Showtime

Apparently nonplussed by the failure of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Seth Rogen is heading back to the billion-dollar industry that no one likes to talk about... for Showtime. Mr. Rogen, along with his partner-in-comedy arms Evan Goldberg, is developing an untitled series for the cable network about three floundering twentysomethings who grapple with life and relationships while working in a pornography store. The duo's longtime assistant, Matthew Bass, is set to write and co-executive produce the series. We guess the hope is that by hanging around someone as funny as Seth Rogen, some comedy sensibility inadvertently rubs off. (And no, that's not a porn-related pun.  read more »

Matthew Perry alert! Showtime announced that they've picked up the pilot for Mr. Perry's new series, The End of Steve, from Rescue Me creator Peter Tolan. On the show, which is described ominously as a "dark comedy", Mr. Perry will star as a talk show host in Rochester, New York trying to put both his professional and personal life back together. Sounds pretty good!

Of course this isn't actually news, since the network ordered the series in the spring and was set to face a "significant penalty" if the pilot wasn't picked up. But who cares! Any excuse we have to extol the virtues of our favorite Friend is an opportunity we'll take.

It's always been a huge bummer to find your favorite TV show episode on YouTube only to have the content police take it down within minutes. But now,  in their scramble to increase ad revenues, YouTubehas the daggers out for sites like Hulu, NBC.com and ABC.com by offering full-length episodes of TV shows on the site.

They'll start with shows from CBS, including The Young and the Restless, and the original 90210 and Showtime's Dexter and Californication. YouTube said it is in discussions with other media partners, but declined to elaborate. According to the Wall Street Journal, they will sell commercial slots for advertisements sewn into the full-length shows.  read more »

Showtime is delving into the depths of the 70's with its new show Studio. While still in development, producers say the project will look at New York City nightlife through the lens of its oft-heralded dark heart: Studio 54.

"The show is less about the history of Studio 54 than it is about New York in the late '70s, what people were going through, the political and social issues," writer Chad Hodge told the Hollywood Reporter. "Studio 54 is the backdrop for exploring that."

Studio won't be another docu-drama like the movie 54. The show will use Studio 54's co-founder Steve Rubell as a fictional character and recount the months leading to the club's April 1977 opening, according to the Reporter.  read more »

Showtime gave the greenlight to their new comedy Nurse Jackie, starring Sopranos First Lady Edie Falco. They're also giving the First Lady of MILFs, Mary-Louise Parker, two more seasons of Weeds.

Ms. Falco's series will begin production in New York in the fall. Episodes will air in the spring or early summer 2009, according to Variety. She'll star as a New York City nurse working in an "urban" hospital and juggling her personal life.

"Nothing is more thrilling for us than bringing Edie Falco to Showtime in this unique, quirky, touching comedy/drama," said Showtime's President of Entertainment, Robert Greenblatt at a press conference Friday.  read more »

Prepare to see lots of Weinstein movies on Showtime soon. Starting with its 2009 release schedule, including Nine with Daniel Day-Lewis and Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards "spaghetti western," the pay channel has signed an exclusive seven-year theatrical-movie-output deal with the Weinsteins. (By the way, Brad Pitt and Mr. Tarantino are allegedly meeting in France today to discuss a Bastards collaboration).

Showtime is thumbing their noses at Paramount Pictures, MGM and Lionsgate, which are canceling their output deal with the pay channel and starting their own separate TV network, set to kick off late in 2009.

Variety reports:

"This deal reinforces a strategy that will give us a diverse slate of films to go with our original series," said Matt Blank, chairman and CEO of Showtime Networks.  read more »

• 0 comments

George Clooney's production company will produce a new half-hour comedy for Showtime called The Fall of Bob. The lead character, Bob (obviously), will narrate his life through flashbacks as he propels himself from a building. Morbid stuff. Variety is reporting that Showtime has been busy courting the big names since greenlighting the Steven Spielberg-produced, Diablo Cody-penned United States of Tara.

The channel also just piloted the darkly comedic "The End of Steve," from Matthew Perry and Peter Tolan .

When news broke that Eliot Spitzer had been patronizing a high-class prostitute, one thing everyone seemed to want to know was what, exactly, he’d asked his call girl to do. It was “unsafe,” in the words of “Kristen,” a.k.a. Ashley Alexandra Dupre—but could that have been an excuse she fabricated in hopes of unloading an undesirable client? Speculation was all over the map, from unprotected sex to anal to dangerous S&M to wearing socks in bed (not unsafe, sure, but certainly annoying). For a few days there, as we marveled over the amount of money earned by the girls at Emperors Club VIP and wondered over their wealthy clients and envied Ms. Dupre’s Flatiron apartment, hookers were on the brain. Are their lives better or worse than ours? At the top end, at least, their jobs actually sounded more like dating than whoring.  read more »

The Smithsonian Channel is getting all historical on us (that's just what they do!) with The True Story. They'll partner with Showtime to produce the five-hour series. It will look at the real-life roots of popular films and characters, including Indiana Jones, Ian Fleming's James Bond, Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame and the Amityville house, according to Broadcasting & Cable. We wonder what they'd have to say about Alvy Singer ...

With the strike on CBS's bank of crime and punishment programming is getting low. CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves announced that the network is looking to its sister channel, Showtime, to fill in the gaps. Will Dexter, the mediocre-written, yet highly addictive show about a forensics cop who moonlights as a serial killer make it to network television?  read more »