Who would buy Hammertime on DVD? I'm actually asking. Is that something that you would actually watch again after you've already watched it on TV?
There are some good complete series sets being released this week, though: Andy Richter's Andy Barker, P.I., a Rome gift set, Farscape, and a new box for The Sopranos.
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.
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.
This is Spoilers Anonymous, a weekly column here at TV Squad where we supply you with the dirt on some of the more popular shows on the air. We'll never put spoilers up here on the main page in order to help the reformed stay unspoiled. If you have anything to add to the group, feel free to step up and let yourself be heard, either with our tips form or by emailing us at tvsquad at gmail dot com, or call and leave a message at (775) 640-8479. Your anonymity is guaranteed, if you wish to remain as such.
This week we have spoilers for: 90210, Bones, Desperate Housewives, Eastwick, Gossip Girl, Grey's Anatomy, How I Met Your Mother, Lost, Melrose Place, NCIS, Scrubs, Supernatural and Ugly Betty. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!)
One of Scrubs' minor but more memorable characters will become a memory this season.
Actor Sam Lloyd, who plays the hopelessly pathetic attorney Ted, will leave the show in the upcoming season. Lloyd said he just finished filming his final episode and called it a "bittersweet moment."
"It was a nice episode, but it was very bittersweet for me," Sam said. "It was basically my choice and I just decided I should move on at this point."
I sat down with Lloyd and fellow band member Philip McNiven to talk about their a cappella music group The Blanks for a feature interview that we'll post soon. In the meantime, enjoy their famous rendition of "Over the Rainbow" to give this sad moment the solemn tone it deserves.
The latest celebrity death rumor that turned out to be false was the one about Scrubs star Zach Braff. He didn't kill himself by taking pills. To prove it, Braff has made the video below. He calls the guy who started the fake rumor (he even created a fake CNN page to make it more believable) a "douchebag" because the story upset his mom.
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.
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.
I guess even J.J. Abrams needs to lighten things up now and then. With shows like Fringe, Lost and Alias, and movies like Star Trek, Cloverfield and Mission Impossible III on his impressive resume, maybe he needs a break from the sci-fi / action / drama genres.
Now he's exec producing an untitled, half-hour comedy for Fox. It's written by Mike Markowitz (who's worked on Becker and It's All Relative), but other than that, details are few and far between. The tagline is that it'll be "a comedic medical show." Hmmm, so maybe like Scrubs?
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.
When Andy Richter left Late Night With Conan O'Brien to establish his own career in acting, nobody knew that he'd come full circle and rejoin O'Brien years later. At the same time, nobody knew that creator Victor Fresco would do much the same thing.
Andy Richter Controls the Universe was one of those quirky shows that most people, who enjoy a dash of nonsense in their comedy, really dug. It was a very playful show about a guy working in a massive company. It featured a small ensemble with great chemistry on-screen, and had a unique look at big corporations.
A few years later, Fresco tapped that well again, and we got Better Off Ted, another comedy with absurdist tendencies set in a massive corporation with a small cast. Like Andy, it eked out a second season based more on critical acclaim than ratings. As someone who enjoys both shows, I find myself worrying that Ted will share Andy's ultimate fate, cancellation after the second season.
This is Spoilers Anonymous, a weekly column here at TV Squad where we supply you with the dirt on some of the more popular shows on the air. We'll never put spoilers up here on the main page in order to help the reformed stay unspoiled. If you have anything to add to the group, feel free to step up and let yourself be heard, either with our tips form or by emailing us at tvsquad at gmail dot com, or call and leave a message at (775) 640-8479. Your anonymity is guaranteed, if you wish to remain as such.
This week we have spoilers for: Chuck, Desperate Housewives, Glee, Gossip Girl, Greek, Grey's Anatomy, House, NCIS, Private Practice, Scrubs, Smallville, Supernatural and The Mentalist. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!)
This is Spoilers Anonymous, a weekly column here at TV Squad where we supply you with the dirt on some of the more popular shows on the air. We'll never put spoilers up here on the main page in order to help the reformed stay unspoiled. If you have anything to add to the group, feel free to step up and let yourself be heard, either with our tips form or by emailing us at tvsquad at gmail dot com, or call and leave a message at (775) 640-8479. Your anonymity is guaranteed, if you wish to remain as such.
This week we have spoilers for: Bones, Brothers & Sisters, Chuck, Desperate Housewives, Fringe, Gossip Girl, Greek, Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, House, Lost, One Tree Hill, Scrubs, Smallville, Supernatural and Ugly Betty. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!)
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.
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.
Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.
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.
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.
I guess even J.J. Abrams needs to lighten things up now and then. With shows like Fringe, Lost and Alias, and movies like Star Trek, Cloverfield and Mission Impossible III on his impressive resume, maybe he needs a break from the sci-fi / action / drama genres.
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 ... 
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." 
Mike Henry and Daryl Hall on a Cleveland Show Thanksgiving
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