Entries Tagged 'CW' ↓

Okay, somebody over at The CW needs to be slapped upside the head for this tagline to the update of 90210 — “If you wanna live in the zip… you gotta live by the code.” What are they, The Beverly Hills Crips? The only two reasons I’ll watch the premiere of this series are Lori Laughlin and Jessica Walter. Other than that, it looks like Gossip Girl meets The Hills. Judge for yourself…

The fledging CW network announced their fall lineup today, beating their peers to the punch by three weeks with a September 1 start date. New series include the reboot of 90210; Surviving the Filthy Rich, the small screen adaptation of the “How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls” book series, their next hope of catching lightning in a bottle; and Tyra Banks reality series Stylista, which follows the trials and tribulations inside the world of Elle magazine. Reaper has been given a 13-episode pickup for mid-season. Gone are the WWE, Aliens in America, and Back to You.

For full details visit ( Variety )

Not quite a year ago, bleary-eyed teens, twenty-somethings, and (ahem) slightly older gentlemen woke up to a world without plucky young P.I. Veronica Mars. After three great seasons, May 7, 2007 marked the untimely end for writer/creator Rob Thomas* and one of the cleverest shows no one watched.

Fast forward to today, and it’s suddenly sunny days for fans of smartly written TV. With ABC’s recent announcement that they’re picking up a Thomas pilot based on the New Zealand show Outrageous Fortune (about a family of criminals trying to go straight), that makes the beleaguered writer three-for-three this pilot season.

Oddly enough, the first two greenlit projects also fall under the “remake” umbrella, though considering his other ABC order is for a remake of his short-lived 1998 series Cupid, it begs the question: if you created a show in the ’90s, and remake it 10 years later, will it still star Jeremy Piven? The answer, it seems, is no.

Of course, the Thomas pilot we should all be most excited about is his spin-off of the ’90s 30-year-old-high-school-kids mega soap Beverly Hills 90210. That’s right…. a spin-off of 90210. It sounds so awful, Rob Thomas is the only person I’d trust to make it awesome. Either way, it’s coming to the CW, so we can all look forward to the inevitable Rob Thomas/Aerie Girls reunion special.

Whenever someone this talented’s luck suddenly turns from bad to rad, it’s tough to tell whether the glass is half full, or half full of poisoned lemonade. Most of me believes that with three chances to do so, Rob Thomas will finally rise to the Apatow-level of success he deserves. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that all it really means is that a year-and-a-half from now I’ll have three more complete season box sets in my Amazon cart that I’ll be too depressed to buy.

What would Veronica do?

* Not to be confused with the lead singer of “rock” band Matchbox 20 (my musical arch-nemesis… don’t ask).

Once again, we confirm that there are very few new ideas in Hollywood, only guaranteed, revenue generating variations on a theme. With the success of The CW’s Gossip Girl, the network has midwifed yet another project from the same publishing house… How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls. This time a college-educated woman is hired by a wealthy family to tutor their teenage dimwit daughters. Haven’t we already seen five seasons of this when it was called The Simple Life? Ah, the 2008-09 season is already shaping up to be a shining example of quality entertainment.

Everybody Hates Chris, the sitcom based on Chris Rock’s childhood as the only black student in an all-white school in Brooklyn, returns this Sunday @ 8/7C with its first new episode since the writers’ strike, “Everybody Hates the Port Authority.” This time, Chris and his dad (the excellent Terry Crewes) visit the Port Authority Bus Terminal to pick up a relative, and wind up losing all their money in a gambling scheme.

Now, I gotta be honest. The first season of Chris was absolutely brilliant, and could be described as the family sitcom for people who hate family sitcoms. But over the second season, the show deteriorated into ridiculous story lines and pointless star cameos (I, for one, wasn’t exactly clamoring to see Jason Alexander back on my TV screen again). In its third season, however, the show was actually enjoying a brief creative resurgence in the last few episodes before the strike. It’s too bad that the CW has now changed its time slot from Monday to Sunday opposite The Simpsons. This is apparently so the network has an excuse to cancel it. But this week, I’ll skip The Simpsons and give Everybody Hates Chris another chance. Given its deadly new time slot, it may be the last one possible.

The CW’s page for Everybody Hates Chris