BillLawrence-related stories
Posted Nov 5th 2009 11:35AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E07) For the first half-dozen episodes of
Cougar Town, legions of watchers have been wondering along with me what would happen when a) Courteney Cox remembers she's not playing Monica Gellar anymore and dials it down a notch and b) the ensemble starts melding with each other a bit more. Well, we seemed to get that in this episode, and it made for a funny and engaging half-hour.
Do I still have issues with the show? Sure. But this episode was the best sign I can think of that Bill Lawrence and company are going to get the show on a funny footing by the end of the season.
Continue reading Review: Cougar Town - Don't Come Around Here No More
Posted Oct 29th 2009 11:33AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E06) I've been trying to figure out why I'm not connecting with Courteney Cox and her
Cougar Town alter ego, Jules Cobb. It's not just about Cox overacting her role; if that were the case, I would have gotten tired of Monica Geller at around season five of
Friends. No, it was something else, something that I couldn't put my finger on.
But after enjoying the male side of the show more than the female side for the second week in a row, the reason has become clear: I might be the wrong gender. I'm neither getting nor caring about why Jules has so many issues with dating young'uns or the process she has to go through as a "woman of years" in order to do that.
What's ironic about that is that I had problems with the pilot because it felt like it was too frat-boy sounding. So maybe
I don't know what I want out of this show. It's not the first time that's happened.
Continue reading Review: Cougar Town - A Woman In Love (It's Not Me)
Posted Oct 29th 2009 11:04AM by Danny Gallagher
Filed under: Scrubs, Interviews, Reality-Free
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.
Continue reading Meet (half of) The Blanks: Scrubs' Sam Lloyd and Philip McNiven
Posted Oct 22nd 2009 12:32PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E05) Much better.
Much better.
Those are the words that kept popping into my head as I watched this episode. Courteney Cox dialed it down a notch. The characters melded together a bit more. We explored the lives of the guys a little bit, seeing a side of each we haven't seen yet. And finally, the show wasn't about Jules Cobb pointing out how she's 40 all the time; it was more about how her experience comes out in her relationships with the young'uns, whether it's her boy toy Josh or her assistant Laurie.
And, it was funny. Especially when there was an apple involved.
Continue reading Review: Cougar Town - You Wreck Me
Posted Oct 16th 2009 3:02PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Scrubs, Interviews, Reality-Free
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.
Of course, with the new med-school-centric direction of the show, there's less of a need for some of the other semi-regulars;
Sam Lloyd (Ted) has already shot his last episode, for instance.
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.
Continue reading Bill Lawrence: Judy Reyes won't appear in season nine, and other Scrubs news
Posted Oct 15th 2009 10:29AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E04) First, let's get a mystery out of the way: the Tom Petty centric titles. I shot off a note to Bill Lawrence asking about it, and he Blackberried back to me that it's because a) Tom Petty is from rural Florida and b) he's Bill's favorite singer. So there you have it.
Now, on to this episode. We've all seen Courteney Cox play neurotic; she played neurotic for ten seasons on
Friends. But we've also seen her play tough, confident and warm, whether it was on
Friends or any of her other roles. Right now, either via the writing or the way she interprets the role, she's playing Jules Cobb as a purely neurotic mess, and a loud one at that. It's not endearing, it doesn't help me connect with Jules' plight, and, most importantly, it's not funny.
Tonight's episode was Jules at her most neurotic, and it made for the least funny episode of the first four. It's a bad trend that's starting to make me worry about the overall health of the show.
Continue reading Cougar Town: I Won't Back Down
Posted Oct 8th 2009 9:42AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E03) Interesting trend with this show: The episode titles have so far been titles of Tom Petty songs. Take a look at the
names of the upcoming episodes and the pattern continues for the forseeable future. Wonder how long they can hold on to this convention, especially as linking the episode to a title of Petty song they haven't used before gets harder.
That's the best thing I can say about this episode, to be honest. This one was less funny than last week's episode, which was less funny than the pilot. At least last week's episode had some heartfelt emotion behind it, so the lack of laughs could be excused. But this episode didn't even have that, which made most of what was supposed to be funny fall flat.
Continue reading Cougar Town: Don't Do Me Like That
Posted Sep 30th 2009 10:01PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E02) I'll say this much about the second episode of
Cougar Town: It didn't make me laugh as much as the first did. But I feel a whole lot better about the show's future after seeing it.
Sometimes that happens, and it happens a lot with Bill Lawrence-led shows. Sometimes it's not wall-to-wall laughs, but the story is satisfying enough that you don't care. In this episode, we see some more humanity behind Jules and her quest to finally have a life even though she's in her forties... and we see the consequences of trying to pursue a life in your forties. We also got a little more out of Ellie than just the bitter wife we saw in the pilot. We also see the beginnings of a weird flirtation between Jules and Grayson that most people figured would happen from the first three minutes of the pilot.
Continue reading Cougar Town: Into the Great Wide Open
Posted Sep 23rd 2009 10:01PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: OpEd, Episode Reviews, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
(S01E01) I have faith in
Bill Lawrence. I know that he's a guy who doesn't want to put out shows that are crap, and that if something he produces is crap (hello, sixth season of
Scrubs), he cops to it and vows to improve.
That being said, I really, really hope he has the time to work his magic on
Cougar Town. Because what I see from the pilot are the bones of a good show, but one that's going to need some time to develop.
I like the actors. I like the premise. There were a lot of funny lines. I even like the fact that Lawrence re-shot certain scenes to make them sound like they're from a more female point of view. But even in the pilot, you can see signs that this show can devolve into something more cartoonish than real, and right now it's a 50-50 shot that it'll do just that.
Continue reading Cougar Town: Pilot (series premiere)
Posted Sep 23rd 2009 11:04AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Industry, Scrubs, Interviews, TCA Press Tour, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
Here's the full transcript from the phone interview I did with Bill Lawrence a couple of weeks ago... minus the part where we talked about
Scrubs. That's an interesting bit in and of itself, and I'll publish that in full sometime during the early part of October.
This goes on for about 5700 words, but if you hang in there, you'll find a lot of good conversation about
Cougar Town, the state of the sitcom, why Bill thinks NBC is shortsighted in its dependence on Jay Leno, and why Courteney Cox let him talk our ears off at the
Cougar Town TCA session.
You can either leave comments here or at the bottom of
the edited version.
Continue reading Bill Lawrence talks Cougar Town (full transcript)
Posted Sep 23rd 2009 11:04AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Industry, Interviews, TCA Press Tour, Reality-Free, Cougar Town
A couple of weeks after I got
some Scrubs scoop from Bill Lawrence in Pasadena, I asked if we could talk by phone about his new show,
Cougar Town. The Courteney Cox-led show, which follows the travails of a forty-something Florida real estate agent and single mom as she tries to re-enter the dating world, starts tonight at 9 PM ET on ABC.
We talked a little more about
Scrubs (I'll print that in a few weeks), then about
Cougar Town. I opened with the fact that at the session he had for the show at the TCA press tour, he seemed to spend a lot of time defending the "noisy title" of the show.
The conversation ranged far and wide from that point, from what he thinks about the future of the multi-camera sitcom, why NBC's dependence on Jay Leno is shortsighted, why he's so outgoing to us press types, and why Courteney Cox let him talk everyone's ears off during the press tour session. You can read
the long but interesting full transcript if you're eager to find that stuff out. An edited version of the interview is after the jump.
Continue reading Bill Lawrence talks Cougar Town
Posted Sep 13th 2009 10:00AM by Jane Boursaw
Filed under: TV on DVD, OpEd, Scrubs, Reality-Free, Jane After Dark
Several DVD sets came my way this week, so I did some marathon viewing sessions for
Jane After Dark. I'm brand new to some of these, so you'll get the stark, raw newbie version. But I'll start with one I've watched since the beginning ...
Dirty Sexy Money: The Complete Second and Final Season. I really liked this show at the beginning. It had all the elements of a great series, including excellent actors (starting with Donald Sutherland, Jill Clayburgh, and Peter Krause) and intriguing storylines with rich people, sex, murder, and mystery. But by the time they got to season two, the storylines just seemed to fizzle out. I would love to hear your thoughts on why
Dirty Sexy Money didn't work. Crummy writing? Poor use of great actors? Too many characters to keep track of? Poor timing with the writer's strike occurring in the middle of its run, resulting in ten months between seasons?
Bonus features: Directing the Darlings (behind the scenes with director Jamie Babbit); A Total Knockout (a day in the life of Natalie Zea, who played Karen); Dirty Sexy Crafty (a featurette about the food on the set); Faux Pas (bloopers); deleted scenes.
Continue reading Jane After Dark: Sexy Samantha talking Greek in Scrubs
Posted Aug 20th 2009 4:24PM by Jason Hughes
Filed under: OpEd, Scrubs, Casting, Reality-Free
In
Bill Lawrence's interview with our own Joel Keller, he said: "There's going to be a new young lady with a voice over and she's either going to be funny and talented and great, or the show's gonna crater."
Well, now we know who that young lady is and I'm sure Kerry Bishe (
Virtuality) will be thrilled to find out that Lawrence is hinging the entire success of
Scrubs 2.0 on her. No pressure! She joins
Dave Franco, cast earlier this week, and
Michael Mosley to complete the new faces of Scrubs (Med School?).
Besides being the new narrative voice for the show, and presumably the lead, Bishe will be a 22-year old first-year med student. She's the first in her family of fisherman to go to college. Mosley, the other new cast member signed today, is ten years older than the rest of the students, the result of a major meltdown a decade earlier when he was at Harvard. So this is his second chance.
Continue reading The cast is complete for the new and improved(?) Scrubs
Posted Aug 20th 2009 11:18AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Industry, Scrubs, Interviews, TCA Press Tour, Reality-Free
On the last day of the TCA press tour, as the stars of ABC were yukking it up at a crowded party at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Bill Lawrence and I were out in the courtyard talking about what the new season of
Scrubs -- or as I'm calling it,
Scrubs 2.0 -- is going to look like.
Essentially, it's going to be like a medical version of
The Paper Chase, with Turk and Cox being the professors. We'll be following the lives of young medical students who will shuttle back and forth between classes and their rotations at the "new" Sacred Heart, which is being rebuilt on the med school's campus. While in the hospital, they'll run into a lot of the characters from
Scrubs 1.0, including J.D., as Zach Braff is scheduled to be in the first six episodes.
It all sounds a bit confusing, so I'll let Bill lay it out for you folks. An edited transcript is after the jump.
The full transcript can be found here. And I'll be getting on the phone with Bill to talk
Cougar Town sometime next week, so stay tuned. Oh, and at the end of the interview, we talk about the role Bill's wife, Christa Miller, had on
Scrubs that didn't involve any acting.
Continue reading Bill Lawrence: The TV Squad Interview (Scrubs 2.0 edition)
Posted Aug 20th 2009 11:18AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Scrubs, Interviews, TCA Press Tour, Reality-Free
Here's the full transcript of the interview I did with Bill Lawrence on the last day of the TCAs. It's goes into some of the financial nitty-gritty of the
Scrubs deal and drops a few other details. I also asked him to repeat what was going to go on in the new
Scrubs a few times, just so I could understand completely what was going on. Enjoy!
The main post, where you can leave your comments, is here.
Well let's start with the obvious. You've been thinking about doing another season of Scrubs for like a year now.(laughing)
Because you told me...when'd you talk to me about that? About a year ago?We're the only people who shot the shit about it. I thought there was a chance it would happene. I just saw the landscape, you know.
Continue reading Bill Lawrence: The TV Squad Interview (Scrubs 2.0 edition) - full transcript
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