SOAPnet books another season of Night Shift
When something’s a success, a follow up is inevitable. Therefore, the news that SoapNet is launching a second season of General Hospital: Night Shift, commencing Tuesday, July 22, is no big surprise. The surprise will be who is going to be involved in the daytime soap spinoff that airs once a week on SoapNet at 11 o’clock. Last season, actors for General Hospital, including Kimberly McCullough, Jason Thompson and Steve Burton did double-duty. And they weren’t alone. Some new characters appeared on Night Shift, but the draw was definitely the daytime stars.
SoapNet ordered 13 new episodes of Night Shift and this year the show will be produced in high def. Production begins next month, and unlike last year’s edition, the show will be filmed on new stages dedicated solely to Night Shift instead of sharing space with General Hospital.
The new Night Shift will be executive produced by Lisa De Cazotte (Passions, All My Children, One Life To Live) and written by Sri Rao (MTV’s What Goes On), but General Hospital’s Jill Farren Phelps and Robert Guza, Jr., exec produce and headwriter respectively, will oversee their efforts.
“Sri has worked closely with Bob and Jill, scoping out where the storylines are going to be on General Hospital,” said ABC daytime chief Brian Frons. “One thing we heard from fans was that there were some disconnects. We’re working hard to make sure there will be more consistency tying the shows together better.”
That’s very true. Night Shift was fun, but it seemed to be playing in a parallel universe to General Hospital when it played in 2007. What you saw in daytime wasn’t reflected in the Night Shift storylines, so there was a jarring effect. Rumors have been flying about who may or may not be involved in the new Night Shift. One, which seems unlikely, is that Jack Wagner — currently on CBS’s The Bold and the Beautiful as Nick Marone — would be lured to Night Shift to play his GH character Frisco Jones. Considering how ABC nixed GH’s Finola Hughes’ moonlighting on CBS’s The Young and the Restless, it would be unbelievable to think CBS would agree to let Wagner moonlight on ABC.
The other hot rumor suggests that Antonio Sabato, Jr. (Melrose Place) would be coming back to the GH world as Jagger Cates. He was last on the soap in 1995.
The Simpsons: Apocalypse Cow - VIDEO
(S19E17) “Sorry, Lise. I can’t be a vegetarian. I love the taste of death.” — Bart Simpson
Another Bart-centric episode, which means another decent installment of The Simpsons. It’s unfortunate that these types of episodes couldn’t have been dispersed more evenly throughout the season. This would have made for a less Homer-centric run of shows during the first half of the year — something that many fans (or maybe just me) were expressing concern about.
As mentioned in previous reviews, shows that feature Lisa and/or Bart tend to be more interesting in nature because there are more dimensions to these characters than Homer or Marge. Because of their diverse personalities and passions there is more to explore with the younger Simpsons; more unique situations where they can be placed. Sometimes, they are right in their element. Other times they are put in a scenario that they are initially uncomfortable in but eventually adapt. Such is the case of this week’s episode.
One would think that placing Bart in a nature-related environment would be like putting Dustin Diamond into an Academy Award nominated movie: it just seems un-natural. Yet, Bart adapted quite well as a member of the 4-H. Perhaps it was the chance to drive a large piece of farm machinery that drew him to the club. Eventually, driving the harvester across clotheslines and piles of manure (which turned into DVD copies of Pirates of the Caribbean 3) wasn’t the only thing Bart expressed interest in. As the Simpson-universe summer began the young Simpson boy took interest in animal husbandry in order to win a contest.
If you think about it Bart has always been a defender of the weak. Yes, he’s always on the case of people like Lisa, Martin and Rod and Todd, but he is more than willing to come to their aide when it is needed. That’s why he was a good fit for his little runt of a cow named Lou. Through determination and a little help from another 4-H member named Mary (voiced by Zooey Deschanel), Bart was able to pull Lou through his paces and make him a winner. This really made him a loser since Lou was headed to the feed yard and imminent slaughter.
Of course, Bart wasn’t going to let Lou get turned into Sloppy Joe without a fight. This is Bart’s M.O.: not very nice to humans, but very kind to animals. In the many episodes where Bart has had to make a decision about the fate of one animal or another he has usually gone the side of good. We can go as far back “Bart Gets an Elephant” to see how kind he is to his four-legged friends. Replace Stampy with Lou and you have the same premise.
But, it was easier to save Stampy as Bart normally wouldn’t eat any of the elephant’s relatives on a bun with ketchup and mustard. Still, he made the right decision to save Lou and get him to a better place. Since Bart is a man of action instead of ideas he needed to incorporate Lisa into his plans. With the help of her radical environmentalist friends (who said a prayer to the spirit of the chain link fence before cutting it open) they were able to take Lou to Mary’s house. Little did Bart know that Mary was one of Cletus’ children (”It was a regular city birth, in a gas station”.)
After being a one-joke character for many seasons, Cletus has been promoted to supporting character status as of late. Cletus is a good character to have because it allows the producers of The Simpsons to show the other side of the city that isn’t revealed as much. We got to see that side in this week’s installment as, under the rules of the hill people, Bart and Mary needed to get married. Blame it on his request to have her take Lou to keep him safe.
The wedding scene was pretty amusing, but it went so fast that it was hard to catch all of the jokes. Most amusing was the contradiction of the caterer who was trying to properly position the spittoon. Also funny was what Brandine gave Mary as something old (a rebel flag), something new (one her baby brothers?), something burrowed (a possum?) and Something Stew. Then there was the ceremony itself, where the preacher assumed that Mary was going to say ’I Do’ since the hill people didn’t really care what the women-folk had to say.
After Lou was rescued by Apu (hey, that rhymes) Marge and the family needed to rescue a cow-costumed Homer (who didn’t have much to do this episode) from being made into some very fatty ground chuck at the Laughter House. Sure, it was jokey and you knew that Homer was going to be saved, but it was an amusing moment. The best line of the night came from Bart at the very end of the episode when he said that he was proud to say that he had a cow, man.
Some other observations about this week’s episode:
- No sub-plot at all this episode, unless you consider Marge and Homer trying to get Maggie to eat greens as a sub-plot. That’s okay, because there was enough story that a secondary storyline wasn’t needed.
- This week’s Blackboard joke: A person’s a person no matter how Ralph. Meh.
- Six hours of Saturday morning cartoons? The Simpsons really do live in another universe! There hasn’t been a broadcast network that has shown six hours of cartoons since the late 90’s. Then again, there hasn’t been a host like Krusty introducing the cartoons in several decades.
- The Trans-Clown-O-Morphs harken back to the days when kids were asked to enter the secret code into the decoder rings they found in their cereal boxes to find out the name of the next adventure. Oh, plus The Transformers. By the way, would you ever tune into a episode of the Trans-Clow-O-Morphs?
- Homer was very family-oriented this episode as well as fairly low-key. It was surprising to see him pass on having Lou stay with them when Bart suggested it. Usually Homer is all gung-ho for those types of things.
Next week — Lisa goes to Sundance.
Andrea Evans returning to One Life to Live
On July 15, 2008, One Life to Live will celebrate its fourth decade on the air. As part of the festivities, a long-time fan favorite is returning to the fold. Actress Andrea Evans is coming back to One Life to Live as Tina Lord Roberts, a role she’s played in two stints on the show, 1978 to 1981, and again from 1985 to 1990. Other actresses have played this part at other times, but for die-hard fans, Andrea Evans is the real Tina. She’s the one who survived a plunge down the Iguaza Falls in Argentina, the one who romanced Max and Cord, the one who drove Viki crazy. In short, this is a very welcomed return. She’ll begin appearing in early June.
The actress, who has been keeping busy with roles on The Bold and the Beautiful and most recently on Passions, told Soap Opera Digest last June that her all time favorite role was Tina. “In every actor’s life, you hope for a role that becomes bigger than yourself and for me, Tina was that role.” No argument here.
“Even though Andrea has not appeared on OLTL since 1990, she has remained among the most requested characters to return to the show,” said executive producer Frank Valentini. “I welcome her home to the role where she made an indelible mark on our audience.”
The return of Tina opens the door for other comebacks. When last seen in Llanview, Tina had divorced scoundrel David Vickers and left Pennsylvania to start over in Baltimore. According to ABC, “Tina has endured a life-altering experience and will have a mysterious connection to one of Llanview’s most powerful citizens. Also, upon her return, Tina will cross paths with her sister Viki and her brother Todd.”
Behind the scenes, there’s another story as well. When Andrea Evans left the show in 1990 it was because she had been unable to shake a stalker. The culprit had been so persistent that he’d even broken into the upper Manhattan studios where OLTL shoots. Shaken and disturbed, Andrea moved to Los Angeles and has worked there ever since. This marks her first employment at OLTL since the time of that stalker.
Could Jericho come back?
I know, I know, we’ve all heard those words before. It seems that every other show that gets canceled these days has a “could it come back on another network?” addendum, a glimmer of hope that somehow, some way, a show that had a small but loyal following will actually survive. Unfortunately, 9.9 times out of 10 it doesn’t happen.
But it could happen to Jericho. According to Brian Stelter at The New York Times, CBS/Paramount execs have been having secret talks with Comcast (yes, Comcast) about doing something with the show for a third season. Now, this might seem like an odd, desperate play for another season if it wasn’t for the fact that NBC has already done something very similar to this with DirecTV, twice. First they had a deal with the satellite provider to air Passions, but that was a big bust (sorry, Passions fans), but they have a new deal to air another season of Friday Night Lights. The new season will start airing on DirecTV in October, and then repeats will air on NBC in early 2009.
This is by no means a done deal. Just because NBC did it with Friday Night Lights doesn’t mean this is going to become a natural thing. But it’s good to see that we now have other outlets for TV shows that have an audience, just not an audience that’s big enough to warrant being on in prime time on the major networks. We now have cable, satellite, the web. Hell, maybe at some point the networks will give all the rights to a show to a really rich person like Bill Gates and private citizens can start producing TV shows and put them online.