The upcoming San Diego Comic-Con got me to thinking about what other venues there are for our readers and what is really available out there - I’ve taken a look around and came up with a short list.  This article is for all of you who might not be able to make it to San Diego.

With that said, let’s get on with it.

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BBC America’s top-rated show, Torchwood, is returning for an epic event that will span five consecutive nights as it premieres in the United States on BBC America with Torchwood: Children of Earth.

Torchwood: Children of Earth, which was created by Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, Queer as Folk) will be the lead show that launches BBC America HD.

If you’re a connoisseur of Farscape, you have a few good things to look forward to.  Especially if you’re attending San Diego Comic-Con 2009.

Comic-Con

Ben Browder and Claudia Black, creator Rockne O’Bannon and executive producer Brian Henson are going to be appearing at Comic-Con in a panel on July 24th at 10:15 a.m. in Room 6BCEF at San Diego Comic-Con.

But this might not be the only panel with Farscape in it.

Rumors have it that there may very well be another panel involving the comic book (which began publication last year) based on Farscape.  No details as of yet as to when or where, but that can be cool.

As I reported back on March 16th, The Sci-Fi Channel is changing it’s name to Syfy.  This name change is part of a brand image change by the 16-year-old network and it’s due to happen on July 7th, 2009.

“Syfy, imagine greater.” Take notice of the proper spelling.  There is no upper case F in the name.

This change is part of a plan to create their own marketable brand while still staying connected to the roots that have served them so well for more than 15 years.  It’s also a specifically coined term that they can copyright for themselves, unlike the term Sci-Fi which is generic across so many mediums.  Syfy will now make web searches and other references attributable to their own content.

We originally reported on the television panels at San Diego Comic-Con ‘09, we knew about the Sci-Fi panels that were going to be present, we did not have specific times.

Now we do.

As would be expected, We’ll be seeing cast and crew from Stargate Universe, Caprica, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, Eureka, Sanctuary and Warehouse 13.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is looking for ratings numbers in the vacuum of space

After being given the Friday night treatment by Fox, Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality didn’t fare too well.

The movie that was originally slated to be a pilot for a series that  was your standard fare from Moore, employing his style and voice to air his perspective on different human scenarios.  In this case, it was about 12 space-faring crew members who were facing isolation on a 10-year space journey, and, dealing with what looked like a faulty virtual reality system.

I enjoyed it and the majority of the Screen Rant readers who commented on my review concurred that it was a good watch.

Today we’re going to talk a little bit about House’s next season, plus casting news about Gossip Girl and Ugly Betty.

We’ve got contract news on Law and Order:SVU, insight into Wentworth Miller’s (Prison Break) next role, and some bits about Sons of Anarchy and Nip/Tuck.

We’ve also got some late-breaking bits we’ve added this afternoon with regards to the creator of My Name Is Earl, and the final season of Lost.

We have the usual weekly recap of ratings from the previous week, but it’s not the usual list.  The source is having issues distributing the information, so I’ve done the best I can this week.

And of course we wrap up with the ratings from last week.

Click to continue "Weekly TV Wrap Up - July 2nd 2009"

Is it a good thing when a lawyer starts to create comic books, writes screenplays, creates video games and can also be called a TV producer?  I call it a good start.  Especially if it’s Marc Guggenheim.

Fresh off of Eli Stone, Guggenheim’s present task is being the executive producer for ABC’s FlashForward.

FlashForward is about a moment in time when the entire population of Earth blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and during that short span of time, they get a glimpse into their future 6 months from that moment.

It’s Wednesday again, time for our regularly scheduled open discussion post!

As usual - talk about whatever you like as long as it’s related to movies, TV or Screen Rant itself. I would suggest however that there are more than enough Transformers discussions going on elsewhere.

Michael Emerson, who plays the sneaky, lying, methodical Benjamin Linus on ABC’s Lost, recently spoke with Collider about the show on the red carpet of the 2009 Saturn Awards (where Lost won Best Television Series). And Screen Rant (courtesy of Collider) has the video of the short interview for your viewing pleasure.

UpDated 7-2-09

Last year at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, the event was ruled by several big named movies that ranged from youthful vampires to illegal vigilantes.  TV was more a side-note than anything else.

This year at the 2009 Comic-Con, things will be a bit different as television programming seems to have a bigger presence than last year.

For instance, the Warner Brothers Television Group will have 11 different panels for their shows.  That’s a studio best for them.  ABC Studios will have 7 panels.  20th Century Fox will have 9 panels.

Do you think your favorite television show will be represented?

Lucky for you, as Screen Rant gets more popular we get more goodies to give away to you. This time we have copies of Knowing and Push to hand out in awesome Blu-ray format. Both of these movies were OK, and I know a lot of folks actually enjoyed them quite a bit, so here’s your chance to own them both.

The Philanthropist, starring James Purefoy (HBO’s Rome, A Knight’s Tale, Resident Evil) as Teddy Rist, started off by confusing me a bit but by the end of the episode, I found the story to have a compelling emotional element that kept me tuned in.

The show opens in the middle of a chase scene where Rist is being fired upon by some locals while on a river bank, barefoot in a jungle somewhere.  We then jump to a bar scene where he’s chatting with a young lady while she’s bar tending and he explains in a backtrack sort of fashion how he came to being shot at on this riverbank.

They use this venue of Rist talking with the bartender to recant a quick history of how he got to this point of time.

This is a DVR spoiler-free review.

“Follow me through the mirror, down the rabbit hole.  Trust me, it has to be this way.”

A rabbit hole indeed.  Ronald D. Moore has done it again giving us some brilliant writing with Virtuality as far as I’m concerned and Fox not sticking to the original plan of creating a series out of his concept is not only their loss, but ours as well.

We have 12 astronauts on a 10-year journey that becomes a potential rescue mission to save humanity.  Their space faring vessel is named the Phaeton.

The show opens with a scene that introduces the Virtual Reality system (VR) world from the ship.  We’re also almost immediately introduced to the glitch that we’ve been told about in the studio press releases.  I think glitch might be an understatement, but that’s just me.

Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality airs this Friday night (June 26th) on Fox and from this writer’s perspective, it has come down a long and harrowing path to get here.

The project started out being lined up as a television pilot and through some unknown series of decisions, Fox has again taken a proven showrunner’s idea and seemingly squashed it with their thumb.

The show that was originally slated to be a pilot for a series has been reduced to a 2-hour movie that’s being aired in the vacuum of Friday.  At least Fox is consistent in their handling of sci-fi projects.

NBC has released the schedule of dates for their fall 2009 / 2010 season.

A pair of new dramas lined up for us are Parenthood & Trauma and some returning shows are Heroes, Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order.  Southland survived it’s first season and is returning for a second.

BBC1 will be holding a very special Doctor Who episode for their Children in Need appeal efforts.

In this special one-off episode of Doctor Who, it will be the first time fans get to see Matt Smith debut in his new role as the 11th Time Lord.

It’s only a 15-minute episode that will air in November but in this special episode, we will see all 11 renditions of the good Doctor brought together.

Can it be true?  A rumor is starting to drift about the web-i-verse that there’s a movie on the horizon that will culminate Smallville’s run on The CW.

In the working theory, it will be called “Metropolis”, and it could be slated for a Christmas 2010 airing on the small screen.

Welcome to my weekly TV Wrap Up.

This week we’re chatting about the NCIS cast, Chuck season 3 insights, a bit of Fringe cast news and I ask a question about a character from Lost.  I’m also going to touch on yet another alien invasion show from TNT.  Also have some details on the DVD / Blu-ray release of season one of Lie To Me.

I wrap it up with my usual look at how shows did in the ratings from last week.

Let’s get on with it.

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NCIS Spin-off Adds Cast

Linda Hunt will be joining the cast of the NCIS spin-off as a hard-nosed former film industry technician who oversees the “backroom” support staff.

Of note, Louise Lombard was let go from the staff, as the cast seems to be constantly evolving.

Is it me, or will we have a hard time getting past the ‘ghosts’ from Linda Hunt’s past?

Source:  Entertainment Weekly

Actress Farrah Fawcett passed away today at the age of 62. Fawcett had long battled cancer - a fight which ended around 9:30 a.m. this morning in a Santa Monica hospital.

I’d been doing really well for the past few weeks, remembering to put out our Wednesday weekly discussion post right on time, but today in all the Transformers excitement it slipped my mind. Better late than never!

As usual - talk about whatever you like as long as it’s related to movies, TV or Screen Rant itself.

One of the shows I was pleasantly surprised by last year was True Blood. The series joined the vampire craze with a heavily adult-oriented take on the genre and stars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer among many others of its strong cast.

One notable cast member and a fan-favorite of the series is Alexander Skarsgård who’s been making plenty of headlines over the last few months for having been in the running for the role of Thor in the upcoming Marvel Studios film of the same name.

In season one of True Blood, he played a relatively minor background character, not appearing in all of the episodes. This season, he’s back with a much bigger role!

After a ton of speculation and “factual” rumors floating around, the time to guess is over.

Callum Blue (Dead Like Me) has been cast for the role of the ever evilly focused General Zod in Smallville.

With General Zod now cast, we can rest easy.  Right?  Maybe.

Callum has had roles in a few shows that you might have seen.  He’s been in Grey’s Anatomy, HBO’s The Tudors, Secret Diary of a Call Girl and the direct to DVD movie release of Dead Like Me.

But aside from this, there are more items to chat about in regards to possible cast news after the break.

Everyone knows the best way to sell the audience on the veracity of your own nonsense is to accompany it with a graph.  A graph demonstrates your authority, your intelligence, your organization, your analytical skills, and your mad Excel skillz; and most of the time, it need not pertain to the what’s going on.

Case in point: Dan Meth, the creative visionary behind Toy Video, demonstrates his the authority and mad skillz with the latest installment in his Pop Culture Charts series, Futuristic Movie Timeline - an analysis of the year in which classic sci-fi movies take place and their year of release, all in chronological plot order.  Meth plots these films like some modern-day Nostradamus who sees the fate of humanity at 24 frames-per-second through a magic camera lens.

It’s with great sadness that we report that Bryan Fuller is leaving his spot as consulting producer on NBC’s Heroes.

Before you wonder, he isn’t leaving due to any internal strife.  Instead, he’s working on developing some new shows / pilots for NBC Universal, the studio which produces Heroes.

The shows he’s developing are keeping him so busy that he just ran out of time for everything and something had to give. The sad news is that Heroes was the show that got the short end of the straw.

Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s legendary sidekick on The Tonight Show for thirty years, passed away early this morning at the age of 86.

According to publicist Howard Bragman, McMahon’s last moments were spent in bed at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center surrounded by his family and loving wife, Pam. McMahon had been in poor health for some years, battling everything from bone cancer to a broken neck - an injury he received in March of 2007.

Back in March of 2008, I went on a tear about the loud volume of commercials on our television sets.

We all know it, but networks say it isn’t so.  Television stations drink the fruit punch and then say that ads are not louder than the program, but that they only sound louder.  Duh!

Technically they are correct - just like the statement that it’s not the flame that hurts your finger, it’s the heat generated by the flame. Sorry TV guys, but the source is the source and that’s that.  You can use whatever words you like, but you still look the fool trying to make us think you’re right.

It’s been said that the new upcoming ABC series called FlashForward won’t be a rehash of the novel of the same name by Robert Sawyer. In fact it’s being said that it may not be what you expect at all.

FlashForward is about a moment in time when everyone on Earth blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds.  During that time, people experience visions of where they’ll be on April 29th, 2010, or 6 months into their future (That could be creepy.)

The mass black out does have its tragic side effects - People are doing everyday things when the black out happens and this creates what is described as a semi-apocalyptic moment as planes, trains and automobiles crash with unconscious people at the controls.  It’s here that the FlashForward pilot kicks in, introducing the main characters of the show.

During the break between seasons a few bits are developing in regards to the cast of the upcoming 9th season of Smallville.

The latest news I’ve seen is that Brian Austin Green is coming on board the Smallville to play the role of John Corben - or you may know him better as “Metallo.”

With several Doctor Who specials starring David Tennant coming to BBC America starting in the latter half of June, the excitement amongst fans is building.

The first of the bunch is oddly a Christmas special titled “The Next Doctor,” with David Morrissey and Dervla Kirwan. It’s airing on June 27th.  The next special to air after that one is titled “Doctor Who: Planet of the Dead” followed by “Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars” later on in 2009. Following these, the final two 2 specials will air.

In support of these last episodes with David Tennant, some cool things are going to happen for fans who will be attending the 2009 edition of Comic-Con in San Diego.