[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Friday morning television briefing. Wondering what Joss Whedon has in store for Season Two of Dollhouse , which returns to FOX this fall? Entertainment Weekly 's Mandi Bierly caught up with the Dollhouse creator to find out what to expect. "About two hours after starting to talk to the writers about story, I was back with such a vengeance, and so energized and so pumped because we really understand the show now," said Whedon. "We understand what works, and what didn't work so well or what we weren't so thrilled about. We don't have the onus of trying to be a big hit sitting on our shoulders. We can just be ourselves. And so the stories we're breaking are pure, and exciting, and everybody's on-board in the room, and it's never flowed better." Look for Echo to use that final word of Season One as a springboard for her second season mission. ""Echo wants to find not just Caroline, but what's going on behind ever

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. Jennifer Westfeldt ( Grey's Anatomy ) and John Boyd ( The Notorious Bettie Page ) have been cast in Day Eight of FOX drama series 24 . Westfeldt will recur as journalist Meredith Reed, an ambitious writer who has ties to Middle East leader Arman Hashemi (Anil Kapoor), who arrives in the U.S. on a peacemaking mission. Boyd, meanwhile, will be a series regular and will play CTU analyst Jonah Schwartz. ( Hollywood Reporter ) The Middleman creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach has joined the writing staff of NBC's upcoming sci-fi series Day One, where he will serve as writer/co-executive producer. Also joining the writing staff, according to series creator Jesse Alexander (who broke the news via Twitter): Kings ' Erik Oleson, and Angela Kang. ( io9 ) BBC Films has confirmed that a big screen version of Doctor Who is being developed and that development of a script is currently underway. It's unclear whether inbound showrunne

While I am still over the moon about NBC's decision to renew Chuck for a third season this fall , this weekend didn't bring good news for fans of several series. ABC has confirmed that it will not be renewing freshman drama series The Unusuals for a second season. The Sony Pictures Television-produced series, created by Noah Hawley, had struggled in the ratings this season, launching in the post- Lost berth on Wednesdays at 10 pm (traditionally a show killer). ABC attempted to test The Unusuals in an alternate timeslot, airing one episode in a Tuesday slot at 10 pm but the series, about the cops in Manhattan's quirky 2nd Precinct, never quite gelled with audiences. Which is a shame as the series offered a fantastic character study each week, some bizarro crimes, and one of the best ensembles on television today, with all of the actors--including Amber Tamblyn, Jeremy Renner, Adam Goldberg, Harold Perrineau, Kai Lennox, Monique Gabriela Curnen, Joshua Close, and Terry Ki

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. Entertainment Weekly 's Michael Ausiello is reporting that FOX will not be renewing sophomore drama series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for a third season. While the network has declined to comment on a cancellation, saying that they won't be announcing their fall schedule until May 18th, Ausiello has several unnamed insiders stating that the series is dead. "It's done," said one source. "Everyone has pretty much known for a couple of weeks." Ausiello was told by one network insider, "Consider it canceled." ( Entertainment Weekly 's Ausiello Files ) As previously reported, Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks, and Gary Jones will reprise their roles from various Stargate franchise series in Sci Fi's upcoming series SGU: Stargate Universe. Also joining them in providing a guest starring role on the first season of the spin-off series is Amanda Tapping, who will reprise

I have to say that I am loving FOX's new Grindhouse -inspired Dollgrind campaign for its Friday night "dames of deception" two-hour block of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse , which launch on February 13th. If you've missed the fantastically retro ad campaign, which harks back to 1970s exploitation-style flicks and features Terminator 's Summer Glau and Dollhouse 's Eliza Dushku, fret not, as you can watch the teaser trailer in full after the jump. What do you think? Does the ad make you want to tune in to the two-hour block? Did you find it clever or funny? Did you laugh at the horribly dubbed Spanish bit? Discuss.

Welcome to your Monday morning television briefing. I'm still in shock after last night's jaw-dropping episode of Skins on BBC America; fortunately, I've already got the season finale in my possession. Otherwise, I think I would explode from anticipation. Lost fans can look forward to watching Season Five of the ABC hit without interruption, according to sources. However, the network has expressed some interest in stretching out the fifth season with one or two weeks off, in order to have the finale air closer to the end of May sweeps, so don't count this a done deal quite yet. ( TV Guide ) It looks like One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn will write the script for the CW's update of Melrose Place , after all. That is, one a deal closes. Schwahn is currently under a deal at Warners, which produces One Tree Hill, and although he recently signed a deal with CBS Paramount Network Television, that deal does not start until June. Additionally, his current Warners deal

Welcome to your Monday morning television briefing. Quite a lot of good telly on last night, including new episodes of Skins, Mad Men, Amazing Race , and Little Britain USA , not to mention another installment of Masterpiece Contemporary's The Last Enemy . Whew. FOX has issued a reprieve for ratings-starved sci-fi action drama Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles . The series has been given a full season order for its second season, which averaged a 2.3/6 in adults 18-49 in its last original airing. Many insiders had pegged the series as a goner, proving that there's obviously still some life in the Terminator franchise yet. ( Variety ) Zeljko Ivanek ( Damages ) has been cast in Season Three of Heroes , where he'll appear in a multiple-episode story arc playing a character known as the Hunter in Volume Four of the series, which is subtitled "Fugitives" and is set to kick off in January or February of 2009. ( E! Online's Watch with Kristin ) Entertainment W

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. I suffered through some sweltering heat here in Los Angeles last night and watched the latest lackluster episode of 90210 and a fantastically taut episode of Fringe (more on that in a bit). CW has given a put pilot commitment to drama The Graysons , based on the pre-Boy Wonder life of Batman sidekick Robin before he dons the mask and cape (a la Smallville ). Drama, from Smallville executive producers Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson and Chuck/Supernatural executive producer McG, will follow Dick "DJ" Grayson in a new take on the iconic character. (In the original comics, Robin was the orphaned son of a high-flying trapeze artist family who was taken in by Bruce Wayne and trained to be Batman's sidekick.) Series is viewed as a potential replacement for Smallville , should this be final season, or as a companion piece if Smallville is renewed. Studio Warner Bros. Television also hopes to use this development to pro

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. I was absolutely riveted by last night's episode of Fringe (more on that in a bit) and not so riveted by another dull installment of 90210 . Meh. The CW's buzz-worthy Gossip Girl scored the highest numbers ever in the life of the series, drawing in 3.7 million viewers on Monday, an increase of nearly 500,000 from the week prior and 300,000 above Gossip Girl's second season premiere on September 1st. Those numbers are even more palatable for the netlet when you realize that it's a full one million viewers more than tuned in to the third episode of the first season. Not doing quite as well? FOX's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles , which lost 800,000 viewers from last week's season premiere to sink to a low of 5.5 million, off 36 percent from its Season One average. Ouch. ( Entertainment Weekly ) More talk from NBC chiefs about the quality work co-chairman Ben Silverman is doing (in between "[party

Good morning and welcome to your Monday television briefing. Steven Moffat, who has taken over the reins at Doctor Who from Russell T. Davies , has said that he wouldn't rule out a feature film spin-off of Doctor Who so long as it didn't interfere with production on the series itself. "It would be good to see it in the cinema so long as it was great and fantastic," said Moffat, speaking at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. "But a film is on [for] 90 minutes and that is not as important as the series. But so long as it doesn't get in the way of the show we could do it. If it got in the way of the show that would be appalling." The series itself has already had two feature spin-offs in the 1960s: Doctor Who and the Daleks and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD , both of which starred Peter Cushing as the Doctor. ( The Guardian 's Organ Grinder ) There's a fantastic interview with J.J. Abrams about his new FOX drama Fringe and about

It was absolutely remarkable to see Chuck 's Josh Schwartz, Lost 's Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, Pushing Daisies ' Bryan Fuller, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles ' Josh Friedman together on one panel. I thought the stage might collapse under the weight of their collective genius. The panel, part of Entertainment Weekly 's Visionaries series, was moderated by the magazine's in-house Lost guru Jeff Jensen, who did an absolutely brilliant job of asking insightful, intelligent questions and keeping the action moving. I go to a lot of these industry panels and typically the moderators are loathsomely awful, so it was a refreshing change of pace to have Jensen take the reins on this discussion and steer it in the right direction. This being a panel consisting of showrunners on some of my favorite series on the air today, I was glad to see that Jensen didn't let them off the hook with questions designed to help promote their respective series. Inste

To echo that long-famous quotable, Sarah Connor will be back next season. FOX yesterday handed the freshman sci-fi drama a second season pickup, with thirteen episodes currently slated to air this fall. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was considered a dead cert for a renewal (along with Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton comedy Back to You ) at the network, especially as it was the only one of FOX's crop of new series to make any impact creatively or ratings-wise this season. The drama could also get a back nine order relatively quickly, especially since the McG-helmed Terminator film (starring Christian Bale) will be released theatrically in May. Look for major synergy going on between the TV series and the aforementioned film as FOX continues to mine this franchise for all its worth. But while The Sarah Connor Chronicles will return this fall rather than mid-season 2009, don't look for it to remain in the Mondays at 9 pm timeslot it occupied earlier this year; Sarah

The true test of any new television series, I find, isn't the pilot itself (which typically has a much bigger budget and purview than the rest of the series), but the second episode. So I was intrigued to see what the sophomore episode of FOX's new midseason drama Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles would look like. Full disclosure: I am not a huge Terminator fan. I loved the original but it's been more years since I can recall that I've seen T2 ... and I've never watched any of the subsequent sequels. So while I'm coming to this series with some backstory, it's not of the intricate, obsessive kind that may help inform some of the storytelling here. I do have to say that there are elements of this series that I do like and others that... just plain don't work for me. In its favor: the choreographed fight scenes, Lena Headey's intensity (dialed down just the right amount in the second episode), Summer Glau (channeling River Tam somewhat here; mo

Bad news for fans of FOX's forensic drama Bones . No, before the letter-writing campaigns begin (complete with massive mountains of Paul Smith striped socks being sent to FOX executives, no doubt), the series hasn't been canceled... but fans of the drama, currently in its third season, will have to wait quite a while for new episodes. FOX has once again tweaked its midseason schedule and announced that, in addition to a berth on Friday evenings, Bones will pop up on the Monday night lineup at 8 pm, beginning in April. While the above is hardly reason for concern, it's the fact that FOX is pushing the remaining four produced episodes of Bones , which were meant to air during February sweeps, to April 28th. Which means that anyone waiting for another fix of Brennan and Booth is going to have to cool their heels for quite some time. It also means that FOX is dead serious about digging their heels in for the long term, preparing for the eventuality that the strike will not en

Well, that's one less unscripted series to worry about clogging up air time this spring. FOX has pulled reality series When Women Rule the World off its schedule, benching the series until this summer, a move which has freed up real estate on its now 24 -free Monday night lineup. According to Variety , the decision to cut When Women Rule the World "could have come down to a sales issue. On the surface, When Women Rule the World -- which follows a group of women who control a group of men -- does not sound like something advertisers would be keen on. New midseason dramas Canterbury's Law --starring Julianna Margulies as a hard-edged attorney who takes whatever is necessary to win a case (though one to whom Damages ' Patty Hewes wouldn't likely give a second thought)--and New Amsterdam , about an immortal detective (no, not Angel ... or Moonlight ) will now launch on Monday nights. Both series will launch after Prison Break and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chron