[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing. E! Online caught up with Lost star Matthew Fox in Monte Carlo, where he was on hand to attend the Monte Carlo Television Festival, and got the actor to tease some details about Lost 's sixth and final season. Fox, who said that Lost will end with "an incredibly powerful, very sad and beautiful way," went on to say " "I think it is going to be very satisfying and cathartic and redemptive and beautiful. I've talked to Damon pretty extensively and every time I talk to him it's sort of surprising how moving it is just to talk about it." As for the beginning of Season Six, look for the action to begin with the reveal of just what happened after Juliet seemed to detonate the hydrogen bomb, with Fox teasing, "It's very surprising and probably fairly confusing initially to the audience... Like a third of the way in [to the season] I would guess we are going to [settle] in one time frame and it

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

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. In a surprise twist, ABC has opted to cancel comedy series Samantha Who , after it was widely believed that the network would renew the Christina Applegate-led comedy. The reason behind the cancellation was budget-cutting by the network and the comedy series was unable to reduce its budget enough to make a third season financially viable for ABC. The network had attempted to transition Samantha to a multi-camera format from single-camera in efforts to cut as much as half a million dollars per episode. ( Variety ) NBC has given out an eleventh hour renewal to long-running legal procedural Law & Order , bringing the series' total to twenty seasons, tying it with Gunsmoke for the longest running drama series on television. It's believed that the order is for sixteen episodes. NBC will unveil their fall schedule to advertisers later today. ( Hollywood Reporter ) CBS is set to unveil its fall schedule to advertisers on Wedne

Welcome to (a very early edition of) your Monday morning television briefing on the first day of the 2009 network upfronts. In a surprising twist, FOX has renewed drama series Dollhouse for a second season. Dollhouse , which secured a thirteen-episode order from the network, is expected to remain on Friday evenings next season. Variety 's Cynthia Littleton writes, "The 20th Century Fox TV fantasy drama starring Eliza Dushku has delivered modest but consistent ratings on a low-trafficked night, thanks to Whedon's built-in fan base." It's believed that the renewal was secured after the studio agreed to drastically reduce the series' budget and accept a significantly lower license fee. Just what that decision will mean for the writing staff and cast of Dollhouse remains to be seen. ( Variety ) Good news for Bones fans (even those irked by the season finale's twist): FOX and studio 20th Century Fox Television have signed a deal to renew Bones for not one b

Welcome to your Thursday morning television briefing. Just what will happen with bubble series like Chuck and Dollhouse ? It looks like the fate of many of this year's bubble series, including those and such series as Cold Case, The Unit, My Name is Earl, Scrubs , Gary Unmarried, and Old Christine , will come down to the wire. "Negotiations continue on fan favorites Chuck and Dollhouse , with the shows facing cost-cutting requests from their respective networks, NBC and Fox, and their pickup odds seeming to shift from moment to moment," writes Hollywood Reporter 's James Hibberd. "Both could go down to the wire." ( Hollywood Reporter ) FOX and NBC are close to locking their fall schedules and will do so by tomorrow. FOX is said to be considering ordering a sixth season of reality series So You Think You Can Dance to air this fall, immediately after the fifth season runs this summer. Other possibilities include overweight dating series The Fatchelor , whic

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. NBC has confirmed that they have passed on David E. Kelley's legal drama Legally Mad , which will not be going to series. Project, which starred Charity Wakefield, Hugh Bonneville, Kristin Chenoweth, Jon Seda, Loretta Devine, and Kurt Fuller as the denizens of a quirky Chicago law firm, has a rather hefty multi-million dollar penalty against it, which NBC will have to pay out to Warner Bros. Television after making a series commitment to the project last year. It's not anticipated that the studio will shop the project to other outlets. In other pilot news, ABC comedy pilot Let It Go (a.k.a. The Bridget Show ), starring Lauren Graham ( Gilmore Girls ), is now believed to be "dead." ( Variety ) The Peacock is also said to have killed procedural drama Lost & Found , which starred Katee Sackhoff and Brian Cox. There were rumors that the Universal Media Studios-produced pilot was being shopped to USA but The Hollyw

In a position that is bound to make me unpopular with the legions of Dollhouse fans, I have to say that I found Friday evening's season finale of Dollhouse ("Omega"), written and directed by Tim Minear, an illogical and messy affair. Following a first season that was fraught with behind-the-scenes complications and showcased an often disjointed approach to serialized storytelling, the finale failed to pay off some of the more intriguing story threads that had been slowly weaving together throughout the eleven or so preceding episodes and offered an Alpha (Alan Tudyk) that seemed bizarrely at odds with how he had been previously presented within the series. "Omega" also suffered from an odd emphasis on telling rather than showing some important beats (meet Adelle: exposition dump) and potentially wrapped the series with a nonsensical ending that didn't in any way feel earned. (Not helping matters: the last scene was in fact culled from the final scene of Jo

Despite the identity of Dollhouse 's malevolent Active, codenamed Alpha, leaking over the internet a few months ago, the reveal in last Friday evening's episode of Dollhouse ("Briar Rose") that Alpha had managed to infiltrate the Dollhouse with the help of Paul Ballard... in the guise of Dollhouse designer Steven Kepler, left many viewers' jaws on the ground. Dollhouse 's Alpha and the faux Steven Kepler were, of course, played by frequent Joss Whedon collaborator Alan Tudyk, best known as Wash on Whedon's short-lived FOX series Firefly (and the subsequent big screen adaptation Serenity ). Tudyk participated in a conference call on Monday with press to discuss his role on Dollhouse , what a potential Season Two could mean for Alpha, and how on earth Wash got to play Dollhouse 's "god-like" Big Bad, who Tudyk says is comprised of 43 different personalities. (Just don't expect one of them to be Steve the Pirate.) So was waltzing off with

With only two episodes left of FOX's Dollhouse , the pressure is on for Agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) to locate the Dollhouse while Echo (Eliza Dushku) and the other Actives deal with their own growing self-awareness. What better time than the present then to take a look back at the last ten or so episodes of Season One of Dollhouse ... and take a look into the future with a glimpse at some of the action from the next two episodes, thanks to the good folks at FOX? But beware: there are spoilers for the penultimate episode and the season finale lurking in the below video. You've been warned. Dollhouse airs tonight at 9 pm ET/PT on FOX.

Welcome to your Monday morning television briefing. Timothy Olyphant ( Damages ) has been cast in FX's untitled Elmore Leonard project, which is based on a short story by Leonard entitled "Fire in the Hole." Olyphant will play U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens who returns to his hometown in Kentucky. "He has a certain jaggedness, but he also loves his job," said creator/executive producer Graham Yost. "He is like an anachronism: He wears a hat, cowboy boots and a holster on his hip. It's a little bit like he was born 100 years too late." Project, from Sony Pictures Television and Timberman/Beverly Prods., will be directed by Michael Dinner and will start shooting at the end of May. ( Hollywood Reporter ) The Chicago Tribune 's Maureen Ryan has a sneak peek at three scenes from Wednesday evening's 100th episode of ABC's Lost , entitled "The Variable." (Gee, does that title remind you of another famous installment?) All I can say is th

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. The Chicago Tribune 's Maureen Ryan talks to Joss Whedon about Dollhouse 's chances for a second season in a massive new Q&A. "I assumed it was dead in the water because the network was refusing to air the thirteenth [episode]," Whedon told Ryan about Dollhouse . "Not refusing, but just not interested. I assumed that meant the bell tolled for us. And they made a point of calling and saying, 'That is not what it means, and we'll keep you posted. I think they want it to succeed. I think they're getting it. They need it to succeed enough for them to pay for it. So I'm oddly hopeful but I'm also ready for anything." ( Chicago Tribune 's The Watcher ) NBC is in talks to pick up an untitled comedy project that will star former Will & Grace lead Debra Messing, who last appeared in the USA series The Starter Wife . The comedy project, written by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott (