TVSquad

Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Leno Weekly." As you may have noticed, there were no daily reviews of The Jay Leno Show this week. We felt that while it was important to cover the show for the first few weeks, the time for daily reviews has passed. NBC had promised that this would be a bold new comedy venture for prime-time network television. It's not.

That's not to say that it doesn't have its value or historical significance. Whether it succeeds or fails, it's still a big deal that NBC abandoned scripted television at 10pm. It's kind of like when ABC threw Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on fourteen times a week to prop up their broken schedule a decade or so ago.

For those of you still interested in how the experiment is playing out, "Leno Weekly" will be a weekly roundup of the highlights and lowlights of Leno's primetime show, including clips. For those who don't think The Jay Leno Show deserves any kind of coverage at all on TV Squad ... now you only have one article a week to ignore!

Way back in the early 1970's, when I was a kid (I'm not that old!), I remember seeing some amazing movies on the CBS Children's Film Festival. It was on either Saturday or Sunday afternoons and I vaguely recall my mother encouraging me to watch. Kukla, Fran and Ollie introduced the movies and to this day, I can still remember seeing classic foreign films that were made for children like The Red Balloon (French), Hand in Hand (British) and Skinny and Fatty (Japanese). I think those movies may have been the first that really got be interested in film.

Turner Classic Movies seems to be providing a similar service for kids today, albeit by presenting great classics from Hollywood's golden era. TCM started a new series called Essentials Jr. Grey's Anatomy star Chris O'Donnell (Scent of a Woman) co-hosts with Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine). Together, they provide introductions and discuss the films, movies that are picked to be just right for kids. According to TCM, "The chosen films are ones that any cinema-literate child should know about and be able to enjoy with family and friends including grown-ups."

Chris O'Donnell's "Robin" was partnered with "Batmen" Val Kilmer and George Clooney in the movies - but he never battled crime alongside Michael Keaton, who brought the Dark Knight to the big screen in 1989, until the two were cast in The Company. The TNT six-hour, three-week mini-series (based on the book by Robert Littell about the early days of the CIA and the Cold War) debuts on Sunday, August 5 at 8 PM.

"Michael wasn't on that long," O'Donnell told TV Squad in a one-on-one interview in a TNT-hosted suite at the Beverly Hilton following a TCA panel for The Company last month. The actor actually shared more screen time with Company co-star Alfred Molina (aka Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus). "We all sat around together [at one point] thinking, 'It's two from the 'Justice League' and one [Spider-man] super villain!'"