James Franco on "General Hospital," six lines in

James Franco, movie actor, Golden Globe winner, "Freaks and Geeks" class of 2000, began his guest arc on the extremely long-running "General Hospital" today. It is quite some time since I paid any attention at all to the goings-on in fictional Port Charles, N.Y. These days the landscape is dominated by Italian gangsters of the post-"Sopranos" variety, some of whom are apparently less villainous than others. There are also: a woman who runs or works for an art gallery and her perky assistant; some security specialists of no clear moral convictions; a cop; and a couple of women whose specific roles I could not divine, apart from the sex. There was no hospital in evidence, general or otherwise -- nor any doctors, for that matter, or likely holders of doctorates.

The soap opera is an exceedingly talky medium. Franco -- who, it seems, will be firmly established next week as a famous yet mysterious graffiti artist, named Franco -- had exactly six lines in his debut episode, spread over the hour: "Spare any change?"; "Quickest way to catch cold, Wylie -- always keep your head covered"; "It's open"; "Good"; "Later"; and "They're expecting me." The first was spoken to some mobsters just before a big shootout on the steps of a soundstage-built brownstone. (Afterward, Franco crushed the windpipe of a dying hood with his foot, then rearranged the body.) The second was to a mannequin, on which he placed a cap. And the rest were to a mysterious woman with an English accent who came over to his studio to give him a straight-razor shave and a long kiss. Mostly he lurked, "disguised" as a homeless person, his face half-hidden or turned away. When the camera finally allowed us a good look at him, he did shine like the superior screen presence he is.

It is hard to tell yet just where on the good-evil scale Franco is meant to fall -- actually, it is hard to tell that about any of these characters, a situation I would imagine that more familiarity would only partly relieve. But artists on TV shows are usually some sort of crazy, and all signs so far point to trouble.

-- Robert Lloyd

An appreciation: Soupy Sales, hip and elemental

Even though the occasion is sad, there is something oddly bracing in setting out to write about a man who called himself "Soupy." We need more Soupys in this self-important, don't-you-dare-throw-that-pie world -- and now there is one less, Soupy Sales having died Thursday at the age of 83.

Born Milton Supman to the only Jewish family in Franklinton, N.C., Sales first got into children's television in Detroit in 1953 -- he also had a grown-up nighttime show there -- but his years of greatest renown were from 1959 to 1966, when he worked out of Los Angeles and New York and was seen all over the country. His costume, such as it was, comprised a black pullover sweater and a floppy bow tie; early on he also wore a top hat, later on he ditched the tie.

My memory of "The Soupy Sales Show" (originally "Lunch with Soupy Sales") is not of specific bits, but an impression of noise and energy and a cheap, sketchy set fit with the usual appurtenances of a midcentury kids' show: a window (for Pookie the lion puppet to appear in), a door (for Soupy to answer). Waving in from the side of the frame were the paws of his otherwise unseen very big dogs, White Fang, the Biggest and Meanest Dog in the USA, and Black Tooth, the Biggest and Sweetest Dog in the USA, whom I never could keep straight in spite of the color-coding. (White Fang is the one I would imitate by saying, "Oh-reah-oh-reh-uh," unless it was Black Tooth.) There were pies in the face, mostly in Soupy's face, though sometimes in the face of a celebrity guest: Frank Sinatra took one, and so did Tony Curtis. The jokes were already old when vaudeville was new: "Show me a giant rooster chasing a member of Parliament.... And I'll show you a chicken catch a Tory." ("Now, just what do we mean by that?" Soupy said afterward, never answering the question.)

DVD Reviews: 'Playing Shakespeare' and 'She Stoops to Conquer'

Two DVD sets for fans of Olde English Theater.

"Playing Shakespeare" (Acorn). I am a little late with this review, but as the program this DVD set fetches back into the present is 25 years old, I don't suppose the couple months that have gone by since its release will matter all that much. And apart from a frock or two, it is not the sort of thing that dates. (Its subject has stood an even longer test of time.) On a soundstage half-dressed to suggest a theater's prop room, with a taped-off work space in the middle, director John Barton -- a hairy, bearish fellow who reminds me a little of the character John Noble plays on "Fringe," but more erudite and not crazy -- leads a nine-part master class in performing Shakespeare, with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which he co-founded, as his student-demonstrators. (This crew includes Ian McKellan, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, Roger Rees, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack and Judi Dench, all dewy with youth, or near enough.)

The series -- taped in 1982 and aired in 1984 -- is about the nuts and bolts of bringing Shakespeare to life and how the text instructs the performance and how the performance must illuminate the text. ("Shakespeare's language," says Barton, "can be made to work on an audience as powerfully as an actor's emotions can."). There is an entire hour devoted to playing ambiguity and irony -- apparently a voice little used in the Britain of 1982, though inescapable today -- and another on the why and wherefore of iambic pentameter. They talk of what to do with rhyme, where to put the pauses, how to balance the intellectual and the emotional, naturalism with theatricality. (Barton is all about the balance.)

Review: 'Defying Gravity' on ABC

Ron Livingston, from "Office Space" and "Band of Brothers," leaves Earth this weekend in “Defying Gravity,” a sci-fi series premiering Sunday on ABC. I will not be the only observer to remark on its coincidental superficial resemblance to "Virtuality," the pilot by Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor ("Battlestar Galactica") that Fox recently ran as a one-off TV movie. Each is set around a near-future space mission that confines its characters -- some with prior issues and entanglements -- in a relatively small space; in each, a mysterious force guides events; and each uses TV broadcasts back home as a narrative device.

Still, the basics of the tale -- the haunted spaceship story, broadly -- have been rattling around for quite a while. The more productive comparison might be to "Lost," where a small group of people are stuck out in the middle of nowhere, the unwitting playthings of some greater intelligence, or force, or fate. And there are lots of flashbacks too.

Livingston, an actor of attractive, sometimes seedy solidity -- he's like a less jolly Tom Hanks -- plays Maddux Donner, who 10 years before the main action was forced to abandon two other astronauts on the surface of Mars. It's hard to tell what lasting effect this has had on him, or on fellow spaceman Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba), who was with him at the time. He seems to be doing OK, though it is possibly no coincidence that neither he nor Shaw has been selected for a new, six-year mission to visit all the planets of the solar system. Which doesn't mean they won't be going.

Read the full review. 

Review: 'The Linguists' on KCET

In the shaggy and bittersweet documentary "The Linguists," airing at 10 tonight on KCET (a few months after its general PBS feed), a pair of youngish scholarly word-nerds travel the globe to chart and record languages about to wink into everlasting silence. There are still more than 7,000 languages on Earth (all but one of which most Americans do not speak), each representing, says David Harrison, one of "the possible ways that the human mind can make sense of the world around it." But they are becoming extinct at the rate of one every two weeks, shut down by official suppression or discouragement -- what results, says Greg Anderson with audible distaste, when one people imposes "their will, and their government, and their language" on another -- or simply by falling out of use.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that Harrison and Anderson are like something out of a Kevin Smith movie, but the film (by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger), though it is full of fascinating glimpses of the remote world, does depend heavily on their goofy, geeky charm. "Around the age of 8 or 9 I discovered I had a somewhat irrational interest in the world's languages," says Anderson, but however many tongues the two speak (lots of them), when it comes to this particular subject it's clear they speak the same language.

Review: 'Doctor Who': 'The Next Doctor' on BBC America

"Doctor Who" returns to American television tonight with the first of the four "specials" that form the last year to feature beloved "tenth Doctor" David Tennant. (For the uninitiated: The title character "regenerates" every so often, as convenient or desirable for the producers or performer, into a different actor.) It makes its American bow six months after its original UK broadcast, on Christmas 2008; appropriate to the day, it has a Victorian setting, and there are decorations and snow and the odd nod to Dickens, along with giant Victorian sci-fi contraptions (in the surprisingly bounteous screen tradition of Victorian sci-fi contraptions).

Having bid goodbye at last season's end to time-and-space-traveling companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and once again to next-to-next-to-last companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the Doctor arrives solo in 19th century London. Here he encounters another man calling himself the Doctor (weighty David Morrissey, from "State of Play" and "Viva Blackpool!") with a companion of his own (Velile Tshabalala) and holes in his memory. There are some nice twists on the way to filling them.

Michael Jackson: TV celebrates, investigates the person, the puzzle

When a famous person dies, their life flashes before our eyes.

As with any world figure, the death of Michael Jackson was a television event. Though they were slow to pick up and then to confirm the news of his passing, once the newshounds had arrived, they stayed put.

"We’re going to stay on top of this story," Wolf Blitzer said Friday on CNN, which, like its fellow cable news declared it Michael Jackson Day. "We’re not going to go very far away." And yet there was no way around the fact that it was a day absent of news, in which camera crews were sometimes reduced to shooting pictures of each other, as they waited for something to happen. Friday’s big event, the coroner’s report, was as inconclusive as everyone expected it would be.

And so reporters looked to uncover Jackson’s particular Rosebud in the testimony of people who knew or claimed to know him. This formed no consistent picture: He was surprisingly normal or a psychological mess; he looked great lately or he looked terrible. His upcoming London shows would either put him back on top or kill him, if he weren’t dead already. A single statement could contain contradictions: "Other than the dangling of the baby over the balcony I thought he was an excellent father," Jackson friend Bryan Michael Stoller told "The Today Show’s” Meredith Vieira, who had set up camp in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

Review: 'Virtuality'

The 'failed" TV pilot airing Friday on Fox is a space ride worth taking.

Notwithstanding the title attached to my byline, I am the last person to ask why things do or do not happen in the TV business. But I can say with some assurance that decisions are not always based on quality of work. If they were, "Virtuality", a "failed" pilot from Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor of "Battlestar Galactica," would be the first episode of a series and not merely the stand-alone "movie" Fox will present it as tonight.
 
It is not a movie -- it ends unfinished, just as it's really beginning -- but that does not mean you should pass it by, any more than you should forgo "The Last Tycoon" because Fitzgerald died before he got to the end. As directed by <runtime:topic id="PECLB000466">Peter Berg</runtime:topic> ("Friday Night Lights"), this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes. (It sometimes plays -- and looks -- like a homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey.")

Read the entire "Virtuality" review.

-- Robert Lloyd

Review: 'America's Got Talent' doesn't have Boyle, but it does have that something compelling

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

Ready for 'The Philanthropist'?

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.