Veteran television writer Troy Kennedy Martin has died at the Age of 77.  His impressive CV includes Z-Cars and The Italian Job but it is the atmospheric environmental thriller Edge of Darkness that is perhaps his finest work.

The six-part drama starring Bob Peck and Joanne Whalley was highly influential and perhaps only matched by Paul Abbot’s State of Play in terms of mini-series as art.

Martin Campbell’s film adaptation of the series starring Mel Gibson will be released in 2010.

Troy Kennedy Martin died of liver cancer.

Well this time I have an answer.  It’s coming to E4 from Friday 4th September and will be on every week night. The show’s first season aired on BBC2 probably on the back of Alison Hannigan’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer following. Season 2 turned up on the now defunct Ttrouble before the show disappeared in to the UK television abyss. Well now’s back on tv and that news is legen………wait for it………

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E4 does seem the right home for this smart and likable comedy. The set up is an older Ted relating to his kids how he met their mother. But ignore that, Ted’s love life is boring. Really it’s about five people being mean to each other. The characters are so likeable even if they are not so sympathetic and the cast has a great chemistry. Neil Patrick Harris steals the show as the womanising Barney Stinson.

The show employs clever time jumps to delve into the characters past and future giving viewers tantalising hints at what is to come. The continuity is outstanding for the most part.

It’s a shame that E4 are marketing this as a Friends rip-off. I think it’s better than that and certainly very different. If that gets viewers in then so be it. The first season has ups and downs and at times is a little generic. But it’s likable and watchable so stick with it and you will get your laughter rewards.

Season five is about to start in the US so it is well worth investing your time and hopes in.

In the UK we are lucky to get the best scripted dramas from the US. If one channel isn’t interested then there are plenty of competitors to pick them up. For example, Sky One began showing Nip/Tuck but then dropped it and it was picked up by F/X. Shows like Dexter and Medium get airplay on satellite channels F/X and Sci Fi respectively before screening on terrestrial channels. However, some shows slip through the net.

Rescue Me, created by Peter Tolan and Dennis Leary is a tragi-comedy-drama set in the world of New york firefighters in a post 9/11 world. The show features cracking dialogue, a superb cast, sex, alcohol, family drama and tragedy. The cast is led by Dennis Leary playing Tommy Gavin, a highly flawed and potentially unlikeable character dealing with the death of his cousin, his wife leaving him and his alcohol problems. He has great support from a huge cast including Andrea Roth, Callie Thorn, Daniel Sunjata and John Scurti.

The shows first three seasons were shown on Sky One but the show was dropped due to poor ratings. Repeats of The Simpsons and shows fronted by Noel Edmonds are clearly more attractive to advertisers. It was expected that one of the many other channels would pick up Rescue Me but F/X declined and no other channel showed interest. Fans can purchase Rescue Me on itunes but a television outing seems unlikely. In the multichannel age we have Sky One, Virgin 1, Living, ITV 2 and 4, F/X and More 4 all screening US entertainment. You would think that one channel would have space for a great hourlong show.

The new US television season will begin next month.  If you just can’t wait for your favourite shows to get cancelled then here’s a treat for you.  To celebrate we look at the top five series finales ……..

5. Star Trek: The Next Generation – All Good Things… (1994)

After seven long seasons of the show that brought Trek back to television, The Next Generation came to an end right back where it began.  Q continues his trial of humanity by sending Captain Picard on a journey though time.  We get to revisit the pilot episode, old characters as well as one possible future as the Captain must solve a puzzle in three time zones.  This two-parter  written by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga proved far more satisfying than their debut TNG movie – Generation – later in 1994.

4. Angel – Not Fade Away (2004)

The Buffy spin-off had spent many seasons on the brink of cancellation.  When this happened in 2004 they decided to go out with a bang.  Season five had been forced to live with budget cuts and a new format.  With Angel and his gang now running evil law firm Wolfram and Hart, this series was supposed to be have more standalone episodes.  When the WB network announced the early cancellation of the show the producers abandoned this plan for one last story arc.  Angel is determined to take one last stand against the evil senior partners by taking out the Circle of the Black Thorn.  The ambiguous final moments show the surviving members of the team fighting an army of demons perfectly defined the show: fight the good fight against all the odds.    

3. The West Wing – Tomorrow (2006)

For seven years we had followed the presidency of Josiah Bartlett played by Martin Sheen.  This episode sees him step down from office as to be replaced by fellow Democrat Matthew Santos.  The changeover is delightfully handled as the old are displaced from their workspace and forced to look to the future. Over the last two seasons the show had widened its scope beyond the White House showing the campaign trails for both parties.  The election drew many comparisons with the real life 2008 as the old war horse republican took on a young, bright ethnic minority candidate.  In a departure from reality Alan Alda’s  Senator Arnold Vinick joined the Santos cabinet as Secretary of State

2. Six Feet Under – Everyone’s Waiting  (2005)

Six Feet Under shocked viewers by killing off the lead character Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) with 3 episodes remaining.  This did mean the show ended on an anti climax.  The show begins not with a death as was standard for the show but with the birth of Nate and Brenda’s daughter Willa.  David is forced to face his demons while Clair looks to the future by taking on a new job.  The final montage of Claire Driving to her life in New York is breathtaking flashing forward to show the deaths of all our characters.  Creator Alan Ball showed us that long television drama could be more emotional, deeper more tragic and more beautiful than the supposed higher art form of film could be.  Rest in Peace.

1. Quantum Leap – Mirror Image (1993)

Should you always give the viewers what they want?  Quantum Leap creator Donald  P. Bellisario certainly didn’t think so.  After a time travel experiment went wrong, Doctor Sam Beckett found himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time the next leap would be the leap home.   The closing text told us that Sam never made it home.  His final leap took him to a bar in on the day of his birth.  This bar is inhabited by some of the people Sam leaped into over the years and a mysterious barman who calls himself Al.  Could he be the guiding force behind Sam’s leaps?  The barman tells Sam the difference he has made to so many lives and that he can choose to keep helping or to go home.  He chooses home but first he wants to fix the marriage of his best friend and guide, Al.  Having done this he leaps away never to be seen again.  Poignant, dramatic, mysterious and tragic: all the things that make a perfect finale.

John Hughes died on August 6th while out walking in New York aged just 59. He had been retired from the movie business since 1994 but in his short time has a film maker he had left an incredible legacy of films. The quality of his teenage movies is something that has long since been forgotten by the industry.

His debut directorial effort was 16 Candles which made a star of Molly Ringwald. This film was a response to the sex obsessed revenge of the nerds style movies like Porkys. Hughes’ films were smart, heartfelt and had a truth at there core. His dialogue was superb and his characters live and breathe.

While today the multiplexes are infected with a the second wave of teen sex comedies like Superbad and Sex Drive there is little evidence of the intelligence of Hughes’ teen films. He articulated the lives of teenagers in an intelligent and revolutionary way and inspired fantastic performances from his young stars. It is perhaps in television that his legacy is most felt.

High School set shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Veronica Mars channelled the spirit of Hughes’ movies with their smart dialogue and the way they challenged stereotypes just as Hughes did in hius masterpiece The Breakfast Club. That film defined what is was to be at an american high school. The social groups are forced to co-operate on a Saturday detention: The jock; the beauty; the rebel; the recluse and the geek all discovered they had far more in common than their stereotypes suggested.

His other work included Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Weird Science, National Lampoons Vacation and Home Alone.

He will be missed.

 
This is the full trailer for Stargate Universe.  The show stars big names Robert Carlyle, Ming Na and Lou Diamond Phillips.  The show looks like a step up in quality of production design and ambition with all planets no longer represented by Canadian forrests.  It has to be an improvement over the last two years of Atlantis which became predictable and repetitive.  That show never fully met the potential of an outstanding pilot, perhaps the darker tone and serialised nature can help this show outshine the franchise’s mother show SG-1.  Expect cameos from Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks in the pilot.

Stargate Universe airs premiers on 2nd of October on Syfy.  Expect in later month on Sky 1 in the UK. Thanks to Gateworld for the trailer.

Could the Bayside High class of ‘93 be getting back together?  It certainly looks like a reunion of some kind might be happening.  Last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Mark-Paul Gosselaar appeared in full bleached-blonde character as Zack Morris.  Incredibly he seems not to have aged even slightly since 1993. 

Gosselaar was the star of the show that ran for four seasons and defined what was cool in the early 1990s to choldren on both sides of the atlantic.   Saved by the Bell also starred  Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, Dustin Diamond, Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkeley, Lark Voorhies and Dennis Haskins as high school principal Mr Belding.  With Gosselaar on board the reunion should be on.

This is no attempt to cash in on nostalgic fame.  Gossellar has had a successful acting career with starring roles in NYPD Blue, Commander in Chief and he currently plays Jerry Kellerman on TNT’s legal drama Raising the Bar.  His co-stars have also had varying degrees of success with Theissen appearing in Beverly Hills 90210 for several seasons and Elizabeth Berkeley shed her nice girl image in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls.  Lopez finished second in the 2006 season of Dancing with the Stars.

The show was a spin-off from the Junior High Drama Good Morning Miss Bliss starring Hayley Mills.  Set in Indianna  the show ran for one season on the Disney channel before being dropped.  It was the brainchild of  NBC President Brandon Tartikoff, who after the failure on Disney re-pitched to his own network.  The show was rebranded and the location was shifted to California.  The characters of Zach, Screech(Diamond), Slater (Lopez), Lisa (Voorhies) and Mr Belding (Haskins) were joined by Kelly (Theissen)  and Jessie (Berkeley).  It became one of the most successful teen programmes of all time. 

The show had spin-offs of its own both starting in 1993.  Firstly there was Saved by the Bell: The College Years which had much of the original cast but just failed to recreate that Bayside magic.  That one season led into mini-series Saved by the Bell: Wedding in Las Vegas.  Running concurrently was Saved by the Bell: The New Class which sadly ran far longer then the original at seven seasons.  Crossover was provided by Screech and Mr Belding.  The show never achieved the same iconic status as the original and suffered from a regularly changing cast.

It is always the original that will be remembered and maybe they’ll be dining at The Max just one more time.

Films that make money get sequels.That’s not always a good thing.  Toy Story is a modern classic.  Not just a great kids film or a great animation but a great film.  The makers achieved the impossible with Toy Story 2 and made an even better film.   Can they complete the trilogy?  Third parts can be notoriously difficult.  Superman 3, The Godfather part 3, Spider-man 3 and Shrek the Third are all examples of franchises looking tired and lacking creative clarity.    

However, there are reasons for hope.  This is Pixar.  Other than the inexplicable Oscar winner Ratatouille they have yet to make a bad film.  Toy Story was their baby and they have every reason to protect it.  The original cast have returned and Pixar veteran Lee Unkrich is in the directors chair with a Screenplay from Little Miss Sunshine’s Michael Arndt.

Fifteen years after the original film, and eleven years on from the sequel could be too long for most children to remember so those films will be released in new 3-D versions as a promotion for the new installment.

Toy Story 3 will be released in June 2010.

Later this year Disney will release The Princess and the Frog. It is the company’s first venture into traditional animation since 2004’s Home on the Range. At the time it was announced that this would be the last traditional animated film the company would produce. The box office numbers for these films could not compete with the computer animations made popular by Pixar and distributed by Disney. With the rise of 3-D animation it appeared as though hand drawn animation as mass entertainment was dead.

The 1990s saw Disney rejuvenated after ambitious flops such as The Black Cauldron (1985). In 1989 Disney’s child-friendly take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was released. With a new confidence they produced hit after hit from Oscar  best-picture nominee Beauty and the Beast (1991) through to The Lion King in 1994. This period known as the Disney Renaissance ended with Tarzan in 1999. After this period Disney moved away from the traditional fairy tales taking on new concepts like the sci-fi take on treasure island with Treasure Planet (2002) and drawing on Inuit mythology in 2004’s Brother Bear.  During this period Disney continued to exploit their back catalogue making unnecessary straight to DVD sequels like Lady and the Tramp 2: Scamp’s Adventure and Cinderella 2: Dreams Come True (2002).

As success for traditional animated films dwindled the Pixar revolution continued. Monster’s Inc (2001), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007) and WALL-E (2008) each took over $500,000,000 at the worldwide box office while Finding Nemo (2003) brought in more than $850,000,000.

With the success of Pixar other companies entered the world of animation production. The Shrek franchise proved lucrative for Dreamworks while Warner Brothers produced The Ant Bully (2006) and Monster House (2006). Disney no longer had a monopoly and the bar had been raised by the company they funded.

Pixar set a high standard not only for animation but for films. The writers and directors had a love of cinema creating memorable characters and classic films that appealed to both children and adults. At the turn of the century this was something the traditional animation could not do.

Ironically it was the Disney aquisition of Pixar that put them back on the path to hand drawn cartoons. One of the conditions of the sale was that John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar and director of Toy Story, became the Chief Creative Officer of the Walt Disney Animation Studios. It was he who insisted that Disney stop the DVD sequels and start producing original animated movies leading to the production of  The Princess and the Frog.

It is a new take on the frog princess story set in the French Quarter of New Orleans following Disney’s first African-American Princess, Tiana. This represents a return to the world of fairy tales that made first made Walt Disney animations so popular including songs by Randy Newman who worked on many of the Pixar films. It has been written by Ron Clements and John Musker who previously collaborated on The Little Mermaid (1989) and Aladdin (1992). They were also involved in the less successful Hercules (1997) and Treasure Planet (2004).

The Princess and the Frog is due to be released on December the 11th 2009 in the United States.

With May comes the Network upfronts and news of all the renewals, cancellations and new shows coming this autumn.  Here’s some of the news that may interest US television fans living in the UK.

For genre fans there is mixed news.  Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is gone after poor ratings on a Friday night.  Its Fox sister show Dollhouse was surprisingly given a 13 episode second season pickup despite low ratings albeit with a reduced budget. However creator Joss Whedon has a loyal fan base and DVD sales are expected to be globally strong.   Also returning with less cash to play with is NBC’s Chuck with a 13 episode 3rd season.  Lost will return for a 16 episode final season in the new year.  Psychic shows Ghost Whisperer and Medium are also to return now both on CBS.

New genre shows include a remake of V starring Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk of Firefly fame, and Flash Forward created by Brannon Braga and David Goyer who previously worked together on the extremely dull Threshold.  A new version of The Witches of Eastwick has also been picked up.

On the comedy front Scrubs comes back for an unprecedented 9th season although much of the cast will depart including leading man Zach Braff.  CBS has renewed The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother which remains bizarrely homeless in the UK.

Returning Drama’s include all the CSI shows, Numb3rs, Bones, Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, House, The Mentalist,  Gossip Girl and Cold Case.

Cancelled are Without a Trace, Life and Prison Break. ER has also bowed out after 15 years long service.
 
New shows for UK viewers to perhaps look out for will be the NCIS spin-off  NCIS: Los Angeles and  Parenthood starring Peter Krause and Maura Tierney based on the Steve Martin vehicle of the same name.  There is also a new Kelsey Grammar sitcom entitled Hank about a sacked CEO forced to move to suburbia.  Melrose Place has been resurrected to compliment the new 90210.  It’s great to see so many original ideas out there.