[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing. NBC has announced that it is delaying the second season launch of Southland by a month. The Warner Bros. Television-produced series, which premiered last spring, was slated to launch its sophomore season on Friday, September 25th but will now instead debut on Friday, October 23rd. The reason behind the late change? According to Variety 's Michael Schneider, "insiders said the Peacock hopes to use the extra month to further promote the show, which they worried was getting lost in the fall marketing shuffle." Southland was meant to launch on the same evening as Medium and Dollhouse . ( Variety ) Chuck co-creator Josh Schwartz and Chuck producer Matt Miller will write an untitled multi-camera comedy pilot script for CBS about a twenty-something couple who have just gotten married and return home after their honeymoon and must learn how to navigate life together. (The premise was inspired by Schwartz and Miller's o...

Cabler TNT has announced that it has extended the run of its drama series Leverage this summer. Leverage will air two additional installments on Wednesday, September 2nd and Wednesday, September 9th. The latter episode, which features guest star Jeri Ryan ( Shark ) will serve as the series' so-called "summer finale." The two additional episodes are entitled "The Ice Man Job" and "The Lost Heir Job." The full press release from TNT, announcing the two additional episodes, can be found below. TNT Adds Two More Episodes of Hit Series LEVERAGE to Summer Lineup Summer Finale, Guest-Starring Jeri Ryan ( Star Trek: Voyager ), Scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 9 p.m. (ET/PT) TNT has added two episodes to the summer run of its hit series LEVERAGE , starring Academy Award® winner Timothy Hutton ( Ordinary People ), Gina Bellman ( Coupling ), Christian Kane (TNT’s Into the West ), Beth Riesgraf ( Alvin and the Chipmunks ) and Aldis Hodge ( Friday Night Li...

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. Entertainment Weekly 's Michael Ausiello is reporting that Nip/Tuck 's Joely Richardson has been cast in the fourth and final season of Showtime's The Tudors , where she would play King Henry VIII's final wife, Katherine Parr. The Tudors is set to return in Spring 2010 and Showtime would not comment on the casting. ( Entertainment Weekly 's Ausiello Files ) In a first, British channel UKTV has sold lifestyle special Ty's Great British Adventure to ABC. Special, which will air Sunday, August 2nd at 8 pm on ABC, features Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 's Ty Pennington transforming the rundown Cornish beach down of Portreath, including commissioning a children's park, a sports shop, and walking routes, along with other improvements. ( Broadcast ) Jamie-Lynn Sigler ( The Sopranos ) has joined the cast of ABC's Ugly Betty , where she will recur as Natalie, Daniel Meade's new assistant who is des...

Welcome to your Friday morning television briefing. The Chicago Tribune 's Maureen Ryan has an absolutely fantastic interview with Doctor Who star David Tennant on the eve of BBC America's airing of last Christmas' Doctor Who special "The Next Doctor." Among the topics of discussion: the end of his run on the legendary British sci-fi series, the truth behind the all-Doctors reunion rumors (false, says Tennant), and what's next for the actor (Poliakoff's Glorious 39 ), among other things. "I'm all finished," said Tenannt of his run on Doctor Who . "Three or four weeks ago, I filmed my last scene. So it's over. Still a long time to go before they're all broadcast, though, so I'm still clinging on for a bit. But yeah, it's done. It was very emotional, very exciting. We managed to go out with some of the best scripts I had in four years. So it was a real treat." ( Chicago Tribune 's The Watcher ) Jeri Ryan ( Shark ...

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing. Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams tells The Guardian that the writing staff on the ABC series, which airs its fifth season finale next week, approach the series a bit like Charles Dickens approached his own serialized storytelling. "It's a leap of faith doing any serialized storytelling," said Abrams in a new interview. "We had an idea early on, but certain things we thought would work well didn't. We couldn't have told you which characters would be in which seasons. We couldn't tell you who would even survive. You feel that electricity. It's almost like live TV. We don't quite know what might happen. I'm sure when Charles Dickens was writing, he had a sense of where he was going - but he would make adjustments as he went along. You jump into it, knowing there's something great out there to find." ( Guardian ) (SPOILER) Entertainment Weekly 's Michael Ausiello talks with Bones sta...

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing. Not unsurprisingly, NBC's Chuck has topped USA Today 's Save Our Show poll, scoring 54 percent of the 43,000 viewers who cast their votes in the ten-day online poll. The Warner Bros Television-produced series scored the top spot overall as well and was the most favored choice among men, teens and twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, forty-somethings, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Westerners, Southerners, Northeasterners, and Midwesterners and the fourth favored choice among women as well. (If that's not cross-cultural appeal, I don't know what is.) ( USA Today ) Adult Swim has acquired rights to the original UK series The Office , starring Ricky Gervais, from BBC Worldwide and will air both seasons as well as the Christmas special (which marked the series finale) this summer. Move marks the second deal between Adult Swim and BBC Worldwide, which previously sold rights to comedy The Mighty Boosh to the cabler, which ...

TNT has renewed freshman drama Leverage for a second season. The cabler announced today that it will launch Season Two of action drama Leverage , which stars Timothy Hutton ( Nero Wolfe ), Gina Bellman ( Coupling ), Christian Kane ( Into the West ), Beth Riesgraf ( Without a Trace ), and Aldis Hodge ( Friday Night Lights ), later this year. TNT has ordered fifteen new installments of the series for its sophomore season. “We’re thrilled that audiences and critics have responded so positively to Leverage and made the show a solid hit,” said Michael Wright, executive vice president of TNT, in a statement. “We look forward to another great season of fun and exciting storylines brought to life by the outstanding cast, led by Timothy Hutton, and the incredible production team, headed up by executive producers Dean Devlin and John Rogers.” “We had an amazing experience shooting the first season of Leverage with such a talented cast and crew and with the full support of TNT behind us,” sai...

TNT's new drama Leverage has a winning premise: a good guy, betrayed by the company that employed him to capture criminals, puts together a team of baddies to rob from the rich and give to the poor, providing, as we're told in the epilogue, "leverage." However, the series--from creators John Rogers and Dean Devlin--fails to live up to the promise of its premise, due to some muddying of its tone, a general flatness, and a lack of compelling humor and action. When faced with a series like NBC's Chuck , which does both well and in abundance on a weekly basis, Leverage seems like a tired rehash of action elements from the 1980s and lacks an overall freshness. I had seen an early cut of the pilot back in the spring and little had changed between that rough cut and the finished product, one of two episodes supplied for review. In fact, the pilot ("The Nigerian Job")--which I only moderately liked at best--is far superior to the series' second episode (...