MAJOR STUFF
... Despite its poor track record in adaptations, the comic The Punisher is still getting interest in heading to television. Fox is working with Criminal Minds' Ed Bernero to televisualize the superhero, a vigilante New York detective with a penchant for lots and lots of guns. The comic has been turned into a movie twice, and both were hecka-lame. We'll see if a TV version can do it better. [EW]
... Rumor has it that CBS is this close to picking up Unforgettable and Person of Interest for full seasons. Neither pickup would be particularly surprising, as both shows are performing fairly well. What is surprising is how many people watch Unforgettable! I mean, come on! [Deadline Hollywood]
... Matt Smith might be planning on leaving Doctor Who, according to a rumor that was started when someone picked through a quote of his with a fine-tooth toilet brush! [Blastr]
... Jimmy Fallon's production company Holiday Road has sold three scripts to NBC, and apparently the late-night host has fatherhood on his mind. Fat Rob follows a rap star as he becomes a father, DILFs is about a group of thirtysomething dads who don't want to grow up, and Rick tells the story of a man who becomes a stepdad to a person who's the same age as him. [Variety]
... Shonda Rhimes' production company has sold The Circle to ABC. Shonda, why won't you let other people sell TV show ideas to networks? The soapy thriller follows the ten adopted kids of a billionaire after one of them is murdered. Brangelina better watch this one closely. [Deadline Hollywood]
... Michael Bay is getting ready to blow stuff up on The CW. Bay will executive produce Outsiders for the network. The drama comes from Supernatural writer Adam Glass and centers on a sociology professor who teams up with a young, uptight female detective (I'm guessing she's sexy, too) to solve youth-related crimes involving subcultures in Los Angeles. [Variety]
... Fox will air The World Cup in 2018 and 2022. Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooal! Also: Soccer is boring. Fact! [Deadline Hollywood]
... Remember that cool-sounding UK television show starring Chloe Sevigny as a pre-op transsexual assassin? The one called Hit or Miss that I told you about a while back? Good news: It's coming to the U.S.! Bad news: only to DirecTV. [Newsday]
CASTING STUFF
... Catherine Tate is returning to The Office! The actress appeared in last season's finale as a special projects manager, and will stick around the show for the rest of the season. [NBC, via press release]
... Whitney's Whitney is getting a dad. Peter Gallagher will guest-star on the NBC comedy as the lead character's father. Excellent, now someone else can be really, really disappointed in her for a change. [TV Guide]
... Mena Suvari is stopping by American Horror Story for a guest role as a famous murder victim. Maybe the show can also figure out who murdered her career. Boom! Got ya, Mena! (...says the not successful guy who writes about TV in his pajamas.) [TV Line]
Follow TV.com writer Tim Surette on Twitter: @TimAtTVDotCom
One of my friends told me about the Punisher TV show last week. I'm gonna say here what I told him then: "It's very simple: if it's not on FX, it's going to fail. No way a major network can carry Frank Castle without literally castrating him." 'Nuff said.
Haha, love all the soccer comments :P
Also, I like Unforgettable... but I'm a sucker for procedurals, so maybe you shouldn't count my opinion... :P
Soccer is not boring, you just don't understand it.
Soccer (or as we call it in Europe: football) is WAY better than american football. American football is so boring and it's not even really football since you don't even really touch the ball with your feet. You should call it handball, or runball, or suckball.
The world knows football as football. America knows it as soccer. United we stand, secluded we stand, huh?
Also Re: Matt Smith, I hope not, but as long as Moffat stays in charge of the writing department I'll be happy. :)
I think the idea of Matt Smith leaving Dr. Who came about as someone misinterpreting a reference to the season finale. Although no actor has remained on Dr. Who for more than five years. And the setup for the season finale does have some similarities to what happened before the last Doctor left so it might give some an impression that he's leaving. But even if he does he'll likely do at least one more series.
Also: Soccer is boring. Fact! (Not true)
Also it's called FOOTBALL you nimwit !
fact: what americans call football is boring and "soccer" rocks
Fact: Both football and soccer is boring ;-)
I don't watch, enjoy, or follow sports at all but I would much rather watch american football than football/soccer.
love that Unforgettable and Person of Interest is looking good to be picked up for a full season. both shows are off the hook and i have to admit I like Person of Interest better, but I still watch Unforgettable. Excited that fox will be airing the worlds in 2018 and 2022, its not boring at all.
Punisher is just about the only comic franchise I wouldn't be interested in as a TV show. That and the abortion that was David E Kelley's recent attempt at a Wonder Woman revamp.
Unforgettable is pretty forgettable to me... Coudn't go beyond the pilot
Did Matt Smith not say right at the beginning he only wanted to do two seasons of Doctor Who as he had other projects he wanted to work on. Can't remember where i saw this though
You just don't get Futbol, or Football. It's not boring at all. I thought the same about American Football and Baseball but when I watched a couple of games of AF I started to understand and appreciate the game, to see the strategy and actually I started to like it a little bit. I don't watch many games though I'm Argentinian and here only broadcast superbowls and a couple of matches in a year.
With baseball I'm still not sure why it's a popular game...no matter how many games I watch is still boring as hell. It must be boring playing it too, I played 2, 3 games of hmmm I believe it's softball when I was younger and the only fun part was when I was batting.
I recommend to you to watch the Panamerican Olympics. Unless you have no love for the "t-shirt" you'll start cheering your country and watching sports you don't see often or you don't even know they exist and the more you see the more you understand and the more you start to like them.moreless
I just hope that Fox does makes the series in a rite way and not like the movies because they were bad.
Also: Tim Surette is not funny. Fact!
Is it bad that I'm looking forward to that Shonda Rhimes show???
The REAL bad news is that for us hispanics,the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup will be on Telemundo (yuck) rather than the way better Univision
Hey!! Punisher War Zone was freaking awesome. As for who should play him in the tv show, that Dominic guy from prison break, the big guy, not the tattooed one. Frank should be big. Not like that Person of Interest guy (luv that show btw), but big. Oh yes the show should be incrededly violent :)
am glad that person of interest will be given a full season.i have not made my mind about unforgetable
I don't really understand why it's tv.com's job in a review to tell us which sport is boring and which sport isn't. I will say that I used to enjoy reading the News Briefs when they were posted because I wanted to hear about the tv world. Now I just read about how TV.com literally hates everything and makes fun of everything. I'm done with this site.
Well, bye then! Saves us the trouble of needing to read about your trouble, which also, coincidentally, interests no one.
No need to be rude.
There are three big screen adaptations of The Punisher. The first one, of course, being the best one. You all must be really young. 1989 starring Dolph Lundgren.
Michael Bay is bringing a young, uptight female detective on TV? You bet your ass she'll be sexy. I'm willing to bet money on that Michael picks her from the Victoria's Secret catalogue. He probably also makes the character vacuum and do the dishes in sexy lingerie and high heels.
Soccer or actually FOOTBALL, is the greatest sport ever. Fun to watch, even funnier to play. Sorry guys, but THAT'S A FACT everywhere in the World. Even in the US -in spite of how "weird" you us citizens are- the sport is gaining more and more popularity.
BTW, your FOOTBALL is not actually FOOT-ball, it's actually a revised rugby-like game.
Go away.
Yeah, it always intrigues me why we in Europe all call it football (or the Dutch version being voetbal), and then the Americans decided to name an entirely different sport by that name and call the original one something else. Where are the sport history-people when you need them?
Not only in Europe is called football, but everywhere in the world. I think only in US is called soccer.
Long story short, in England around the creation of the sport, it was called Association Football aka soccer to differentiate it from the other popular sport Rugby Football. Seems like in US they mixed them up and they end up playing rugby and calling it soccer LOL
It's soccer in Canada as well, since we play our own version of US football here.
You talk too much and the stupid "sport" should be called Peasantball if accuracy is important. World's most popular since all it takes to play is a goat bladder stuffed with newspaper. If the least inebriated participant can still drag his heel to make 2 basically parallel lines in what will inevitably be dirt, you got a "field", hooray! Now get out there and run yourselves windless, ya knuckleheads. What the "F" is wrong with you, talking about suckass soccer on a TV board? LOL
@tvtimemachine Haha, you are so naive. I bet you would suck at football. For American Football you just need to be bulky and fast, nothing else (oh, and a coach with an advisor to "brain" the plays).
For football you need technique, ability, precision, stamina and coordination.
And the fact you mention about the bladder and the field, is just another thing that makes FOOTBALL way better than AMERICAN FOOTBALL (that is: a sport in which you run a lot and almost never touch the ball with your feet)
It would be great if there where some stupid teens like in other "fantastic" family dramas (terra nova, walking dead, falling skies). instead of expensive and r-rated scenes where punisher hunts down criminals we could watch stupid kids doing stupid things for 13 episodes.
Ugh, this is so bittersweet. I always thought Punisher could be made into a solid tv show. But network television is going to kill it. It has to be Punisher MAX and it HAS to be on cable. FX would've been a good fit. Without the brutal violence it is going to suck. Nobody wants to see Frank Castle shoot guys in the knee caps. The guy is a monster, I wish tv/movies would depict him that way.
Hey, back off of Unforgettable! It's a good show and I really like it! As for Person of Interest, well, it's my favorite new show. So, I'm very happy to hear about the good news for BOTH shows! Also, American Soccer is boring. European soccer is definitely the best (Champion's League and Premier League, baby!).
Ho-ho... You know I love you Tim, but soccer is not boring. Soccer in America is boring because your players don't know how to do it properly and keep buying pensioned European players, but in The Netherlands, soccer is seldom boring ;)
predictions for an upcoming schedule ...
CBS Comedy Project w/Fred Durst vs NBC Fat Rob
NBC DILFs vs ABC Man Up (the show will found an audience or to be more accurate they will kidnapped people and force them to watch the show!)
Oh yeah! I just can't wait ! ^^
XD XD XD
Outsiders sounds like the classic 21 Jump Street....Mmmm Johnny!
The Punisher much like Deadman can not be translated to film! It just won't work in 2 hrs on screen, or the 8-12 episodes networks are currently using as their yardstick. The comics are saturated with in-depth thoughts, relationships, flashbacks, and nuance that can not be "suffered" or accepted by the audience, nor delivered well by directors and actors reading from script.
Also, yay, Catherine Tate.
Oh no you didn't. Football (or soccer, as you put it) has more moments of magic than any sport in the world. And it doesn't require the beefed-up ugliness of pretty much every American sport.
Soccer is a terrible sport
Wow that's a very insightful comment niedermayer. You should apply for a job at ESPN.
I really hope matt smith sticks around for a while longer. He is really good as the Doctor and I could see him staying with the role for a few more years before regenerating into the next one. At the very least, I hope he stays past the 50th anniversary, which I hope is a multi doctor story with some of the older ones coming back.
The punisher should not be reimagined as a detective who is secretly a vigilante. On of the core parts of the character is that he has no secret identify and that he often times hunted by the police. It brings up conflicts where the police are under orders to capture him but they respect him at the same time. If they want to have a series, they could focus on the cops as they have to deal with the punisher's actions and trying to beat him to a criminal before he imposes his own form of law on them. At the same time they could focus on his psychology. I could see it being expanded to the point where they could show other Marvel characters like Matt Murdock as a defense attorney or Peter Parker as a photographer at a scene.moreless
Also, as a sports fan, I get bored watching soccer. I can't stand sitting there for a little over 90 minutes knowing that there may only be 3 or 4 quality attempts at scoring.
I figure it's why soccer fans chant and sing while watching matches -- the fans have to amuse themselves.
as opposed to a game of american football..that can last, what, 3 hours...
I really wish some one (any one) would do some research (any research) before writing a story. There have been (3) THREE big screen punishers (Lundgren, Jane and Stevenson)like them or hate them there have been 3
Hate, Hate and Love to bits. :)