TVSquad

Apparently the new Trek movie, Fringe, and whatever it is he does over at Lost these days, isn't enough to fill up J.J. Abrams' day. That's a good thing. He'll be too busy to notice that you are downloading the leaked Fringe pilot. Through Bad Robot, Abrams is set to produce a new project, turning an article from the New York Times into a feature film. J.J.'s overlords at Paramount have purchased the rights to a recent article titled "Mystery On Fifth Avenue."

That article, written by Penelope Green, tells the story of a luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue that has some unique architecture. After dropping $8.5 million on the place, the new owners brought in an architectural designer to liven the place up for the kids. The remodel included hidden compartments, puzzles, poems, and messages. There is even a book and a soundtrack that goes with it. How that translates into a movie remains to be seen, but Abrams has some help from a couple television veterans as he tries to figure that out. Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show) and Wally Wolodarsky (The Simpsons) are on board to write the feature. I'm thinking Panic Room meets Jumanji, with time traveling aliens.

JJ Abrams, of Lost, Alias, and Felicity fame, has another TV show coming up, this time on FOX.

Fringe will star Kirk Acevedo and Tomas Arana and is about a young female FBI agent who teams up with a scientist to investigate odd phenomena and other sci-fi happenings. Wait, is this X-Files 2?

More interesting than the plot of the show is the price tag for the pilot episode: $10 million. That's just for the pilot episode. I hope it doesn't turn into one of those shows that has a great-looking, expensive pilot episode (*cough* Smith *cough), hooks viewers in, and then the rest of the show falls apart. But I have faith in Abrams. He has a great track record, enthusiasm, and is an actual fan of the genre and not just a producer, so I'll give this a shot.

To update Bob's strange news item from Thursday: Six Degrees is back on the schedule. Bob noticed a quick reference in an article that the J.J. Abrams drama is still filming, even though it's been off the schedule since early November. Now it's scheduled to return to a new timeslot on Fridays at 9 pm as of March 23rd.

It's a crappy time slot, no doubt. Especially compared to Six Degrees' original spot after Grey's Anatomy on Thursday nights. The show, about six people whose lives all intersect, struggled during its first few episodes, getting a maximum of 9.6 million viewers (less than half of the Grey's audience stuck around). Possibly because it was boring and pointless.

Whether or not Six Degrees has been retooled, we'll just have to wait and see. It looks as though the casting remains the same.

Jonathan posted news recently that J.J. Abrams is in talks with HBO to direct and produce a show through his Bad Robot Productions. That's all well and good, but let's play junior programming executive for a moment. How would you feel about buying a show from Bad Robot, given their history.

Are you making a deal with the brilliant team behind the top 20 hit Lost? And does the fact that we have now switched that qualifier from top 5, to top 10, to top 20 cause any concern? Or are you making a deal with the team that so bungled Alias that by the end of the run it was almost an act of charity for ABC to even air the show? Seriously. May 17th, 2006, Alias is the #5 show in its time slot behind Deal Or No Deal (NBC), Bones (Fox), The Amazing Race (CBS), AND Next Top Model (UPN), only managing to beat out the movie Final Destination 2 (WB).

Geez. I guess we know who television's "It" man is these days. J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Lost and Alias and director of Mission: Impossible III, signed new television and film production deals with Warner Bros. and Paramount, totalling approximately $60 million. According to E! online, the deals wrap up some intense negotiating where nearly every Hollywood studio was vying to get the Abrams name on its stuff. There's a funny quote from a Warner Bros. exec in the LA Times, saying, "J.J. is such a unique and extraordinary talent, someone whom I've admired for years." I laugh at that because, if he was so talented, why didn't you bozos sign him years ago instead of now when he's hot? Oh, I think I just answered my own question.

J.J.'s television deal with Warner Bros. gives him $4-$6 million a year and pays $2 million of Bad Robot's overhead costs. The movie deal with Paramount gives him $2.5 million a year over five years, plus costs and $5 million for his first movie. Paramount execs call J.J. "the next Steven Spielberg."

No pressure, J.J.