Norman Bates is coming to television. A&E's series about the relationship between Norman (Freddie Highmore) and his mother (Vera Farmiga) opening the Bates Motel comes in March. The stars were on hand to discuss the show, with the Viennese ballroom dressed up like the Bates Motel dining room (versatile room!) They really broke out the fancy '50s era centerpieces, even though the new series is updated to present day. It felt like Hitchcock's production design; all that was missing were taxidermied birds.
Oh, and Highmore was sure to drop the line "We all go a little mad sometimes" in the press conference. Psychophiles swooned at that.
4. Doctor Who's companion in an odd place.
Okay, nothing about The Carrie Diaries is geeky, right? It's the prequel to Sex and the City with a cadre of beautiful young CW talent. Well, there's one geeky person on Carrie Diaries. Freema Agyeman was the Doctor's companion during the David Tennant years, and she plays Carrie's New York fashionista mentor Larissa Loughton on the show. We got to chat with Agyeman and she was a delight, even telling us that she'd be making some promotional appearances for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary this year, because how could you not acknowledge you were part of something that huge? Alas, The Carrie Diaries is her fulltime gig now, so David Tennant's companion won't be meeting Matt Smith's Doctor.
3. Amazon, shipping.
With the success of Arrow, of course the CW is going to make another superhero show. Their next plan is a Wonder Woman prequel called Amazon. If you happened to see a bootleg of David E. Kelley's rejected NBC pilot, you know anything's gotta be better than that. CW president Mark Pedowitz said Amazon would be set in the present day, she will be called Diana (casting reports called her Iris) and that it would be an origin story like Smallville. He also said Kelley gave them his blessing, and invited Kelley to pitch any project he wants to the CW!
2. JJ Abrams twice.
J.J. Abrams has three geek shows on TV, and he came to TCA for two of them. For NBC's Revolution, he sat on a panel and stayed a few minutes afterwards chatting with reporters. For Fox, he came to the evening party to talk about the final episode of Fringe. In both cases, 90% of the questions were about Star Trek Into Darkness, and he gave nothing away. He wouldn't even talk about Daniel Craft, the Star Trek fan to whom he showed a rough cut of the film before he passed away last week, out of sensitivity to the Craft family.
One thing he did say is that it's no easier to make a sequel just because he's made the first one. "Honestly, it's never easier the next time, ever, for anything," Abrams said. "You always think, 'Oh, I've done that, it'll be easier the next time.' No, it's harder the next time. But it's important that every character need to be in the story, otherwise they shouldn't be. But I wouldn't say it was easier."
1. S.H.I.E.L.D. shcuttlebutt.
By far the network with both the biggest and the geekiest show is ABC, with the S.H.I.E.L.D. series in development. In his executive session, ABC president Paul Lee said he's fast tracking the pilot and it will be the first one he looks at for pickup consideration in the fall. Joss Whedon would have to fail colossally for this not to happen. Later that night, IGN found Lee at the ABC party and got him to confirm that the series takes place AFTER The Avengers' New York City battle, Agent Coulson and all. Man, when S.H.I.E.L.D. comes to summer TCA, that's going to be the geekiest TCA ever.
"The truth about Joss is he has some great relationships in it," Lee said. "So there are a lot of really funny male/female relationships, some very flirtatious ones that go through it. But it's also Joss, too, and it's Marvel, and there's a lot of action to it. So we haven't yet seen the pilot. We fast-tracked that before the others. We are going to see it a lot earlier than the others and we are very hopeful that that's going to move forward to series, and we will build our marketing campaign early for it. And by the way, the script is great. So I don't want to jinx it because that may not mean a good pilot or a good series, but we are very excited about it, and Joss is wonderful to work with."
Does anyone else see it as alarming that A&E felt the need to go with a 50's era decor for the Bate's Motel press meeting? I mean, they update the story to the present but then entice the press with nostalgia for the orginal's production sets? Sounds like a bait-and-switch to me.
How do you even dress up a room like the Bate's Motel dining room circa 1950's? I seriously doubt the original Bate's Motel had a dining room. What motel does?
I really want to like this but I'm very nervous. They tried to go this backstory route way back in 1990 with Psycho IV. It did not go well and they had Anthony Perkins.
Hrm, Topless Robot gets Entertainment Weekly news with a thin coat of "Most of that stuff is vaguely related to 'geek', right?" io9 gets Rob's list of the 20 worst Gobots.
I've been defending Topless Robot's new management. It takes time to adjust and find a groove. I even defended the first fast food review. But, honestly, the site doesn't really look or feel like Topless Robot any more. It is like the launch trick Marvel pulls when they switch leads inside a title, knowing that a Hercules book wouldn't sell on its own, but if it carries on from Incredible Hulk's numbering it can carry on some of the audience.
Topless Robot is looking more and more like a general entertainment site, with the thin veneer of "geek" to justify keeping the old name.
@Baines So Da Vinci isn't nerdy? JJ Abrams isn't nerdy? Wonder Women isn't nerdy? Stephen King isn't nerdy? I think your displeasure is unfortunate. But that is the benefit of the internet, you could move along to some place else. Baines...we hardly knew thee
man what is in the water today? all of the blokes we never heard of jumping ship. pro tip - if nobody heard of you before, you won't be missed - unless you sign off with a WRT level diatribe. challenge accepted internet? <y/n>
@Baines Not that it'll change your opinion any, but it's really difficult to get credentialed for the TCAs. Getting a guy on the inside to report on shows of interest to us (and I stand by the idea that all the shows mentioned are of some interest to us - I switched out those that weren't) was a bit of a coup, and far from cribbing EW news.
Though EW has Geoff Boucher, the biggest name in legit geek journalism, so any comparisons there are arguably flattering.
"I would say 80, 85% of what's in there actually really happened, and
then we've embellished it with a little bit of what I'm calling
historical fantasy, or things like that. But he has a pretty incredible
life. We didn't have to embellish as much as you would think." So quickly, can someone show me in the history books where Da Vinci started Parkour?
@Canadian.Scott Reminds me of the article I read about Burton's Sleepy Hollow when it first came out. They described it something like 'Ichabod Crane is a police detective/forensics engineer instead of a one room school teacher but otherwise it is exactly like Washington Irving's original story." Anybody who has actually read the story (or even watched the Disney cartoon) couldn't possibly make such an asinine statement. It's like saying "except for making the character of Jesus a pill popping womanizer with a chip on his shoulder we followed the story of the Bible very closely."
I am excited about SHIELD and The Following. I'm on the fence about Under the Dome. And i could do without prequels of Wonder Woman and Psycho. As for the other stories, has anyone followed Revolution? I started to watch it, gave it six episodes and then bailed.
@Canadian.Scott Under the Dome might work, but I look through King tinted glasses. The best way for it to work would to put all the reality tv stars under the dome and not give a shit about them.
@Canadian.Scott I watched a little after my boss said how great it was, for somethingto talk about at work, however I my suspension of disbelief was strained past breaking by a world in which potato clocks don't work
@Canadian.Scott I could never get past the utter idiocy of the premise, so I never watched Revolution. I probably won't watch Bates Motel, but I hope it does well for Freddie Highmore's sake. He was a good kid actor, and I'd like to see him make something of himself as he gets older.
@rabidronnie As long as it isn't more psycho movies...Revolution was a mistake, the acting was brutal, the storyline made no sense. But then again I loved The River and we all know how that worked out...i will never know what happened to Admiral Pike...
@rabidronnie @Someguy I can get through the selective stuff but the lead actress is about as emotional as a board. And then the dad from Twilight just starts fights when he had nothing else to say. Again, why does The River die and Revolution live?!? But then again i love found footage stuff.
@Someguy@Canadian.Scott@rabidronnie I think you nailed it with the word "selective." What has stopped working, what still works. . . I mean, I don't know a lot of specifics because again, I didn't watch it, but it seemed incredibly inconsistent as to what basic scientific realities have continued to work and which ones haven't.
@Canadian.Scott@rabidronnie A premise like Revolution would work for a Twilight Zone or Doctor Who episode or two, but you cannot be that undefined and selective in you plot points and make a show last.
Excited about S.H.I.E.L.D., Cult, The Following (although given Fox's abyssmal track record, I expect that if it's any good it will be cancelled after one season at most), Defiance (set in my hometown, woot woot!) and possibly the new Stephen King mini-series. Although goddamnit now I gotta read that whole 1000 page book by this summer! Anyway, tv is getting too exciting now!
my first thought when i saw what the list was going to be and how hard it was going to get ten. is would at least the shield tv show make the cut some where. or maybe the cws attempt to finaly give wonder woman her due in other media. make the cut and surrprised shield is number one . plus love that i am not the only one who thinks cult is bannons little revenge for farscapes ending
Awesome list! It's very cool to be able to see some of this "inside" stuff.
I've looked through all of the trailers, and the one that sticks out to me is the Da Vinci one. Why does everyone have a British accent if the show is supposed to be set in Italy?
@Big.Jim.Slade Starz needs something since Spartacus is ending. I have to say my opinion of Starz and the way they have dealt with Spartacus and the death of the lead actor will get me to at least try a new series from them without even knowing what it is.
They've earned my support. And I like steampunk Davinci.
Frankly I got bored with the villain of the week Arrow however I admit that I would watch the crap out of the same show if the lead were a buff female - all the better with short hair.
@Gallen_Dugall Get out of here. 1. Arrow has such a complicated and overarching plot, with every event directly leading to another, that is is beyond stupid of you to call it a villain of the week show. 2. I hate i09. I hate it. And you have the audacity to come to my haven and post one of their horrid "look at something someone did" posts?! Fan art?! A whole article dedicated to FAN ART!? And they do that multiple times DAILY.
Don't post this here. Don't link to i09 here. I don't need to see any of this. Get out.
@angry@Gallen_Dugall Yeah, I assume that by season two they'll have all the plot minutia worked out and I'll give it another shot. As for io9 no one is going to put a gun to your head to make you follow the link but I still drop into io9 for Robs bits and if I see hot Wonder Woman fan art I follow up on that too, but yes the site sucks particularily in the inability of people to have conversations about stuff - like this.
@Canadian.Scott@Someguy Ugh. I tried real life once.. I wandered around for days looking for someone with an exclamation mark over their heads. Finally had to give up; grab random people and scream at them, "Do you have a quest for me!!!!!?" "Can I go kill 10 pigeons and bring them back to you??" "I have collected 100 timbits, where do I turn them in????"
@rabidronnie @Someguy @Canadian.Scott i totally play this game but mine is set in a boring office which my wonderful company will not let me put stuff i want in.
@Someguy@rabidronnie@Canadian.Scott I play that game! Probably a different server, though. . . and cleanup is not nearly as easy as it is in "Sims". . .
Yea I've been playing that Virtual reality game that everyone been saying I should play. They call it real life. Trust me, it's not as good as people keep telling you it is. No save points; no extra lives; Turns out your also can't just jump on a guys head and take his coins either.
My turns not over yet though, I'll have to get back to it so I will be in and out for a little while.
@angry@Gallen_Dugall That's where Rob went, so if I have to ignore a few annoying posts to get to his, I'm willing to go there a couple of times a day. Not that LYT isn't kicking ass here...
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