TVSquad

Hollywood's latest choice for a Saturday Night Live film remake is both the strangest and most interesting choice they could make, short of a big screen "Weekend Update" action epic or a "Toonces the Cat" feature-length Pixar film.

Variety reports that Lorne Michaels and company are creating a big-screen remake of the show's popular "MacGruber" sketches. Cast member Will Forte will take on the title role and pen the movie's script along with SNL writers John Solomon and Jorma Taccone, the latter of whom is better known as one-third of the musical comedy group The Lonely Island.

Kristen Wiig will also star as MacGruber's object grabbing sidekick Vicki. Ryan Phillipe and Val Kilmer have been attached to the project, but their roles haven't been nailed down yet.

It's looking like yet another new series is going to quietly fade away. The new Knight Rider show has halted production in what is likely the beginning of the end for the sequel of the 80's series of the same name.

The number of shows ordered by NBC has been ordered has been lowered from 21 to 17. The creators probably won't even have time to change the scripts, so I predict the season (and likely series) finale will end on an awkward note.

Hello! The Saint is rising again. The venerable character, who was created by writer Leslie Chareris in novels in the 1920's, will be back on television in a contemporary setting, and actor James Purefoy (Rome) has been in talks to play Simon Templar, the suave, British "good guy" thief. Aside from Purefoy, the Hollywood Reporter writes that the production team includes first class talent: Homicide's Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana (Oz), writer Jorge Zamacona, Bill Macdonald, and the original TV Saint himself, Roger Moore, and his son Geoffrey Moore.

Battlestar Galactica has spoiled us all.

I say that because, since the excellent "re-imagining" of the craptastic '70s scifi series hit the air, we expect the remakes of our favorite shows to be darker, more layered, and more complicated than the originals. But sometimes, going darker doesn't always work: take a look at the failure pile that passed for the Bionic Woman remake as the best example of that. So, when a "25 years later" return of Knight Rider was announced, I half wondered if they were going to go the BSG route and make it all serious. But I equally wondered if they would go the other way and make it a modern camp classic, sort of the way the original, Hoff-injected series was.

Turns out, the answer was "none of the above." Mostly the movie / backdoor pilot that aired last night was dull, with a few fleeting moments of camp thrown in. But it never made me clamor for the show to return as a series.

In the movie Batman Forever, Val Kilmer as Batman said "Chicks love the car." There he was talking about the Batmobile, but maybe he was being prophetic, too. Kilmer has just signed to replace Will Arnett as the voice of KITT in the forthcoming NBC Knight Rider telefilm/back-door pilot. I want you to note that in the original link, they've been very generous in picture selection for Mr. Kilmer, as his waist size and age have apparently been running neck and neck the last several years. This article chose a more recent picture, and right now we're all thankful he's only doing voice work on the film.

Knight Rider premieres in 10 days (02-17-2008) and Arnett had completed all of the voice work already. Apparently, as our own Kristin witnessed first-hand, the new KITT is a Ford Mustang and Arnett had done some GM commercial work before so it would be blasphemy to let him voice a Ford car. BLASPHEMY!!

(S04E01) "Because I hate owing you." - Colby

Yeah, yeah... I know. Here it is, the end of the the fall premiere week and I'm blogging about a show that only seven months ago I said I was done with. "It's bland" I decried, and it's lost the spark that originally drew me in. So what am I doing here? Well, despite the fact that I stopped writing about Numb3rs, I'm a sucker for pretty much anything on TV. (Case in point? I reviewed the entire first season of Dirt!) That's right. I put my pen down and I watched Don and Charlie's antics for the whole rest of the third season anyway. And you know what? I sort of got sucked back in. Last season's finale was right up there but I still bit my tongue when I considered throwing up a post. I knew I'd end up being negative despite the fact that I enjoyed it. So I here I am, starting from scratch, attempting once again to remember why I liked this show in the first place.

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!'"