TVSquad

William H. Macy is set to star in the TNT series Family Man.

This is the third TNT project Macy has been involved with, having already co-written (with writing partner Steven Schachter) the Emmy-winning Door to Door and The Wool Cap.

Family Man, which Macy also wrote with Schachter, focuses on the life of a man who gives to charity but also steals from major corporations. According to Variety, the series is told in "flash forward" fashion in which we see Macy imprisoned in the future. Sounds like kind of a modern take on the Robin Hood story to me.

There's no word yet on when the series will air.

We told you yesterday about the new shows that NBC unveiled at their upfront, and now video previews of the new shows have made their way onto the web.

After the jump are previews for the new shows The Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Life, and Chuck, along with my quick notes on what I think based on these little snippets. Those legs above aren't exactly sexy. Maybe that's just a temporary state.

The Aryan Brotherhood is a network of white power groups that began in the California prison system and is now spread throughout several other state prisons. The group consists of men who are trained to kill efficiently and mercilessly and control the drug trade. On March 4 at 8:00pm, Explorer: Aryan Brotherhood will go inside these prisons to give a first-hand look at how the group operates, and also delve into efforts by law enforcement to stop the Brotherhood, which boasts at least one former member who claims to have killed twenty-two of his fellow inmates.

Way back in September of 2005 I mentioned a non-existent reality series created by a Hollywood producer in order to scam investors out of millions of dollars. The alleged reality series, DHS: The Series, was to focus on the Department of Homeland Security. No such series ever existed, and Joseph Medawar, the producer behind the scam, was sentenced last month to one year in prison.

Alison Ann Heruth, who lied in interviews saying she would both act in and co-produce the series, was given five years probation. She was recently sentenced to ten days in jail for violating the terms of her probation, which included paying $250 in retribution once a month.

Any takers on how long until this whole fiasco gets turned into a made-for-TV movie?

(S03E09) After watching Michael Scott "transform" himself into "Prison Mike," I was so enthralled by it that I've decided to rent Scared Straight from Netflix. I remember watching that documentary back in the 70s when I was a teenager, and I thought it was so over the top that I remember laughing all the way through it. Of course, if I was sitting in that room with those convicts in Rahway, I might have gotten smacked around a bit. But the idea of "lifers" telling kids how to not be like them is just too much grist for the comedy mill.

(S01E06) I've never been a big fan of gritty crime drama, which is why "The Fifth Quarter" has never been my favorite short story of Stephen King's. It's a very bare bones tale of a man whose friend is killed over a buried stash of millions of dollars and his subsequent quest to retrieve four pieces of a map, each belonging to a different "bad guy." It's not really typically "King" and even he acknowledgers in the Notes of Nightmares and Dreamscapes that the story is more like something that would have come from Richard Bachman (his occasional nom de plume) or even Richard Stark, the malevolent writer from his novel The Dark Half.

Of course, I can't really blame King for wanting to try something a little different once in awhile, but in a lot of ways the story works much better in a visual medium. The problem is, one hour isn't enough for a story that is this involved. Screenwriter Alan Sharp fleshes the story out by giving the protagonist (Jeremy Sisto) a wife and kid, and everyone in this episode plays their parts well, trying to convey a lot of backstory in a short time so we can get to the blood and guns. If anything, the episode suffers from trying to cram way too much drama into a short amount of time. I think this would have worked much better as a feature film, following Wilie (Sisto) as he hunts down the men who killed his friend and begins to piece together the map that will lead he and his family to a better life. That could still happen, I suppose, it's not like they haven't done multiple adaptations of King's work before.

(S02E07) This episode begins with Tom sitting in a jail cell with another prisoner (Judd Hirsch) who's in jail because he locked his fifteen year old nephew in the cellar over the weekend for pooping and peeing all over his house. Tom, on the other hand, is in jail for killing about four thousand people. His cell mate reacts to this news with, "people are too sensitive these days."

Tom's tale of woe begins when he becomes a salesman for a new device called "Spray a Carpet or Rug," a gigantic machine that emits a foam that turns into carpet instantaneously. The Mayor loves the device because he can carpet all of Jefferton and not have to pay the "lawn mower man" who takes care of the grass and has been pestering the Mayor about a raise. The city council allows Tom to do a test run on Memorial Park, so Tom dons his chemical suit (the foam causes him seizures) and carpets the whole park.