[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Monday morning television briefing. Timothy Olyphant ( Damages ) has been cast in FX's untitled Elmore Leonard project, which is based on a short story by Leonard entitled "Fire in the Hole." Olyphant will play U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens who returns to his hometown in Kentucky. "He has a certain jaggedness, but he also loves his job," said creator/executive producer Graham Yost. "He is like an anachronism: He wears a hat, cowboy boots and a holster on his hip. It's a little bit like he was born 100 years too late." Project, from Sony Pictures Television and Timberman/Beverly Prods., will be directed by Michael Dinner and will start shooting at the end of May. ( Hollywood Reporter ) The Chicago Tribune 's Maureen Ryan has a sneak peek at three scenes from Wednesday evening's 100th episode of ABC's Lost , entitled "The Variable." (Gee, does that title remind you of another famous installment?) All I can say is th...

Welcome to your Friday morning television briefing. I had a fantastic evening last night at a WGA event for the writers of ABC's Lost , which included Team Darlton, Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis, and Elizabeth Sarnoff. After just three episodes, NBC has cut culinary competition series The Chopping Block from its schedule, effective immediately. In lieu of the Marco Pierre White-fronted reality competition series, which landed a 0.9/2 share among adults 18-49 and 2.6 million viewers overall, NBC will air repeats of Law & Order: Criminal Intent and NBC said that Chopping Block could return at a later date. (But don't hold your breath.) ( Variety ) Paul Wesley ( 24 ) will star opposite Nina Dobrev ( Degrassi ) and Ian Somerhalder ( Lost ) in the CW supernatural drama pilot Vampire Diaries , from writer/executive producer Kevin Williamson. Wesley will play Stefan, a "gloriously, amazingly, epically beautiful young man" who is a 200-year-0ld vampire locked in a battl...

I'm a huge fan of culinary competition series like BBC America's superlative Last Restaurant Standing and Bravo's sleek Top Chef , so I thought I'd fall under the loopy charms of NBC's newest culinary offering, Chopping Block . How wrong I was. Chopping Block , which launches tomorrow evening, seems to be a rather tasteless amalgam of Last Restaurant Standing and FOX's Hell's Kitchen (hardly a surprise as host Marco Pierre White replaced Gordon Ramsay on the original UK edition of Hell's Kitchen ) the result of which left me starving for something more substantial. The premise is this: Eight couples are split into two teams and given their own restaurants to run in New York City while enfant terrible chef Marco Pierre White, who previously trained such culinary notables as Mario Batali and Gordon Ramsay, tasks the competitors with various challenges--from cooking a signature dish to changing the restaurant's decor--and offers his thoughts about ...