But what the world really needs is for Nathan Fillion to find a project that is worthy of his considerable talents. He’s got leading man chops, pulls off humor well and has that sly twinkle in his eye like Han Solo. It’s just, well, most everything he’s been in with the exception of Firefly has been the suck.
Okay that’s not entirely true. Waitress was touching and so was Slither in that B-movie kind of way. But you probably didn’t know he was in Saving Private Ryan or on the sitcom Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place with Ryan Reynolds.
Cameos in Lost help, and a role as Dr. Hammer in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog have endeared him to many, but this guy shouldn’t be slumming on Desperate Housewives or that FOX show Drive (starring alongside Emma Stone, no less).
Still, we’ll give any project he’s in the benefit of the doubt and the hope that it won’t be beneath him. ABC has picked up his pilot for seriesCastles. In it, Fillion stars as a horror novelist who helps the NYPD solve crimes. Ugh. Really? We don’t need another Murder, She Wrote.
I think at this point, that Fillion needs to get with Joss Whedon (still the only director to fully understand how to make Fillion a star and utilize his abilities as an actor) to create a vanity project along the same lines as Eliza Dushku’s Dollhouse.
The message boards on IMDB are saying the show is more comedy/banter than procedural show, similar to FOX’s House. Okay, that’s a good thing. Others are saying it reminded them of several USA programs like Burn Notice or Monk. I can get behind that, if that is the case.
For those few readers that stick it out around here day to day, you probably have an inkling about my anticipation for anything and everything Joss Whedon. And when you throw in Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion into the mix for a superhero musical, well, my anticipation gasket just about blew.
We finally have a trailer for Joss’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. If you remember, “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to,” Whedon says.
The goggles on NPR are perfect and as someone who has been to one of those Buffy “Once More With Feeling” sing-along musical episodes held at a theater (yes, dear internet you’ve taken my last shred of dignity), I can attest that Joss knows his musicals.
Look for this to hit the internet sometime this summer, broken up into three ten-minute chapters.
Uber geek Joss Whedon has given us another reason to want to bear hug him, as if giving us Buffy, Angel, and Firefly weren’t enough.
Seems that during an interview with AICN, Neil Patrick Harris (Is his resurgence one of the better things in life and proof God may actually exist? It’s like he’s become the Roy Hobbs of Hollywood: a young promising start, fading away to obscurity and then getting one last chance in the big leagues. We fully expect for him to figuratively shatter the field lights sometime soon.) revealed he was shooting a superhero musical titled Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog.
“The bag is catless. During the strike I started writing a musical intended as a limited internet series, 3 episodes of approximately 10 minutes each.”
The interest spread and shooting began this week with NPH as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer and Felicia Day as Penny. Day starred in Season 7 of Buffy as the young slayer Vi. So what’s it about yo?
“It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.”
Sounds perfectly geeky. Though it woulda been nice to get Alyson Hannigan, because the FCC says it’s okay for her to get naked, we’ll settle for Day. By the by, I miss being able to go to Coolidge Corner to watch the Buffy musical episode sing-a-long. They should get that going in Stumptown. Also, if this is as good as it sounds, then yes, we’ll concede that NPH just hit one so freaking far that lightening struck as he rounds the bases and glass rains down from the light poles.
Nathan Fillion, who got his start on the daytime soap One Life to Live, but has recently found cult success as a leading man in television shows Firefly, Drive and Lost (next fall he’ll be suiting up as a gynocologist in his biggest role to date for Desperate Housewives) and in such little seen movies like Waitress, Serenity and Slither. And even though it would seem he has no reason to return to daytime television, that’s just what the actor is doing, when he shot some scenes for OLTL’s 10,000th episode. His story arc will air on Aug. 16 and 17th.
“I guess a lot of actors don’t like to admit they once did soaps, but it was important for me to go back to where I got my start,” says Fillion, who played star-crossed lover Joey Buchanan from 1994 to 1997 on the ABC drama. “I will never forget what OLTL did for me personally and professionally.”
Still, the two-day stint was “bittersweet,” he notes, because he went back to bury his TV grandpa, Asa. The character was played by Phil Carey, the lovable crank who quit the show last spring in a contract tiff. “Phil didn’t like everybody but when he liked you, he liked you, and he was very kind to me,” Fillion recalls. “To honor him was a very big deal.”
Not sure why, but we love the humility and humbleness of such a little gesture. Lots of actors don’t enjoy reprising roles that made them famous, as they view such an act as beneath them. But not Fillion. We’re hoping this small gesture allows Karma to repay him and make him the successful leading man lots of people believe him to already be.
Gotta love a network that has no idea how to handle their best shows. Someone should send the entertainment president a memo thus informing him that you can do more than cancel good televisions shows on the Fox Network. Makes one wonder how in the heck Bones and House have survived this long.
With that as the backdrop, many of you know we had a certain fondness for the Tim Minear/Craig Silverstein produced show Drive. It starred Nathan Fillion, who one day, and we hope like hell it’s not as a cast member of Desperate Housewives, will get his breakthrough role. Regardless, the show was cancelled after like two episodes and Fox decided not to air the unaired episodes sometime this summer.
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But what the world really needs is for Nathan Fillion to find a project that is worthy of his considerable talents. He’s got leading man chops, pulls off humor well and has that sly twinkle in his eye like Han Solo. It’s just, well, most everything he’s been in with the exception of Firefly has been the suck.
Uber geek Joss Whedon has given us another reason to want to bear hug him, as if giving us Buffy, Angel, and Firefly weren’t enough.
