TVSquad

I was looking forward to Matthew Perry's new Showtime show The End of Steve, a drama about a radio talk show host. Unfortunately, Showtime wasn't looking forward to it as much as I was and didn't pick up the show.

Instead, Perry is going to produce, co-write, and star in a new comedy about a sports arena manager who finds himself thinking about where his life is at after he turns 40. Fans of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The West Wing (two other shows that Perry was in) will be interested to know that Thomas Schlamme will be involved in the show too as director and co-producer.

You know, ever since Friends went off the air, rumors have cropped up again and again that there would be a big screen version of the show, presumably picking up the storylines from the grand finale. Of course, if you remember the great stories on Joey, maybe post-Friends storytelling isn't such a grand idea after all.

However, at least one person is sure that a feature film is coming. James Michael Tyler, who poured the coffee at Central Perk as Gunther (he also ogled Rachel), was asked about the movie version and Tyler said that Friends: The Movie is definitely on.

So no one told him life was going to be this way, but it was, at least for a few days. A gentleman in Brixton, South London named Steve Misiura watched every single episode of Friends in a non-stop marathon. That's 84 hours of Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe loving, fighting, and drinking coffee. He actually broke the world record for watching TV, which was at 72 hours straight. I think this is a record someone here at TV Squad should try to break.

Of course, this being the age of the web, he kept a blog about it and uploaded pictures from the event. The picture above is Steve about 80 hours into his marathon. He began to hallucinate and get various ailments.

I think it would have been OK, record-wise, if he had interrupted his marathon at some point. He could have just used the excuse "I was on a break!"

Have you caught Kevin Pollak's new online talk show? It's titled Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, appropriately enough, and it airs (can we still say that if it's on the web, "airs?") every Sunday at 5PM PT. So far he has had a variety of guests on, including Mad Men's Jon Hamm, Levar Burton, Paget Brewster, and Alex Albrecht. It's a fun little show, with a casual atmospshere and a Charlie Rose-like set. Here is his interview with Matthew Perry (yes, that's really him on Twitter). Sure, they talk about Friends, but also tennis, Studio 60, Old Spice commercials, and this.

I've been trying to figure out what bothers me about the TV commercials for the new movie 17 Again, and I finally know what it is: it's just not believable.

I know, I know, of course a movie that features a 37-year-old man somehow becoming a teenager again through some complicated process (from the previews I think it involves a whirlpool and/or lightning) isn't supposed to be gritty realism, but I'm talking about the cast members.

There's an odd little rumor spreading around the internet today, that Friends star Matthew Perry will appear in the season finale of Lost. Is it true or not?

Answer: very not. ABC and Perry's publicist says that there's no truth to the rumor whatsoever. Perry did express a desire to appear in the show, which he loves, but it's not going to happen. How did it start? Well, the IMDb is an awesome web site, but when you can join and pretty much add any info that you want, things like this are going to happen (see also: Wikipedia). His name is still up there though, playing a character named "George Hobbes."

We told you a while back about Matthew Perry's new Showtime series, The End of Steve. He'll play an arrogant local talk show host who is going thorugh some changes in his life. Now some other cast members for the series have been announced.

Nate Torrence, who costarred with Perry on the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (he played Dylan), has joined the cast and will play Perry's assistant. Other people signed on for the show include Martha Plimpton (she'll play Perry's producer), Eddie Shin (he'll play Perry's boss), and Kiele Sanchez, who Lost fans will remember as the much-loved character of Nikki, who is currently still buried on the beach somewhere. She also starred in one of my favorite sitcoms of the past ten years, ABC's Married to the Kellys.

Oh, besides Studio 60, Perry also starred in a show called Friends that lasted a few years or so.

There are many Thanksgiving traditions we all enjoy: the turkey, the stuffing, watching football, fighting over the drumstick to see whose wish comes true, and putting up with family members you avoid 363 days of the year (you see them at Christmas too).

There's another tradition, this one TV-oriented: Friends!

All this month, AOL TV is publishing their list of TV's hottest hunks of all time. That's a lot of hunks, but probably they won't all be memorable to you -- or to me.

Because when were you swooning over TV hunks? When you were a teenager, of course. Unless you are really, really immature. But seriously, I am guessing that beyond the age of 16 or so, you probably didn't plaster any Teen Magazine pin-ups on your bedroom walls.

As a teenager of the '80s, I surely had my favorite TV hunks. Yep, they were plastered on my bedroom walls, too: imagine hunk wallpaper and you've got the idea. So who on TV mingled amongst the movie actors of the Brat Pack?

We all speculated as to what role Jennifer Aniston will play when she guest stars on NBC's 30 Rock later this year, and now we know what part she'll play. It's actually one of the choices we came up with.

Aniston will play an old friend of Liz Lemon who starts to stalk Jack Donaghy. The character is described as an ex-roommate of Liz's from Chicago who is a "free-spirited, Fatal Attraction-like stalker." Well, let's hope that she isn't completely like that. We don't need any gunshots to the chest or bunny-boiling on 30 Rock. The character's name is Claire Harper.

So we've had Aniston and David Schwimmer on the show. I think all of the Friends people should appear on 30 Rock at some point.

Remember Studio 60? It was a little show that not many people had opinions about, and no one here really talked about it that much. But creator/writer Aaron Sorkin is talking about it, to GQ.

Sorkin actually feels guilty about the entire thing, because he knows he screwed it up. He tells Mickey Rapkin that the ultimately the show didn't work because he made too many mistakes:

I was too angry when I wrote Studio 60. The show became like the cover of Abbey Road. Everybody was trying to figure out who this character was in real life or what that incident was trying to be.

Thanks to the success of the Sex and the City movie -- and talk of more to come -- the rumor mill has been bubbling with other TV shows making the leap to the big screen. In the case of Arrested Development, it sure sounds like the truth.

However, the Friends feature is a rumor that has no legs. Warners owns the property and on July 4th, even though all U.S. offices were closed for the holiday, denied the rumors via the London office.

Jayne Trotman, Warner's director of publicity, said of the Friends movie, "(There's) no truth in the story."

Just to be sure, Matthew Perry's press rep also denied the rumor. She told the BBC that nothing is happening and the rumor is just that, a shred of news with no value attached to it.

Matthew Perry spent ten seasons on Friends and a rough season on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but it looks like he isn't sick of television.

Perry has signed to star in a new comedy titled The End of Steve. Perry will play a radio talk show host in Rochester, NY who likes to swear a lot. In fact, the first word you hear Perry's character say on the show is a certain word that women don't like to hear. It begins with a C and rhymes with something a baseball batter does, especially if there is a runner on first with no outs.

The show is from Peter Tolan (Rescue Me, The Larry Sanders Show, Home Improvement), and while there is no network announced for the show, I think we can assume it's going to be HBO or Showtime (unless it airs on FX or AMC and they bleep the swears, but that would blunt the edginess of the words).

[via Google News]

If there is one rumor that never dies it's the one about the possibility of a Friends reunion. Since the series finale aired in May 2004, rumors about a reunion popped up here, there and everywhere. Sometimes the rumor takes the form of "there will be another spinoff" (remember Joey?) but most of the time it's a "there are talks about a movie but one of the stars doesn't want to commit." This week's revival of the rumor is of the latter kind.

I almost didn't want to review this DVD set. Did I really want to go back into those murky waters again and bring up all those old disagreements? But here we go...

Actually, the DVD set for Studio 60 is much like the TV series itself. It starts out brilliantly and then as it goes on it starts to get worse and worse. But then it ends nicely!

Packaging

Pretty standard packaging, just a regular box containing three plastic holders housing two DVDs each. The artwork on each plastic holder is fairly interesting. Instead of a large pic on the front and the info on the inside, all the episode info is on the front and back of each individual holder, including pics from episodes and promotional pics.