Gale Harold Will Have Recurring Role on The CW’s New “Hellcats” Series

Pop the champagne Gale Harold fans, he's coming back to TV!

Your favorite star, who we loved as Brian on Queer as Folk and Jackson on Desperate Housewives, returns to television this fall in a recurring role on the new CW series Hellcats.

Executive producer Kevin Murphy mentioned this casually onstage during the Television Critics Assn. Summer Press Tour so when the Hellcats session ended, I made a beeline to him and asked for all the details!

Gale plays Memphis lawyer Julian Parish and the teacher of the show’s main character of Marti Perkins (Aly Michalka).

“He’s in a bunch of episodes but he’s not technically a regular,” Murphy said. “He plays Julian Parish who is sort of like James Woods in True Believer. He’s one of those lawyers who’s made a choice not to go for the big bucks. He works sort of in a storefront thing and the way he pays the bills is he teaches at the local university. And he used [the students] as free labor. They’re his paralegals, they do his legwork for him and he’s in the process of trying to get a three strikes law overturned.”

Greg from "Greg in Hollywood" asked Murphy what made him want to cast Gale and his answer showed what a big admirer he is of the actor: “Oh my God, I was such a fan of his on Queer As Folk. He has the ability to be really, really wicked smart and also just really kind of sexy and immersive, and his character, he pulls you in. He’s a seducer and I think all the great lawyers are seducers.”

A seducer huh? we wondered if he is going to be the straight version of Brian Kinney.

Replied Kevin: “He’s a guy who, he loves the sound of his own voice, he’s an arrogant dick with his heart in the right place. He basically puts his money where his mouth is.”

Then he added: “I didn’t say he was straight. … I didn’t say he wasn’t though.”

AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen was standing with Greg and asked Murphy to clarify the sexuality of Gale’s character.

“Honestly, I haven’t decided, I’m not being coy,” Murphy said. “We’re not dealing with that part of him [yet]. I’m not trying to tease you. I’m open to anybody being anything is more my point.”

Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed!

The CW Releases It's 2010/2011 Fall TV Line-Up

For the first time, the CW will have an all-original series lineup.

The network, launched in 2006 after the merger of the WB and UPN channels, said Wednesday that it will launch two freshman dramas in the fall along with its returning shows, which finally will give the CW a weekday schedule free of slots devoted to repeats.

The CW hopes to build off freshman hit "The Vampire Diaries" with action-drama "Nikita," and give its new cheerleader soap "Hellcats" some help from "America's Next Top Model."

During the CW's "upfront" presentation to advertisers at Madison Square Garden, executives emphasized the network's online-savvy young demos, noting that it has more Twitter followers than any other broadcaster.

The CW is the first broadcaster to sell its entire fall lineup as on-air ads bundled with online streaming ads, converging the two mediums into a single ad sales focus. All of the CW's fall shows will be available online three days after their linear airing, complete with commercials from the network's linear advertisers.

On Mondays, "90210" will be paired with "Gossip Girl," linking two shows with a high concentration of young female viewers. Tuesdays will have "One Tree Hill" and the sophomore season of "Life Unexpected." On Wednesdays, "Top Model" will lead into "Hellcats." Thursdays has "Vampire" into "Nikita." And on Fridays, the 10th and final season of "Smallville" will be joined by "Supernatural," a duo that performed well together on the network previously.

The CW plans to pick up "a few" more shows for midseason, raising the possibility that it will have more inventory next year. Between the network's use of repeat slots and not having backup programs to replace the occasional disappointment, like "Melrose Place," the CW's lineup developed ratings potholes this season that can stymie audience flow.

With returning shows "One Tree Hill" and "Life Unexpectedly" only having 13-episode orders -- "Then we'll see how they do," Ostroff said -- the network's schedule could change significantly in midseason. But as long as those changes keep original content on the air, the CW has a shot at some year-over-year growth.

The CW has Stake in 'The Vampire Diaries'

The CW has given early pickups for the 2010-11 season to its frosh hotshot "The Vampire Diaries" and four other signature skeins.

Pickup of Warner Bros. TV's "Vampire Diaries" is a no-brainer for the C-Dub given the show's solid ratings perf and buzz factor. Also renewed for the coming season are "America's Next Top Model" and Warner Bros. dramas "Gossip Girl," "Supernatural" and "90210."

Not on the list is CW mainstay "Smallville," also from Warner Bros. TV. There was speculation that this season would be the last for the 9-year-old drama, but all signs suggest the show will keep going for a 10th season in 2010-11. Another CW longtimer, "One Tree Hill," also has a better-than-50/50 shot at returning for an eighth season.

A question mark on the CW's current sked is "Melrose Place," the Tuesday companion to "90210" that struggled in its run earlier in the season. The show has been off the air since early December and is set to return March 9, when it will face tough competish on Tuesday from "American Idol."

The jury is also still out on midseason entry "Life Unexpected," which has drawn kind words from crix but sluggish ratings to date in the Monday 9 p.m. berth behind "One Tree Hill."

"Vampire Diaries" has been the clear standout for CW this season. The skein that gives CW a piece of the undead zeitgeist stirred up by the "Twilight" pics and HBO's "True Blood" ranks as the net's top show in its target demo of adults 18-34 (2.5 rating/8 share). It's averaged a strong 4.6 million viewers in the competitive Thursday 8 p.m. berth.

Vampire Diaries Scores Full Season Pick-Up

The CW has picked up The Vampire Diaries for a full season!

The show boasted the network’s best premiere ratings since the network’s inception and had 3.8 million viewers in its latest episode. There’s an order in for nine more episodes of the show!

Variety reports that Melrose Place also got a pick-up, but for five episodes - the hope is that Heather Locklear’s upcoming appearances will help the show win more viewers for the rest of the season.

Congratulations to both casts on the pick-ups!

Fall TV Premieres: Friday Night

This year's Fall TV Premiere Week continues tonight as several of your favorites return for their TGIF engagement. Here's what's new...

DOLLHOUSE (FOX 9:00 pm): Season two of this Sci-Fi drama with Echo (Eliza Dushku), a programmable human employed/enslaved by a shadowy organization, will include more character story lines into the mission-of-the-week template.

GHOST WHISPERER (CBS 8:00 pm): The fifth season starts off with Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) going through a traumatic labor scene which was direct by Hewitt. Then the action leaps forward five years to Melinda and Jim (David Conrad) now a doctor that is the centerpiece of the dark places the producers intend to go.

LAW & ORDER (NBC 8:00 pm): Entering it's 20th season, with the producers promising to get even rippier-from-the-headlines including an episode on the shooting of an abortion doctor and one which puts Dick Chenet and the torture clique on trial.

MEDIUM (CBS 9:00 pm): Now on CBS, season six will pick up four months after NBC's June finale with Allison (Patricia Arquette) out of a coma. Also watch out for the Halloween episode in late October which will incorporate footage from George A. Romero's 1968 classic "Night of the Living Dead."

NUMB3RS (CBS 10:00 pm): Season six will stay focused on solving crimes after Anita (Navi Rawat) responds to Charlie's (David Krumholtz) proposal. Gary Cole will guest star in an episode where he turns up as a suspected sniper with plenty of math involved.

SMALLVILLE (THE CW 8:00 pm): Clark's (Tom Welling) relationship with Lois (Erica Durance) provides the heart of season nine. Lois will hold the key to Clark's journey which you will begin to learn on the last second of the premiere episode.

SOUTHLAND (NBC 9:00 pm): On the second season opener, Lydia (Regina King) finds herself teamed up with an aggressive new cop (Amaury Nolasco) after the shooting of her partner Russell (Tom Everett Scott). In addition, more details about the private lives of rich-boy-turned-cop Ben (Ben McKnenzie) and closeted blowhard John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) will unfurl.

All schedules are based on Eastern Time.

CW Gives Full-Season Order to 'Tree'

The CW has given a full-season order to veteran drama "One Tree Hill," and has also ordered additional scripts for frosh entries "The Vampire Diaries" and "Melrose Place."

The netlet had ordered just 13 episodes of "One Tree Hill" this season, but the early pickup now secures the show a full seventh season.

As for "Diaries," the CW has picked up nine more scripts - a good sign that a full-season order is in the cards. And it's no surprise: Show holds the record as the CW's most-watched premiere ever (4.9 million viewers).

Then there's "Melrose," which has so far been a disappointment for the Dub. But net execs are still holding out hope for a turnaround - especially once Heather Locklear shows up in November. The CW believes the show is creatively on track enough to earn an order for six additional scripts.

CW execs were waiting Wednesday night to see how the second episode of its other new drama, "The Beautiful Life: TBL," performs. That show struggled in its opening and now faces even tougher competition vs. the launch of ABC's highly touted 9 p.m. comedies.

Fall TV Premieres: Vampire Diaries & Supernatural

The CW continues it's efforts to be the first to premiere it's new Fall TV shows before the rest of the networks.

Tonight we can finally catch the premiere of "The Vampire Diaries," their answer to HBO's "True Blood" and the Twilight movie series. In addition, the third season of "Supernatural" premieres tonight.



Here's what The CW has posted on their website about "The Vampire Diaries":

Four months after the tragic car accident that killed their parents, 17-year-old Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev, "DeGrassi: The Next Generation") and her 15-year-old brother, Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen, "Everwood"), are still adjusting to their new reality. Elena has always been the star student; beautiful, popular and involved with school and friends, but now she finds herself struggling to hide her grief from the world. Elena and Jeremy are now living with their cool-but-overwhelmed Aunt Jenna (Sara Canning, "Smallville"), who is doing her best to be a surrogate parent.

Elena manages to find some comfort with her familiar social circle – best friend Bonnie (Katerina Graham, "17 Again"), frenemy Caroline (Candice Accola, "Juno"), and former boyfriend Matt (Zach Roerig, "Friday Night Lights"), but Jeremy is on a more dangerous path, hanging out with the stoners and using drugs to hide his pain. Jeremy is also trying to figure out why Matt's sister, Vicki (Kayla Ewell, "The Bold and The Beautiful"), is suddenly rejecting him and hanging out with Jeremy's rival, Tyler (Michael Trevino, "Cane").

As the school year begins at Mystic Falls High, Elena and her friends are fascinated by a handsome and mysterious new student, Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley, "Fallen"). Stefan and Elena are immediately drawn to one another, although Elena is puzzled by Stefan's increasingly bizarre behavior when he appears suddenly at the cemetery where her parents are buried. What she doesn't realize is that Stefan is hiding a dark, deadly secret of his own – the fact that he's a vampire. At a bonfire party the next night, Elena and Stefan are just getting to know each other when chaos erupts after Vicki is attacked and left bleeding from a savage bite to the neck.

Fearing that he knows who is responsible for the attack, Stefan returns home and finds his older brother, Damon (Ian Somerhalder, "Lost"), whom he hasn't seen for 15 years. Damon is also a vampire, and the two brothers have a long and bitter history. Damon ridicules Stefan for rejecting their legacy of violence and brutality, but he understands his brother's obsession with Elena, since she looks exactly like a woman Stefan loved more than a century ago; a woman that Damon tried to make his own. Now these two vampire brothers – one good, one evil – are at war for Elena's soul and for the souls of her friends, family and all the residents of Mystic Falls, Virginia.

Based on the series of books by L. J. Smith, The Vampire Diaries is from Alloy Entertainment and Bonanza Productions Inc in association with Warner Bros. Television and CBS Television Studios with executive producers Kevin Williamson ("Scream," "Dawson's Creek"), Julie Plec ("Kyle XY," "Wasteland"), Leslie Morgenstein ("Gossip Girl," "Private") and Bob Levy ("Gossip Girl," "Privileged"). Marcos Siega ("Dexter") directed the pilot.

I've been sucked right in to watching this show tonight. I hope it turns out to be a hit!

Fall TV Premieres: 90210 & Melrose Place

The cast of Melrose Place

Tonight we have the pleasure of welcoming the first two shows to the 2009/2010 Fall premiere season and they are both on The CW.

The CW is promoting these shows with taglines such as: "Tuesday is the new Hump Day" and "Menage a Tues". And how appropriate it is since the two shows premiering tonight are 90210 (for it's second season) and Melrose Place, it's premiere show.

Both shows are new versions of the 1990s FOX favorites Beverly Hills,90210 and Melrose Place. They have been updated to include storylines related to our current decade along with a sleuth of new cast members and characters.


Here's what The CW has to say about the new Melrose Place:

In an elegant Spanish-style apartment complex in the trendy Melrose neighborhood of Los Angeles, the lives and relationships of a diverse group of 20-somethings intertwine to form a close-knit surrogate family.

Sydney Andrews (Laura Leighton, the original "Melrose Place") is the landlady, still beautiful at 40, and a central figure in the lives of all her tenants, especially handsome and rebellious David Breck (Shaun Sipos, "Shark"). Sydney started an affair with David despite her turbulent history with his estranged father, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro, the original "Melrose Place"). Both father and son learned through experience that Sydney was not above using blackmail to control people.

Another tenant, high-powered publicist Ella Simms (Katie Cassidy, "Supernatural"), once considered Sydney her mentor, but their friendship was destroyed by betrayal, and Sydney threatened to evict Ella and ruin her career. Sydney also played a pivotal role in the career of Auggie Kirkpatrick (Colin Egglesfield, "All My Children"). After they met at an AA meeting, she became a supportive friend to Auggie and encouraged his dream to become a chef. He’s now a successful sous chef at the trendy restaurant Coal, but his relationship with Sydney has gone sour since she began drinking again.

The other tenants include Lauren Yung (Stephanie Jacobsen, "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles"), a medical student in desperate need of money to pay her student loans, and Jonah Miller (Michael Rady, "Swingtown"), an aspiring filmmaker who has just proposed to his live-in girlfriend Riley Richmond (Jessica Lucas, "Cloverfield"), a first-grade teacher. The newest tenant, wide-eyed 21-year-old Violet Foster (Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, "7th Heaven"), has just arrived in LA and is horrified to find a bloody body floating in the courtyard pool. David is the leading suspect but, as the police are soon to discover, almost everyone living at Melrose Place had a reason to want the deceased out of the way.

An updated version of the popular 1990s series, Melrose Place is from CBS Television Studios with executive producers Todd Slavkin & Darren Swimmer ("Smallville"). Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim ("An Inconvenient Truth") is the director and executive producer of the pilot.

Coming Soon: Melrose Place to The CW

Being a fan of the original Melrose Place, I'm looking forward to the new version of this 90s "soap opera" coming this fall to The CW.

New Fall TV Season: The CW AnnouncesTheir Line-Up

The CW is the latest network to throw its hat in the Thursday ring with a bold scheduling move on the most lucrative night on television.

The network, which will officially unveil its fall schedule Thursday, plans to slot hot new drama "Vampire Diaries" on 8 p.m. Thursdays, paired with "Supernatural."

"Vampire Diaries" will replace departing veteran series "Smallville," whose ninth and final season will air at 8 p.m. on Fridays.

New drama "Melrose Place" will be paired with "90210," repeating the launch pattern for the original "Melrose Place," which followed "Beverly Hills, 90210" on Fox in fall 1992.

Focusing on a group of young male and female models, the new drama "Beautiful Life" is considered a perfect scripted companion for "America's Next Top Model" and will launch after the hit reality series on Wednesdays.

The CW's flagship Monday lineup of "Gossip Girl" and "One Tree Hill" will stay intact. The network recently announced that it will stop programing Sunday nights, enabling its affiliated stations to air what they choose.

"Smallville" had been in the Thursday 8 p.m. period for the past four seasons. The Superman drama landed on Thursday in fall 2005, when it was on the WB, and was joined several months later by then-freshman series "Supernatural."

"Vampire Diaries," based on the Alloy Entertainment series of teen vampire books, is envisioned as a central element of the Thursday schedule, where the CW has a built-in sci-fi audience with "Smallville" and "Supernatural."

Ian Somerhalder to Cut His Fangs inCW's 'Vampire Diaries'

Move over Twilight twink, the CW is bringing us the hottest vampire to date, Lost's Ian Somehalder as a charming immortal Damon in "Vampire Diaries".

The show is based on the book series, which centers on the love triangle of a mortal woman and two vampire brothers, one evil and one good.

Blue-eyed Somerhalder, who played 'Boone' on ABC's Lost and 'Paul Denton' on the big screen in The Rules of Attraction will play the good brother, who struggles with his intrinsic evil tendencies as an immortal.

Premiering in the fall, the series will be exec produced by Kevin Williamson (Dawson's Creek, Scream).

Casting of the evil brother, Stefan, is yet to be announced.

The CW Gives Go-Ahead to Melrose Place Pilot

The CW's update of "Melrose Place" has received an official pilot order, and Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim will direct it.

A remake of the '90s series about a group of twentysomethings living in the trendy Melrose neighborhood of Los Angeles, the pilot was written by Darren Swimmer and Todd Slavkin ("Smallville").

Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," is known for directing edgy TV dramas such as "Deadwood," "24" and the pilot for "The Unit." But early in his career, he helmed lighter fare, including Fox's "Party of Five."

The picture shows cast members of the original television series celebrating the program's 200th episode during a party in Beverly Hills. (L-R) front row, Josie Bissett, Thomas Calabro, Jamie Luner. Back row, Rob Estes, Steve Wilder, Heather Locklear, Kelly Rutherford, Rena Sofer, John Haymes Newton and Jack Wagner.

Melrose Place 2.0

According to Entertainment Weekly, The CW is planning to relaunch Melrose Place.

A spokesperson for The CW confirms what has been buzzed about for months, the network is developing an updated version of Melrose Place. Details remain sketchy, but it's believed Melrose 2.0 would launch next fall.

The move comes as The CW has enjoyed some measure of success with its 90210 reboot. Despite modest ratings, the show has brought attention to the struggling network at a time when it sorely needs it. The suits no doubt figure a Melrose rebirth will generate another round of mass hysteria. (And they'd be right!)

Earlier this month, Darren Star, who created both Melrose and 90210, admitted to TVGuide.com that a Melrose resurrection "would be a fun thing to do. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened -- if it can be put together in the right way."

I wonder if they will be bringing back some of the original cast members. I would love to see Heather (Amanda) Locklear, Jack (Peter) Wagner, Andrew (Billy) Shue, Grant (Jake) Show, Courtney (Alison) Thorne-Smith, Thomas (Michael) Calabro, Josie (Jane) Bissett, Lisa (Taylor) Rinna, Laura (Sydney) Leighton, Marcia (Kimberly) Cross, Doug (Matt) Savant, Daphne (Jo) Zuniga, Kristin (Brooke) Davis, Rob (Kyle) Estes, or the rest of the cast.