TV 90210

Sookie's on board. Well, at least she's interested.

Melissa McCarthy, who played Lorelai Gilmore's best friend, has landed a role supporting star Christina Applegate in the new ABC sitcom Samantha Who? (formerly known as Sam I Am). It's not a bad sitcom, but, come on, it's not the Gilmore Girls feature film.

Amy Sherman-Palladino, who created Gilmore and has a Fox show coming in winter, said the other day she would consider doing a feature to continue, and perhaps wrap up, seven years of Gilmore Girls TV. And McCarthy just told me it might be fun to reconvene the Stars Hollow group and that she'd be happy to see the script.

So, come on, Amy, whaddya say?

It's Bonnie Somerville, one of the hot stars of ABC's Cashmere Mafia, which starts in November. You might remember her as Ross' girlfriend Mona, from Friends, or Laura Murphy from the last season of NYPD Blue.

She stars with Lucy Liu, Frances O'Connor and Miranda Otto as one of four powerful, stylish New York women in the show that comes from Sex and the City's Darren Starr and looks an awful lot like a drama version of that show. It even has the same costume designer, Patricia Field. She sure knows how to dress a pretty gal.

But there's hardly any cashmere in the pilot, a couple of coats, and Somerville's gray sweater, so I told the cast and producers that I was extremely disappointed.

"Which scene did you notice cashmere?" Somerville asked.

On you, of course, I replied.

Obviously impressed with my keen fashion sense (one of the producers asked me which one of the women's outfits I wanted, which I thought was a little mean), Bonnie blurted out: "Will you marry me? You'd probably buy me cashmere."

Actually, on my salary, she would be buying me cashmere.

Besides, I'm still holding out for Jennifer Garner. Here she is looking for a job to keep that sleazy Ben Affleck in poker chips. Once she realizes he's no good for her, I'd be happy to take her in, and her darling daughter, Violet, to raise her as my own.

And you shouldn't be surprised I know so much about fashion. My fellow critics voted me "Best Groomed."

CBS has a cool idea that should appeal to the electronic crowd, of which you -- yes, actually, you! -- are a premium member.

CBS Eye-Lert each week will let you know just how long the late game runs on Sunday and when 60 Minutes, and then Cold Case and Shark (which moves to Sunday this fall) will start.

First, subscribers will get the news that the game will run late. Then, as the game progresses, the exact start time of the Sunday series will get beamed out. You can get it on e-mail, or cell phone text message (and maybe some other way that I'm too much of Luddite even to know about). Eventually, they hope to get the whole thing rigged into TiVo, so it will automatically record the shows properly. Sunday night TiVo has been a big problem at my house for years.

"CBS Eye-lert is literally a game-changer for our audience," said George Schweitzer, "so when the Jets run long, Cold Case viewers won't come up short." You can see why he's the president of the CBS Marketing Group. He probably works for the Jets, too. Who cares about them?

All you do is trade a little personal info for a subscription at cbseyelert.com

But don't go there yet. The whole thing's still being set up. Mark a reminder in your computer for a month from now.

Harold Perrineau, who plays Michael Dawson, and was given a pass off the island last year, will return next season to Lost!

This thunderously important nugget was painfully extracted from ABC Entertainment boss Steve McPherson a few moments ago after indignant TV critics, including me, peppered the exec with whines and threats.

The news was supposed to come tomorrow at Comic-Con, the huge comic, sci-fi, Fanboy, fantasy convention in San Diego. But we showed them. Don't mess with the pros, Steve.

Veteran cynics propose that there will be other, even better, Lost news at Comic-Con, and that the dogged critics were only thrown a tiny bone to shut them up. But when I get a nice bone, I'm happy to share it with all of you.

Have you noticed that every single solitary TV drama has a pressing need to take us into the men's room, where some poor schlub is usually trapped in the act by some aggressive character, usually female, and forced to listen to a diatribe?

The latest to go there won't even start until winter, on Fox. It's called Canterbury Law. Julianna Margulies plays an aggressive attorney, and she aggresses herself right into the can in a scene the producers and Fox are so proud of, they stuck it in their promotional clips.

So, grouchy as always, I asked in a disdainful tone why they always do that. You know, Storm shames the entire TV industry into slightly higher standards. Good luck.

Walon Green, who's worked on Hill Street Blues and Law & Order and a million other things had an answer that gave me new appreciation for life in the pissoir:

Well, the urinal is actually an ideal place to shoot something, because it's not a stall. It's not enclosed. It's open. It offers opportunities for different angles and good coverage, and there's also sound potential.

"Walon, you rock," said Julianna, as I quietly shrunk back into my shell.

Those darn Eagles made a big mistake cutting Quarterback Jeff Garcia, such a vital component of last year's pretty-darn-successful team.

No, not because they could use him again this year, but because they screwed up It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the no-holds-barred laff-a-thon on cable's FX.

"We were all ready to go with Jeff, and then they cut him, just a couple of weeks before the scheduled shoot," says Rob McElhenney, first among equals as the producer and star of the show -- not counting Danny DeVito, who came along in the second season.

"We tried to get Donovan McNabb, but his agent never even called us back."

Sunny follows the misguided misdeeds of a group of slackers who are willing to violate any social norm that the network will allow, just to improve their standing in society. In the Garcia ep, they've all seen the movie Invicible and figure that like walk-on Vince Papale, they can make the team and get adulation and big money.

With Garcia gone, the guys thought maybe the Eagles organization would give them some help with their show.

Nope. "But at least they let us film in the parking lot," McElhenney said.

The cast palavered at a Fox cocktail party featuring Danny DeVito's Limoncello, a brand the diminutive actor established after showing up schnockered, supposedly under the influence of the Italian liqueur made from Sorrento lemons, on The View. I tasted it. There is no way to get drunk on the stuff. You would go into toxic sugar shock long before the alcohol could take over. Which doesn't mean it wasn't tasty.

Info, and a truly lame limoncello song:http://www.harbrew.com/limoncello.htm

The show's third season starts Sept. 13.

The Terminator is b-a-a-a-ck, baby -- or it will be on Fox this winter in the form of the explosive (literally, there are more blasts than they have at the stone quarry) Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sarah must run around and save her son, John, so he can grow up to save the world.

Our old friend Ahhnohld is pretty busy being governor of Caleeefornia, plus, he's way too expensive, so there's a new Terminator in town, a girl. But there will be lots of big, bad robo-people, too, and one wonders if the new Sarah, Britisher Lena Headey, will be up to the fight.

"Show us your arms!" screamed the critics, and Ms. Headey, which you pronounce HeeeDeee, coyly declined.

Here's the original Sarah, the spectacular Linda Hamilton

And here's Lena

I think we're doomed. Or is there some special way out?

I'm not a big fan of the TCA Awards, given out last night, because I think we critics give out awards daily in our reviews. And when everybody says "we" love this or hate that, there's always a bunch of "us" who hate this and love that.

So here are the winners (and the fancy, sort of nebulous, titles, "Individual Achievement in Drama" and so forth, have been shortened):

Best Dramatic Actor: Michael C. Hall Dexter
Best Comedy Actor: Alec Baldwin 30 Rock
Best News and Information Show: Planet Earth
Best Drama: The Sopranos
Heritage Award (for a show that's one of the best of all time): The Sopranos

I agreed with all of those picks, though Minnie Driver (The Riches) could have beaten Hall, and Mary Louise Parker or Elizabeth Perkins from Weeds, or Julia Louis-Dreyfus from The New Adventures of Old Christine could have beaten Baldwin, which is why, as long as they're going to have the awards, they should have separate ones for men and women.

Discovery's Planet Earth, which would have been one of about 20 shows better-suited than Heroes, to win Program of the Year, was also named Best Movie, Miniseries or Special. Spike Lee's HBO show, When the Levees Broke, or even AMC's Broken Trail, would have been better-suited for the prize.

ABC Family's Kyle XY won Best Children's Program, which was a mixed blessing. They'll take the prize, but the network and producers were pretty upset at having the show, aimed at teens and young adults, even considered as a children's program. The critics, in general, don't know that much about children's shows, and they are always scrambling around this award.

The Best New Program was Friday Night Lights, which is sort of interesting since it says that the new show Heroes was good enough to be Program of the Year, but FNL, apparently, was better. The Best New Program actually was The Nine, but everybody forgot about that.

Best Comedy, The Office, is a reasonable pick, but I like Weeds, 30 Rock or even Old Christine better. You can't argue with Mary Tyler Moore for Career Achievement Award; I don't think perennial nominee Bill Moyers will ever get it, and he should.

And, in the really big news, in the silly sort of high-school awards that the critics vote to give to themselves, can you guess which one I won?

Tomorrow, around noon EDT, I'll file an audio report on last night's awards show:
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/jonathan_storm/Jonathan_Storm_in_Hollywood.html

Somebody was making fun of me, saying that all I have is young girls in this blog.
Which is totally wrong. Groucho? Baseball? And there's a great item about Rita Moreno on one of my audio files: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/multimedia/8602847.html
And you can find all the audio files at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/jonathan_storm/Jonathan_Storm_in_Hollywood.html
They are suitably silly, IMHO.
But now to address the young girl problem:

This *woman* is clearly on her way to becoming a mother. Actually, she already is the mother of two-year old Grace Elisabeth, and the child that's growing in this picture will be the second for the Hasselbecks. I surely hope some nice young liberal couple is out there working to keep things even.

Lizzie showed everybody her belly the other day on The View, and the website TMZ snapped up the video. But who cares about that? What you want to know is: Did producer Mark Burnett know from the get-go that Elisabeth, one of the stars of Survivor II (they need to start doing things like The Super Bowl, now that the next one, from China, this fall will be No. XV) would become the biggest post-Survivor star?

"The first time I saw on her video, she lit the screen up," said Burnett, who has come a step or two since then, too. "But anybody who tells you they can see future stars is either full of it or clairvoyant."

Of the more than 185 Survivor contestants so far, Burnett singled out this trio as originally radiating maximum star power: Richard Hatch, Jerri Manthey and Colby Donaldson. Hatch was jailed for tax evasion, Donaldson's made it all the way up to that TV pinncale, Rachel Ray, and you'll find Manthey, after a stint on The Surreal Life and a shot on the cover of Playboy, performing at some funky bar off Sunset.

CBS seems awfully well-organized behind Jericho. The network gave a bag of peanuts and a specially made T-shirt to all the critics today, with a big peanut on it saying "We did it! We saved Jericho!"

Did the network actually have a lot to do with promoting the idea that zillions of fans got together to resurrect the show? Did the network "cancel" it on purpose, so as to generate widespread interest for a second season? And then did it overstate the interest as a publicity stunt, to try to get more viewers for a mid-season show that the network was already ready to run?

Skeet Ulrich (Jake), Lennie James (Hawkins), Ashley Scott (Emily) and executive producer Carol Barbee regaled us with their thoughts this morning.

Ashley: When you get canceled, you kind of think that that's it.

Skeet: Sounded pretty definitive to me.

The show will come back "lean and mean," said Barbee, with accelerated story lines centered on Jake and Hawkins striving "to save the world." Currently scheduled for winter, it could make it onto the schedule as early as October if a skedded CBS show gets a quick demise. Sprague Grayden's Heather Lisiniski will be back for a least a few eps. Even Gerald McRaney's Mayor Green, who died so melodramatically in the final episode last spring, could return, in flashbacks.

They're going into production Monday, and the whole seven episodes that have been ordered will be in the can by the end of September, and then everybody goes off to the winds again. Nobody knows exactly what will happen if the show proves to be a success, and CBS wants to order more episodes.

Lennie: "It's a conversation we need to have. We don't know."

My personal opinion: Despite all this buzz, real and imagined, the actual viewing audience will not grow significantly, and those seven will be Jericho's last.

James would beg to differ: "All that passion. It kind of reminded us of who we make it for, and what it’s all about. People are tuning in, and it is a moment in their week, and it really matters to them. Czechoslavakia, Denmark, New Zealand, Russia: The Jericho Rangers are worldwide."