TWO AND A HALF MEN REMAINS NO. 1

Ratings for CBS’s Two and a Half Men dipped slightly on Monday, but with 17.3 million viewers, it remained the top-rated show of the night, beating ABC’s two-hour Dancing With the Stars, which averaged 16.5 million viewers. Fox’s new dinosaur drama Terra Nova, meanwhile, held steady in its second week with 8.3 million viewers, but […]

EMMY SHINES SPOTLIGHT ON FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

Friday Night Lights, the critically praised but ratings-challenged drama, is going out with a bang. The show, which recently was able to stay alive by first being televised on DirecTV before being rerun on NBC, was nominated today (Thursday) as one of the five dramas in the best drama category in the 63rd Primetime Emmy […]

LOCATION MANAGERS GET TOUR OF UNDERUSED S.E. LOS ANGELES

In yet another effort to slow runaway production to other states and countries, the Location Managers Guild of America, aided by the California Film Commission, is organizing tours of areas in the southeastern part of Los Angeles County for studio location managers and producers. As reported by today’s (Wednesday) Los Angeles Times, the tour takes […]

SHOWTIME HALTING ORIGINAL SERIES ON NETFLIX

Netflix clearly faces a thorny issue: Why should movie studios or television networks provide their content to the online video renter when they can simply make them available on their own websites and keep all the rental profits themselves? That issue was underlined on Tuesday after it was announced that Netflix had extended its deal […]

TV, MOVIE BIZ BOOSTS L.A. ECONOMY

In what today’s (Wednesday) Hollywood Reporter described debatably as “a sign that the recession is over,” the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. reported Tuesday that location film permits in the county jumped 16 percent in 2010. While that increase may sound impressive, it comes after the number of permits declined by 23 percent in […]

MUSICAL, LESBIAN SITCOM COMING TO NBC

Robert Greenblatt is expected to take over as chairman of NBC Universal TV Entertainment this week, bringing with him two edgy series that presumably had been rejected when he served as head of entertainment for Showtime. New York magazine reported on its Vulture blog that the two shows, one a musical, the other a lesbian […]

DEXTER KILLS IN SEASON FINALE

While an audience of 2.5 million for a TV show would be regarded as disastrous in the broadcasting world, in the cable world it can represent a huge success. That’s the number of people who tuned in for the season finale of Showtime’s Dexter at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, but Showtime, the No., 2 pay-TV […]

EX-SHOWTIME CHIEF GOING TO NBC

Robert Greenblatt, who is credited with turning the CBS-owned Showtime pay-TV channel into a viable competitor to Time Warner’s HBO, will take over as chairman of NBC Entertainment once the NBC Universal-Comcast merger is completed. Greenblatt was responsible for augmenting the channel’s movie titles with such original programs as Dexter, Weeds, United States of Tara, […]

MOVIES GIVE WAY TO TV SHOWS ON DVD SALES CHART

Three season compilations of television shows nudged movies out of the DVD sales chart for last week. Indeed, the top seller for the week was ABC’s Lost: The Complete Sixth Season. The fourth season of Showtime’s Dexter also made the list at No. 4, followed by the seventh season of CBS’s NCIS. Sony’s The Back-up […]