HollywoodIdiocy.com

Although it’s on tap as a replacement series for next season, rather than the official fall schedule, series creator Rob Thomas and ABC are full-steam ahead on the big remake of the late 90s dramady, Cupid. A person could put up a small business for sale trying to guess the whims of Hollywood execs, but at least the show is in full-on casting mode.

The latest member added to the cast is Sarah Paulsen, who most recently appeared as Harriet Hayes on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and previously had appeared on several series in supporting roles, most notably on the old WB Network’s dramady, Jack And Jill. Paulsen will reprise the role of Dr. Claire Allen, the pyschiatrist assigned to look after former mental patient Trevor Hale, who is convinced he’s the god of love.

Allen was originally played by actress Paula Marshall; when Cupid was canceled after less than a season on the air and she joined 2-3 other series in their final season, Marshall gained the reputation of being an actress who was “the kiss of death” for any show she was cast in. Paulsen has no such reputation.

Actor Bobby Cannavale is taking on the role of Trevor Hale, originally portrayed by the charismatic Jeremy Piven. The remake of Cupid promises to be one of the more interesting remake/relaunch stories of the coming TV season.

ABC’s critically-acclaimed murder mystery series, based on the novels of James Patterson, Women’s Murder Club, has landed a showrunner just in time to crank our four more episodes before season’s end, giving the show a shot at renewal next fall. The Angie Harmon-fronted drama, based around the efforts of four female friends in positions of power in San Francisco to solve the city’s toughest crimes, has been teetering on the edge of cancellation largely due to losing its show-runners over the course of the 100-day writer’s strike, recently resolved.

Now, Robert Nathan, a veteran show runner on NBC’s Law and Order, has been tapped to come on board for at least the last four episodes this season and try to gently retool the show enough to get a ratings bump and secure a season renewal. Word is, if the network hadn’t found a show runner, the drama was doomed to see its sets struck, right down to the bathroom fixtures, and grind toward slow, painfel non-renewal death. At least now, it has a shot.

E! Online is reporting, direct from showrunner Bryan Fuller, that even if the strike were to end this week, his show, ABC’s Pushing Daisies, would not be back for more episodes this year. And I quote from E! Online:

“Lots of talk has been going down this past week,” Daisies boss Bryan Fuller told me earlier today. “Essentially, even if the strike is resolved in the next week or two, we wouldn’t be back until next season. There was a preliminary conversation that involved a plan to hit the ground running and try to get episodes on the air as soon as possible, but it no longer seems like that’s going to happen. It seems most likely that we will have a very short first season and then come back in the fall for a proper season two.”

Now, that’s a dang shame. Sure, it took yours truly until the strike break to find time to display a bunch of TIVO’d episodes of Pushing Daisies across my standard Sony WEGA sitting awkwardly atop my plasma tv mount, but once I found the show and realized it was from the same wonderful folks who brought us Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, I was all over that show and it’s now in my personal Top 10 “Must Watch” list.

C’mon, Fuller… say it ain’t so! If the writer’s strike settles soon, I don’t wanna have to wait till September to see more of The Pie Maker and Dead Girl! That’s just wrong in SO many ways!

Now the WGA writers strike is getting ugly for the long haul; the kind of ugly that a simple exchange of religious jewelry cannot solve.

In a trend started last week by ABC and taken up this week by Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox TV, CBS Paramount Network TV and Universal Media Studios, Hollywood’s leading studios have decided to cut costs by axing the development deals of several writer-producer teams whose output has halted as a result of the strike.

The move is seen largely as a counter-move to the WGA’s decision to come to individual agreements between the WGA and certain studios, like David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, a deal which allowed the CBS late night host to return from hiatus with his staff of writers intact.

By axing the writer-producer deals with these studios, the studios are cutting their costs but are also freeing up a lot of creative talent from their current obligations, so that when the labor agreement is finally settled, there could be a lot of “free agent” producers available whose services could induce a bidding war.

But before that can happen, a labor agreement must be reached; unfortunately, the move of studio owners to ax existing deals in the middle of the strike is likely to result in a strike that is much longer, more bitter and increasing entrenched, rather than one that will be resolved more quickly.

Cupid, the ABC TV comedy-drama from 1998-99, was given too short a season in the eyes of many fans who fell in love with the 15-episode series that was canceled by the network immediately after its Valentine’s Day airing.

But now, series creator Rob Thomas, now better known for former UPN/CW drama Veronica Mars, is getting a second shot at the series. The premise centers around a paroled patient from a mental hospital who believes himself to be Cupid, the god of love, who was cast out from Mount Olympus for doing a poor job, and must unite or reunite 100 perfect couples to earn his way back into the Greek pantheon.

As originally conceived, the show starred Jeremy Piven as Cupid and Paula Marshall as his skeptical therapist. Thomas has revealed in multiple interviews that the show will be entirely recast when it is remade, with an eye toward making the concept a bit more accessible to the audience and turning it into a romantic anthology series, ala Love Boat. At least it’s not a remake of the somewhat cheesier HOTEL series ABC once aired, newly relocated at the classy Rio Las Vegas.

There’s no word on casting yet, but as Thomas has a development deal with ABC currently, expect the show to get a long look next spring when the network starts assembling its fall 2008 lineup. For me, this show was a personal favorite the year it aired and although Piven and Marshall will be missed, I think we can trust the series creator who discovered Kristen Bell to find appealing, younger replacements when the new version in cast.