If you never managed to catch Andy Barker, P.I. when it originally aired two years ago, try not to beat yourself up. Though the show had an impressive cast, led by Andy Richter as a CPA-turned-private-investigator, and including Harve Presnell, Tony Hale, Marshall Manesh, and Clea Lewis. It was also created by Conan O'Brien and Jonathan Groff. But it only lasted six episodes, and didn't seem to get much push from NBC. Watching it on the newly released DVD, Andy Barker, P.I.: The Complete Series, it's hard not to feel the show could have had legs if given the chance.
All's well that ends well, though, and Richter is happier than ever, paired again with Conan O'Brien on The Tonight Show, getting to do what he calls a "silly little comedy show" without dealing with the backwards world of the sitcom. I spoke with Richter earlier this week about Barker and being back with Conan.
Do you think Andy Barker, P.I. got a fair shake when it was first out?
Oh, certainly not. Absolutely not. It was sort of just, you know, shoved on TV and meant to go away.
Chris Rock has the kind of status as a comedian that allows him to work on any project he wants. He produced the documentary Good Hair, he's writing a book, and he has been working on back-to-back film shoots.
Tuesday at 8 PM on NBC, you'll hear his voice in Merry Madagascar, playing Marty the zebra for the third time, along with returning regulars Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer, and Jada Pinkett Smith. He's confident it's not the last time he'll voice Marty, either, with Madagascar 3 in the works.
So why does a guy who can do anything he wants spend time in front of a microphone pretending to be a cartoon animal?
"Money," he says jokingly, speaking on a conference call on Wednesday. "No, no they're good. You realize as you get longer in this business, the only thing that keeps you working is doing good stuff. You know, I mean the box office is great, too, but if people don't like what you do the moment the box office isn't fair, they don't want to work with you anymore."
We've got a new e-mail address for the podcast! If you have any questions or suggestions about the 'cast, please e-mail us at tvsquadpodcast [at] google [dot] com.
This week, actress Linda Purl joins me, Jason Hughes and Kona Gallagher to talk about her guest starring stint as Pam's mom on The Office -- she's on tonight's episode, by the way. She also chats about her long acting career (remember her during the waning days of Happy Days?), her work with the California International Theatre Festival and her current success as a touring lounge singer.
After the interview, which is about 30 minutes, Kona, Jason and and I talk about the following:
In the hall of TV show bands, The Blanks are The Rolling Stones. Definitely The Who, tops.
The a cappella quartet made their small screen debut on Scrubs as Ted's band The Worthless Peons, played by Sam Lloyd, Philip McNiven, George Miserlis and Paul F. Perry (not to be confused with Ted's air band The Cool Cats that was just a brief side project when they probably failed to win those water park tickets) and have since become a hard-working touring band that has gone back and forth between both sides of the U.S. coasts. But they were a band long before Scrubs was even an afterthought in Bill Lawrence's skull, assuming that Lawrence didn't come up with the idea for Scrubs when they all met at Syracuse University.
Lloyd and McNiven (the completely bald one that looks like Professor Wonder Bread) were nice enough to dish out all the backstage dirt that comes from the hard and edgy road life of an all-male vocal band.
Seth Rogen has always enjoyed Halloween specials, from the TGIF line-up when he was a kid up to The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror. Tonight, he'll be in his own Halloween special, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space (NBC, 8 PM), based on the Dreamworks animated feature Monsters vs Aliens.
"I was a nerd and had nothing to do on Friday nights," Rogen says of the TGIF line-up during a conference call with press. "Whenever like the sitcoms would do their Halloween episode, I always enjoyed that for some reason. That always spawned some good comedy."
As my Thursday afternoon time slot to interview Tracy Morgan came closer, I knew I was in for an interesting twenty minutes. As most people have seen and heard over the years, interviewing Tracy is an amusement park ride that even Busch Gardens couldn't conceive. He's blunt. His emotions rise and fall quicker than a roller coaster. And you never know what he's going to say.
When I got to talk to him, he had been interviewing all day in support of his surprisingly emotional and inspirational memoir I Am The New Black, and he was tired. But there was a lot of stuff I wanted to ask him about, only some of which involved his well-publicized smackdowns of SNL co-stars Cheri Oteri and Chris Kattan. There was also his criticism of David Israel and Jim O'Doherty, the creators of The Tracy Morgan Show, and just the general details about his rough upbringing in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the '70s and '80s. Tracy didn't disappoint.
So, buckle up folks, and get ready for a fun ride. Audio and a transcript is after the jump.
Word of our podcast revival must be spreading like an Alaskan oil fire because we've just booked our first celebrity guest...and it's a biggie in my book. Late Show writer and author Bill Scheft will join me and TV Squad bossman Joel Keller on next week's APB Podcast. We'll talk about his work on David Letterman's late night show and the changing landscape of late night TV as well as his newest novel, Everything Hurts.
If you've got questions for our guest (and I'm sure you do), leave them in the comments section below and we'll ask them to our gracious guest when we record the podcast at 10 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Oct. 27. I'm sure you're all dying to know the answer to one big question, so don't waste your time by posting it below: what the hell does Bill have against 49ers coach Mike Singletary?!?
It looks like the new crew at Disney's At the Movies is turning the ship around.
The new series run with fresh hosts (New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott (left), and Chicago Tribune film critic, Michael Phillips (right)) has gone 180 degrees in the other direction from the lighter, more sensationalized previous season.
Last year's host combination of Ben Mankiewicz and Ben Lyons often came off more glib than informative -- leaving both critics and fans wondering what happened to the more measured, analytical tone of former hosts Roger Ebert, Richard Roeper and the late Gene Siskel.
Between the two of them, Scott and Phillips bring decades of entertainment writing and critiquing experience -- combining a love of movies with a willingness to tick off the Hollywood powers that be when necessary.
The writers and producers of Syfy's Stargate Universe could've played it safe and got along just fine with their latest series.
After Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 feature film from MGM, the series' first TV adaption (SG1) arrived in 1997. When you throw in the follow-up series, Infinity and Atlantis, the Stargate franchise has run on TV in one form or another for more than 12 years.
When the time came to invent the next step in the franchise, show-runners Brad Wright and Robert C. Cooper could have trotted out more of the same and done perfectly well. Instead, they upped the ante -- bringing a bigger budget and updated production techniques to Stargate Universe.
MGM and Syfy welcomed journalists to Vancouver's Bridge Studios to explore the show's starship Destiny set and discover how this series cruises beyond its successful predecessors.
Bravo's resident house flipper, real estate guru and OCD interior designer, Jeff Lewis, is a very complicated guy. When I spoke to him recently, I was actually a little concerned. If you've seen Jeff on Bravo's Flipping Out, you've seen him lose it on occasion. Would he yell at me on the phone if I asked the wrong question?
In fact, Jeff Lewis was extremely friendly and funny. We had a great talk and he couldn't have been nicer. He was also really forthcoming about the past seasons of Flipping Out, including this one that's concluding tonight.
What has it been like to be turned into a reality TV star?
Because of the reaction of the show, some people see me as a villain and that could be the way I do business. I handle my employees in a rather non-traditional way. I was concerned about how people would react in public, but it's actually been pretty positive. Overall, it's been a very positive experience. Many people are very nice and complimentary and supportive.
Figured today was going to be a good day to publish the Scrubs-centric part of my conversation with Bill Lawrence last month. Here we talk about what's going to happen during the first episode or two of the new season of Scrubs.
The biggest piece of information? That Judy Reyes, who played Carla during the first eight seasons, won't appear at all in this new-direction ninth season. She's the only regular of Scrubs Classic (my name for it) who won't appear at least once during the upcoming season. "I think she was either going to be a regular on this show or looking to go do other things with her career," Lawrence told me, citing that he "totally respect(s)" her decision.
Other info from Bill: How the season premiere will open, how the transition from Zach Braff's voiceover to another voiceover is going to work, and more about the new character directions for Classic regulars John C. McGinley, Donald Faison and Eliza Coupe.
It's hard to say that a show that's already won a small U-Haul's worth of Emmys and other awards can be having a breakout season, but that seems to be what's happening with Mad Men during its third season. The buzz around the show has been as loud as we've heard since The Sopranos went to black, and that's not a coincidence; the man who created the early-1960s world of Sterling Cooper, Matt Weiner, was a writer on the landmark HBO drama.
Weiner just completed shooting season three, and he took time out of his post-production process to sit down with me on Monday and talk about how the season has been going so far. I tried to get him to talk about what seems to be the show's inevitable roll towards the cataclysmic event of 1963, the Kennedy assassination, but Weiner was tight-lipped as usual. However, his observations on how he approaches events like that is an interesting read. Oh, and we also touch upon how he came up with the idea to run over a British ad exec's foot with a lawn mower, which is a good story by itself...
Given the popularity of the second-season opener of The Next Iron Chef, I figured it was a good time to pull out this interview I did with the show's host, Alton Brown, at the network's TCA party in July. It was definitely the tastiest party of the tour, as each Iron Chef contestant plied the critics with delectable morsels of their creativity at various stations.
In a bit of a surprise, one of the contestants, Amanda Freitag, was being assisted by her friend Ariane Duarte, one of the more popular contestants from rival program Top Chef's New York season (I was so flabbergasted by the turn of events, I snapped a pic of the two with my cell phone). When I pointed this tidbit out to Brown, his response was very interesting...
Stealing scenes on the small screen is nothing new to Christian Slater. The actor, known for films like Heathers, True Romance and Pump up the Volume, has made memorable guest appearances on shows like Alias, The West Wing and My Name is Earl. His first shot at his own series, the NBC spy thriller My Own Worst Enemy, struggled to find an audience, leading the network to cancel it halfway through the first season.
Slater is back starring in a new series,The Forgotten, produced by CSIhead honcho Jerry Bruckheimer. The ABC procedural follows a team of amateur detectives who work murder cases involving unidentified victims, or John and Jane Does. Slater plays former cop Alex Donovan, whose search for his missing daughter inspires him in the field.
I got the chance to talk with Slater about The Forgotten, his new career in TV, and what one of his most famous big screen characters would think about his latest role.
I wanted to add a spoiler warning with this post, but sadly, John Cho, who plays FBI agent Demetri Noh on ABC's FlashForward, is pretty tight lipped about all the big reveals that are coming up this season. I had the chance to speak with him recently, and despite my continued harassment, he's good at keeping secrets.
But, that doesn't mean fans will have to wait long for answers to start rolling in about the mysterious massive blackout that allowed everyone in the world to see into the future.
"I have been excited by and impressed by how much they're revealing this early on," he said. "There's been serious bombshells on a weekly basis ... I feel like they [the writers] are very conscious about giving the audience a lot of information."
If you never managed to catch Andy Barker, P.I. when it originally aired two years ago, try not to beat yourself up. Though the show had an impressive cast, led by Andy Richter as a CPA-turned-private-investigator, and including Harve Presnell, Tony Hale, Marshall Manesh, and Clea Lewis. It was also created by Conan O'Brien and Jonathan Groff. But it only lasted six episodes, and didn't seem to get much push from NBC. Watching it on the newly released DVD, Andy Barker, P.I.: The Complete Series, it's hard not to feel the show could have had legs if given the chance. 
Chris Rock has the kind of status as a comedian that allows him to work on any project he wants. He produced the documentary Good Hair, he's writing a book, and he has been working on back-to-back film shoots. 
We've got a new e-mail address for the podcast! If you have any questions or suggestions about the 'cast, please e-mail us at tvsquadpodcast [at] google [dot] com.
Seth Rogen has always enjoyed Halloween specials, from the TGIF line-up when he was a kid up to The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror. Tonight, he'll be in his own Halloween special, 
As my Thursday afternoon time slot to interview 
Word of our podcast revival must be spreading like an Alaskan oil fire because we've just booked our first celebrity guest...and it's a biggie in my book.
It looks like the new crew at Disney's 
The writers and producers of Syfy's Stargate Universe could've played it safe and got along just fine with their latest series.
Bravo's resident house flipper, real estate guru and OCD interior designer, Jeff Lewis, is a very complicated guy. When I spoke to him recently, I was actually a little concerned. If you've seen Jeff on Bravo's 
Figured today was going to be a good day to publish the Scrubs-centric part of my 
It's hard to say that a show that's already won a small U-Haul's worth of Emmys and other awards can be having a breakout season, but that seems to be what's happening with 
Given the 
Stealing scenes on the small screen is nothing new to Christian Slater. The actor, known for films like Heathers, True Romance and Pump up the Volume, has made memorable guest appearances on shows like 
I wanted to add a spoiler warning with this post, but sadly, John Cho, who plays FBI agent Demetri Noh on ABC's 
Andy Richter: The TV Squad Interview
Have any questions for Vik Sahay of Chuck? Ask them here!
Mike Henry and Daryl Hall on a Cleveland Show Thanksgiving
