television’s most prolific guest stars to a series regular?
Martha Plimpton: Well, it happened sort of organically in the way it usually happens I think for people. I hadn’t been looking particularly for a series regular gig but I also wasn’t not looking for one. I was shooting a movie in Toronto, I got a call that there was this pilot script that would be coming towards me and I should give it a read, they said it was from Greg Garcia and I knew about him for a long time and was a big fan so I thought, “Great.” Then when I read it I just loved it, it was hilarious and it actually made me laugh and I thought, “Well, this never happens, ever, so I better get on this.” I don’t want to sound too mystical, but the character just seemed perfect, I just identified with her right away, I loved her sense of humor and I love the way she was written. I talked to Greg on the phone, he gave me the rundown on what the plan was, I flew out to L.A. to audition and went through the whole process like every other actor would do and luckily it worked out. Every week the scripts just seem to get tighter and funnier and I’m really liking being able to see this character, all of the characters actually, develop and become more themselves. I like working with an ensemble of actors and learning each others rhythms and figuring each other out and that’s really exciting for me.
Search Results for: pilot
Must Read TV: ABC, GLEE, THE WALKING DEAD
• No ordinary TV season, as ABC gives full season orders to lowly rated freshman favorites NO ORDINARY FAMILY and BETTER WITH YOU.
• It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, with GLEE already announcing a street date for their Christmas album.
• KEY a lock, with FOX greenlighting a pilot order to Joe Hill’s graphic novel.
• THE WHOLE TRUTH was, ABC just wasn’t that into you.
• Lord of the small screen? FX picks up WILFRED, a new single-camera comedy starring Elijah Wood.
• If you have to come across any WALKING DEAD today, make sure you’re armed… with a camera (to send us a pic!)
Must Read TV: RUBICON, TORCHWOOD, SKINS & More!
• I spy… RUBICON Boss making a cast for a second season.
• It pays to be mean, assuming of course your name is GLEE co-creator Ian Brennan.
• 3 Reasons to consider the switch to Starz, DOLLHOUSE, GREEK & ONE TREE HILL stars eye key roles in TORCHWOOD’s upcoming season.
• Girl power! SKINS releases a second trailer.
• Casting Couch: Lea Thompson, Keith Carradine, James Marsden, Judith Light and Robert Knepper all book new roles.
• Finding your inner Macaulay Culkin: 17-plus memorable TV Halloween costumes, and what they say about their wearers.
Good News, Bad News: CW PICK-UPS, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA & THE WHOLE TRUTH
Good News: The CW has given full-season orders to freshman dramas NIKITA and HELLCATS as well as veteran sudser ONE TREE HILL. Bad News: For LIFE UNEXPECTED, which was conspicuously absent from the network’s plethora of pick-ups despite a recent order for two additional scripts. [Source: Ausiello]
We have a bone to pick with Fox (Re: The BONES spin-off)
Earlier today Fox made headlines with the news that they’re developing a potential BONES spin-off based upon the popular Locator series of books. Unfortunately, we’re having trouble pinpointing just how we feel about this.
On the one hand, we have the utmost respect for BONES creator Hart Hanson who will be spearheading the project which is said to revolve around Walter Sherman (aka. The Locater), a twenty-to-thirty-something friend of Booth’s from Iraq who Deadline Hollywood characterizes as an “eccentric, obstreperous and amusing reclusive man with highly sought after abilities to find anything.” What’s more, we’re quite frankly relieved to discover that Fox is capable of greenlighting a spin-off that doesn’t come from the desk of Seth MacFarlane.
Today’s TV Addict Top 5: Things You Didn’t Know About THE MIDDLE Star Eden Sher
Her life as a hollywood celebrity is no as exciting as you might think.
Despite what the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton might have you believe, the life of a young Hollywood starlet isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Turns out, when star Eden Sher is not busy shooting THE MIDDLE, she isn’t celebrating the sophomore success of the hit ABC comedy with weekend jaunts to Las Vegas or late nights out at the Viper Room. So just what is Sher doing in her downtime thanks to her newfound fame? Easy, “Sleep!” revealed Sher on a recent one-on-one interview. “On the weekend I just sleep most of the time because we’re working so hard on the show during the week.”
She is not as big a cross-country fan as the character she plays on TV.
Talk to any actor who has been asked to learn a skill (such as martial arts or guitar) for a role and you’ll invariably discover that they’ve fallen in love with their new found talent. Any actor that is except Eden Sher, who can’t quite muster Sue’s enthusiasm for cross-country. “I can of course relate to her in every episode because I play her, but I’m definitely not as ‘Sue-ish’,” explained Sher. “I never was on my school’s cross-country team and I actually have no intention of every doing it! Learning about it from Sue, well, it’s hard work and a very weird sport.”
Reviews: NO ORDINARY FAMILY & NIKITA
By: Aleks Chan
As I emerged from the glut of mediocre courtroom drama pilots, disappointing comedies (ahem, RUNNING WILDE), and snoozy serialized whodunits (oh, THE EVENT) working on this year’s Fall TV Preview, I looked to my exhausted DVR and found a nice handful of episodes of two shows I remembered to have a mild interest in seeing again: NO ORDINARY FAMILY, in which Michael Chiklis and Julie Benz run a super-powered family, and NIKITA, the French assassin thriller rebooted for THE VAMPIRE DIARIES audience, starring the distracting beauty Maggie Q. They both involve humans with superhuman abilities (some more comical than others), and they’re constructed as butt-kicking-high-drama hybrids.
These shows are still more middling than they are must-sees, but I hold out for them nonetheless. NO ORDINARY FAMILY holds the most promise of the two. After a plane crash lands them in chemically-altered water that imbues them with special abilities, the Powell family is forced to cope with the unexpected implications of their new powers. Like super powers often do, the Powells’ are manifestations of qualities they lack or need: Chiklis’ Jim, a sketch-artist for the police, wants to help catch criminals who get away — so he gains super strength. His wife Stephanie (Julie Benz) is the busy breadwinner who can’t find time to spread between her work and her family; now she can run at lighting speed.
The kids are the type of precocious TV children that thin interest very quickly: Daphne (Kay Panabaker) can read other’s thoughts, lamely rendered, TRUE BLOOD-style, in complete, coherent sentences that no one thinks in. JJ (Jimmy Bennett) can learn at a rapid, instantaneous rate, leading his teacher to question his sudden academic skyrocketing.
They click like a good TV family should, and Chiklis and Benz have an inherent chemistry to them. Some liken the pilot to The Incredibles when it was announced last spring, but I don’t see it — their familial strife is unevenly loaded and they’re don’t seem to be any immediate stakes. While they do have to worry about being exposed, the show doesn’t place much urgency in the matter. A plot from last week’s episode (in which Steph has to sneak into her work’s lab to steal a blood sample that would make light of her chemical anomalies) did hinge on this, but it never felt like they were in any actual danger of being outed. 7TH HEAVEN’s Stephen Collins plays Steph’s boss of likely insidious intentions who’s harboring criminals with super powers of their own. The storyline is moving dreadfully slow, and it rings too much of HEROES to not make anyone weary of where it might lead, but a death scene involving (ugh) a telekinetic fiend was convincingly frightening, so there’s hope, if minor.
Balancing the super and the ordinary is what the show struggles with, but I see potential bridges in the winning supporting roles: Romany Malco (WEEDS) plays Jim’s best friend-cum-sidekick George, an attorney who gives Jim leads on crimes and builds Jim a “lair” to house his vigilante mission. Autumn Reeser, channeling her Taylor Townsend of THE O.C., is Steph’s plucky, over-interested lab assistant Katie. These relationships blend the home, work, and super lives together in a way the show should work more towards: not too seriously, with a sense of humor, and together. Not enough screen time is devoted to this family as a family — if they really weren’t an ordinary family, they’d break the TV mold and spend time together.
NIKITA doesn’t have super powers, but it does have Maggie Q: She reportedly does most of her own stunts, impressive given her wafer-thin figure and the amount of ass she kicks every week. Indeed, Nikita, an assassin working to take down the rogue secret government agency (called Division) that trained her and murdered her lover, gets herself into enough fisticuffs in an episode that you could call the show MAGGIE Q FIGHTS and its ratings wouldn’t change.
The plurality of fight scenes are very-well done: slick, fast, and timed with the right crunch and thwack that you could imagine them in pop art sweeping the screen. Q does it all with an entrapping grace and a flip of her — she is Nikita, she’s rendered so closely in the image of a male fantasy of what a super heroine would look like. Besides the young male viewers who watch NIKITA, I suspect another reason why Nikita herself slings more fists than words is because that’s the only time Q is a convincing performer.
Her Mischa Barton School of Acting style does meld well with the plot though, which is like a romance-spy novel written in a series of mass-market paperbacks (the fat, short ones) — spinning in circles and lacking momentum. Nikita is targeting Division assets to weaken them and has her protégé Alex (Lindsay Fonseca) working as a mole while training as a new Division recruit. Division is hunting Nikita, headed by a positively skeletal-looking crew, including Michael (Shane West), Nikita’s former trainer.
The CW recently announced that the show is being retooled to attract more female viewers, the network’s primary demographic. This could prove problematic. I cannot foresee this happening without having to rely on Q as dramatic actress over her high-flying kicks. She has time to find her inner Syndey Bristow, or at least watch a few Angelina Jolie movies (I liked Salt), but if the plot ever uncoils, the whole thing could fall apart. Grade: No Ordinary Family: B-; Nikita: C
NO ORDINARY FAMILY airs Tuesdays at 8PM on ABC (CTV in Canada) while NIKITA airs Thursdays at 9PM on The CW (“A” Channel in Canada)
Aleks Chan is a contributing writer to The TV Addict. He has seen every episode of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER four times, has once referred to his DVR as his “best friend,” and has only seen the pilot episode of THE SOPRANOS — and has no intention to apologize for it. He lives in Austin, Texas. His name is pronounced like Alex. Email him at alekschan.thetvaddict@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@alekstvaddict), or his own blog, Screen Reader.
Must Read TV: 30 ROCK, SMALLVILLE, MY GENERATION & More!
• Still talking ’bout MY GENERATION, creator Noah Hawley reminisces about what could have been.
• Incredibly unexpected news, ABC prepping the return of THE INCREDIBLE HULK.
• Fashion in the city, HBO eyes Tea Leoni for a new comedy pilot.
• Happy 200th SMALLVILLE, a Hero’s Journey Remembered.
• Spotted: 17 differences between 30 ROCK’s east and west coast episodes.
Today’s TV Addict Top 5: Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Miss Tonight’s LIFE UNEXPECTED/ ONE TREE HILL Crossover Event
It’s time for ONE TREE HILL fans to pay it forward
Which is to say, it would be really cool of TREE HILL fans to stick around past the “Millar/Gough Ink” (Read: Closing credits) for a night. Seriously ONE TREE HILL fans, remember way back in 2003/04 when your show was the little watched series nobody expected to survive? Well, eight seasons later, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot. And since you guys know all too well what it’s like to sit back and watch the CW network (formerly the WB) consistently lavish attention on the likes of GOSSIP GIRL, NIKITA and the VAMPIRE DIARIES while all but ignore the rest of the schedule, perhaps you could do us LIFE UNEXPECTED fans a solid and stick around to watch Haley (Bethany Joy Galeotti) and Mia (Kate Voegele) travel to Portland. Particularly because…
LIFE UNEXPECTED needs every viewer that it can get!
No really. With an average of a million and a half viewers, LIFE UNEXPECTED is currently the lowest rated show on the network. Which means when it comes time to find a timeslot for DANNI LOWINSKI, the new legal dramedy pilot that the CW just recently picked up for midseason, one doesn’t need to be smarter than a fifth grader to guess which show the Network is most likely to take off the air to make room.
Must Read TV: ABC Family, Jimmy Smits, USA & More!
• Start your day off on the right note, with the best Old Spice parody ever! (See Above)
• Jeremy Duncan FTW! CBS signs deal to produce a live-action comedy based on the popular comic strip Zits.
• If you had a million dollars, TWO AND A HALF MEN’s Angus T. Jones would still be richer than you!
• Mark Your Calendars: USA sets premiere dates for FAIRLY LEGAL, ROYAL PAINS and WHITE COLLAR.
• Jimmy Smits: Why can’t the beloved TV actor catch a break in primetime?
• Desperate Teenager? ABC developing a new single-camera family comedy about a teenage girl who is moved from the big city to her version of hell — the suburbs.
• With a HUGE void to fill, ABC Family greenlights four new pilots.