Thank the Gods we can all put the speculation to rest.  I was getting worried that the new series Caprica might be all we got for a long, long while.  It’s also possible that Caprica may just go to series that the backdoor pilot/movie will be folded into the first season.  Essentially, the SciFi network has enough confidence in the show’s lasting appeal and quality to make a go of it.  iF Magazine has more deets about the upcoming SciFi schedule.

I’ve held off on posting about the new season of 24 for the most part simply because the last few seasons have slipped in quality with the death knell of  last season, which struck me as a shameful parody of the show.  It has reached a point, I believe, where they either have to call it quits or radically reinvent the show.  It sounds as if the new season will be neither of those two things.

The producers had a chance to do so last season, where instead of a season where Jack Bauer skips around town doing the same old thing, battling the same old plot twists, they should have made the entire season about Jack Bauer breaking out of a Chinese prison and attempting to get back home to America.  It would have been the perfect ending to the show.  Jack on the run, out numbered and facing the heat in Southeast Asia.

Anyway, this time Jack Bauer plays the White savior for the fictional dark continental country of Sengala.  Can’t say this trailer makes me want to see the new season, but I know I’ll watch.

Am I alone in thinking that season 2 of NBC’s Heroes was full of turdiness? It was awful and my main problem, besides the terrible writing on the show, is that we want to see these people fly their freak flags, ya know? I want this to be like X-Men, where the characters are all fighting to save the world and the stakes are high and it’s intense. I don’t really care about the personal psychobabble that the show always seems to wallow in.

That aside, I’m still cautiously excited for the start of Season 3. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since the end of Season 2, that I forgot just how much the show irked me or maybe because I’d like to get reacquainted with Kristen Bell, but perhaps I’m hoping that some characters will get killed off. Cough, Nicki, cough. Seriously.

The biggest issue I have with Heroes is that there are no stakes because no one gets killed off unless you are a henchmen, a cop or some third-tier character. There is no danger on the show. If they focussed on two or three characters (Peter, Claire and Hiro would be the obvs choice) and everyone else had the potential to be killed off then I’d be excited. <Lebowski impersonation>It would be like living on the edge, man!</Lebowski impersonation>

We’ll see if good really does battle evil on Sept. 22, 2008.

It’s not a spin-off.  Amy Poehler and Aziz Ansari will be starring in an Office-like show, one with the same tone, style, and vision of the original but one that has no connection to the original.  In other words, they take place in two separate television universes, so don’t expect Steve Carrell or Jim and Pam (can’ think of their real life names) to show up in this new version of the show.  Just seems like NBC doesn’t really know what to do with this show, which sounds like they think a show that isn’t a direct spin-off of the original won’t succeed.  [Nikki Finke]

We’re glad the kids will have someone cool to sing along with, even if the adults are all sick to death of Feist’s “1-2-3-4″ when the venerable PBS show debuts its 39th season this year. Leslie Feist will drop by to teach kids to count to four.

A salient point is to be made here. In the actual song, Feist herself has a hard time counting to 10. In fact, she doesn’t do it. Second, we’re a bit miffed that she doesn’t have a showdown with The Count. This would have been the way to go.

In the wake of Yo Gabba Gabba’s hipster credentials, is Sesame Street trying to do the same. They have Will Arnett, Heidi Klum and Jack Black making stops to the stoop made famous by Big Bird, Oscar and Grover.

The network that helped to redefine television (there words not ours, of course) has been in a rut lately.  One generation is gone, now that The Wire ended and another is beginning.  It doesn’t help that Showtime has clearly stolen their mojo (yes you read that right, as of this post Showtime is the better of the two networks for television).  But the network has several projects in the works from big name talent and many of them sound promising.  Variety has a rundown of what viewers can expect from HBO in the coming years.

A few random casting things we felt compelled to share.  First, The CW’s new 90210 sequel landed a major coup by getting Nat (Joe E. Tata) to come back to the Peach Pit.  No word on if he’ll be a recurring character again.  But, wow, awesome. Now if we can just secure Dylan and Brandon.  Robert Downey Jr. is making the most of his post-Iron Man celebrity by signing up to play Det. Sherlock Holmes for director Guy Ritchie.  This is supposed to be a grittier version of the detective, closer to the heroin-using, opium-smoking detective from the books.  Can’t wait to see what RDJ does with that.

Collider has a review of the pilot script for the upcoming Ron Moore helmed, Battlestar Galactica spin-off project Caprica. It’s a precursor to the super-awesome sci-fi show.  We won’t give away the details here, but suffice it to say, the reviewer loved what he read. “Did you know that Dr. Frankenstein lives on in the world of Battlestar Gallactica? That is the ultimate story being told here. Someone angry at the universe defies the gods in an attempt to bring the dead back to life. There are always consequences. In this case, roughly fifty years later humanity barely hangs onto existence after attempted genocide by robots called Cylons. Still, isn’t some good father-daughter time worth that?”

The CW’s new 90210 sequel is looking better and better, what with Shannon Dougherty, Tori Spelling and possibly Ian Zeiring all reprising their roles from the original.  Now if only Nat comes back to man The Peach Pit we’ll be all set.  EIther way, photos have surfaced showing the hangouts snazzy new exterior design.  This looks more like Rodeo Dr. hotspot that greasy spoon.  More Peach Pit After Dark, then anything else.  See photos here.

Geraldo Rivera took another foul-smelling shit on respectable TV journalism as he broadcast the bloodied corpse of suicide-case supermodel Ruslana Korshunova on Fox News.

His comments on the scene were tabloidtastically awesome as well: “These are the last images of her broken body being lifted off the Manhattan sidewalk, where shocked and sickened witnesses watched her smash onto the concrete.”

All vomit aside, did we really expect anything better from either Geraldo or Fox News?  This is the same mustached loser who disclosed the location of American troops in 2003; supposedly pushed an aide worker aside during the Katrina rescue; and, y’know, that whole Al Capone vault thing.

Swooping in to the rescue came David Clark, executive producer of programming at Fox News, to say, “It was a producer error and we deeply regret it.”  Uh-huh.  No, seriously, we believe you—”error.”  ‘Cause Fox News has never done anything aggressively stupid for ratings.

I got a chance to watch the new J.J. Abrams pilot Fringe last night. It’s pretty good in the vein of Alias, albeit without all the kick ass action. But it’s sort of similar with shadowy agents and organizations with big conspiracies and what not.

The plot centers around an FBI agent, a mad scientist and his vagabond genius child (Joshua Jackson) trying to piece together a mysterious infection or incident aboard a flight from Hamburg, Germany to Boston’s Logan Airport.

Yes, it’s cool it takes place in Boston, but it’s not cool that it’s so obviously not taking place in Boston or that the show’s writers didn’t do their homework about Boston. There is absolutely no way there is a giant storage facility in Boston’s Back Bay. Sorry. If you take the time to visit the Back Bay you would know this.

Gripes aside, this is an intriguing procedural with enough paranormal mystery and interesting characters to keep me coming back in the fall. It’s a J.J. Abrams show via The X-Files. Need I say more.

Fringe is scheduled to air in September. The leak is here. DC Comics will publish a comic-book prequel to Fringe Aug. 27 and the show already has a few fan sites, including this one.

I’ll be offering more thoughts on the show and doing a full review, but I just wanted to quickly let you know the show is out there to watch. Now anyone know if Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse has leaked yet?

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Update: You can watch the Season Four premiere in edited fashion at Variety.

Over the past three weeks I’ve devoured the first three seasons of Showtime’s darkly funny Weeds. For those who watch the show and I’d assume love it dearly, please skip ahead and know that the shows returns tonight at 10 p.m. on Showtime for the start of Season Four. We’re all terribly excited around these parts.

Like the best television shows, Weeds works on a level beyond its mere premise. Sure, it’s “about” a suburban mother who sells pot, but it’s also “about” the gray area people will live in and justify to survive. It’s about trying to take the American Dream and keep it from slipping from your fingers.

Nancy Botwin is a single mother (twice widowed), who’s slowly moving up the drug food chain to provide a better life for her two children, Shane and Silas. Except that, you know, dealing drugs leads to all sorts of problems and rather than make her children’s lives better Nancy just about ruins them.

Played by Mary-Louise Parker with a dose of intelligence, survival instinct, recklessness, ingenuity and coquettish charm, Botwin finds herself in one pickle after another like inadvertently becoming the driver for a drive-by-shooting, becoming romantically involved with a Drug Enforcement Agent, and so on and so on.

She keeps it together by the friendship of Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), her wacky CPA; her rivalry with frenemy Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins), perhaps the most loathsome character on the show but I root like hell for her to find redemption or at the very least stop being such a bitch; the irrepressible brother-in-law Andy Botwin (Justin Kirk), who has nothing but good intentions but fails miserably as a porn star, rabbi, Army recruit, Uncle, business partner, well pretty much everything he does except for sleeping with crazy women; and of course, Conrad, the best damn grower of marijuana and Botwin’s love interest.

The cast of characters on this show keeps things breezy and funny, but the darkness of the material and the constant valleys for all involved elevate the material to something more meaty than your average sitcom.

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