A&E snags David Hasselhoff, Dee Snider and Bob Saget for new series
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David Hasselhoff, Dee Snider, Bob Saget, Tony Danza, cops and addicts will populate A&E’s new season schedule, showing the cable channel’s ongoing attraction to strong, sometimes manic personalities.
Essentially taking a page from its own playbook for new character-based reality and scripted programming, the network is repeating what works -- spinning off ‘Intervention’ in a series that will follow ‘sober companions’ -- and expanding further into proven genres like cop procedurals and family dysfunction.
Along with a dozen returning hit series, including ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter,’ ‘Hoarders’ and ‘Billy the Exterminator,’ the network plans to launch eight new unscripted series this year and has a handful of scripted dramas in the pipeline, including a miniseries based on the bestselling Robin Cook novel, ‘Coma,’ from action filmmakers Ridley Scott and Tony Scott.
Just-announced series will follow Hasselhoff as he becomes a stage dad to his two aspiring singer daughters, Danza as he steps into the classroom as a teacher in Philadelphia, and Saget as he hits the road and drops into people’s lives. Snider, best known as the frontman for hair-metal band Twisted Sister, joins Gene Simmons as another of the network’s rocker-dad-with-wacky-family stories in ‘Growing Up Twisted.’
Obsession and addiction are still on tap, with a 10-episode series (working title: ‘I’m Heavy’) about people battling their weight problems and ‘Intervention in Depth: One Man Rehab,’ which trails addicts after their intervention through a team of sober companions.
Cops are high on the priority list too, with a new one-hour called ‘The Glades,’ set in what’s left of Florida’s Everglades, with a Chicago detective playing a fish out of water in a new Southern post.
Gangs and prisons, fertile territory for any number of cable networks, get attention through ‘The Peacemaker,’ a South L.A. reality show about a violence prevention counselor, and ‘The Squad: Prison Police,’ focuses on a Tennessee law-enforcement group that’s part SWAT, part ‘CSI.’
Sibling network BIO, also announcing its new slate, will get a double dose of William Shatner with his returning series ‘Shatner’s Raw Nerve’ and a new offering called ‘Shatner’s Aftermath,’ looking at the fallout of instant celebrity.
Returning show ‘I Survived’ gets a spinoff dubbed ‘I Survived ... Beyond and Back,’ about people who have flatlined and come back to life, and the currently red-hot paranormal trend sparks another series, ‘My Ghost Story,’ to add to the heap. BIO already has ‘Celebrity Ghost Stories,’ which has been renewed.
-- T.L. Stanley