TVSquad

(S01E03) For those of you playing along at home, the ratings for the big two hour premiere of Drive are in. Unfortunately, they weren't very good. That isn't the end of the world though. To really get an idea of where the series stands, we'll have to wait until the numbers come in for the regular Monday night showing. Things should be fine. Nobody watches Dancing With The Stars or Deal Or No Deal anyway, right?

Moving on, thinking happy thoughts about Nielsen boxes tuned to Drive, episode three was another solid installment. That's solid, but not great. It didn't quite match the level of the first two. Not that there weren't high points. It just seemed that some of the stories lacked the intensity that we saw in the premiere. There was still some good information coming to us, but not in as gripping a fashion. That's fine, but not exactly what I wanted to see in the time slot premiere.

Fox is promoting the hell out of Tim Minear's new action series, Drive. And now we finally have an official launch date (the folks over at Drivefans.com already knew this). According to the official website, there will be a 2-night, 3-hour premiere on Sunday, April 15th at 8 pm and Monday, April 16th at 8 pm. According to The Futon Critic, the permanent time slot for Drive is on Mondays at 8 pm.

While I have high hopes for Drive because A) it's being produced by Tim Minear and B) it stars Nathan Fillion, I also worry that it will be like many of Minear's other great shows that were canceled. Ahem... Firefly. While I didn't see it, I hear great things about The Inside, which Fox canceled in 2005. He was a "consulting producer" on Standoff but I'm not going to hold that against him. In fact, Minear has had a project on television every year since 1999.

If you want to know more about the show, check out Joel's story from the TCA.

Is Hollywood finally waking up and smelling the census report? Add to the growing list of shows centered around Latino families CBS' Los Duques. Starring Jimmy Smits, who also serves as the program's executive producer, the show focuses on the Duques, a powerful South Florida family of rum merchants. In typical telenovela fashion, the family's ailing patriarch leaves control of the company to an outsider, Smits' character Alex Vega.

Smits' production company El Sendero has two additional projects set up at FX and ABC. The FX program, The Inside, focuses on a former Special Forces operative who gives up his identity to infiltrate a drug cartel. The ABC project is an epic miniseries about immigration told through several interconnected storylines. The miniseries will be written and directed by Gregory Nava, who directed Smits in the feature film My Family/Mi Familia.

Tim Minear has had a rough go of it with his post Whedonverse career. Wonderfalls and The Inside were both shut down early in the going, which is a shame because Wonderfalls was a fantastic show. I don't have a lot of hope for his current gig as Consulting Producer for Standoff either. The show just doesn't seem to be able to find an audience. But you know what they say... try try again.

USA Today's Coming Attractions has a little blurb about Minear's latest project, Drive, that says it is coming in March. They refer to it as "Amazing Race meets 24." Minear adds, "There's a giant purse of money at the end, but they don't know where the end is." Other than that, most things about the show remain up in the air. Early reports had Nick Lea (X-Files, Whistler) and Ivan Sergei (Hawaii, Jack & Jill) starring in the show. However, a recent post on nicklea.com reveals that many of the roles are being recast, including Lea's and Sergei's. Even with all the confusion, it's still a Minear show. That makes it worth watching.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big Tim Minear fan. Actually, I never missed an airing of Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls, or The Inside. He served as a producer on all of those, along with writing his fair share of episodes. Heck, I even remember watching some episodes of High Tide back in the day when Minear was just getting started as a writer. Still, news that Minear is being brought on as Consulting Producer for Standoff just boggles me.

Now, I think that Firefly and Wonderfalls were brilliant, and The Inside was solid. But that just means that 'I' think someone should give Tim another show. The part I don't get is that from the Fox perspective, these shows were all failures. They managed to last 11, 4, and 7 episodes. Three series, 22 episodes. What does a guy have to do to be shown the door?