July 2008

George Foreman has conquered many opponents, but he wasn’t eager for a rematch with TV. The boxing great had struck out with a short-lived 1993 sitcom, George, and didn’t much care for learning lines and hitting his marks, calling it “the hardest job I ever had.” But none of that is an issue on TV Land‘s Family Foreman (Wednesdays beginning July 16), which allows him to just be himself while the cameras follow him in his daily life as a husband, father, sporting legend, ordained minister and insanely successful businessman. Perhaps you’ve heard of his grill. Viewers will get to […]

Ashley Tisdale’s character in her latest movie is the kind of girl Sharpay Evans would relish making miserable. It was that stark difference between the oh-so-fabulous snob she immortalized in the High School Musical movies and the mousier gal she plays in ABC Family‘s Picture This! (July 13) that drew the young star to the role. Tisdale plays Mandy, a high-school senior who finds her path to popularity — and a date with the school’s hottest guy — blocked by her overprotective father (Kevin Pollak), who grounds her on the night of the most important party of the year. She […]

It still seems impossible. When TV’s hottest show, The Sopranos, finally left the air, the suspicion was that nothing could follow it, that anything its creative team might come up with would inevitably fall short. And then along came Mad Men. Sopranos executive producer Matthew Weiner’s hard-drinking take on the world of advertising executives in early ’60s Manhattan got people talking from the outset with its modern look, its brazenly un-PC swagger and, possibly most of all, the laughable amount of onscreen smoking in each episode. But it’s the texture and complexity of the characters and their emotional entanglements that […]

In its first venture into original scripted drama since its big bucks, big bang “Real Life. Drama.” rebirth, A&E sticks tight to the new tagline and the sort of storytelling its audience loves best — expertly blending the grit of the network’s signature reality series Intervention, the soul of its warts-and-all crime-fighter, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and the highly stylized drama of acquired series like CSI: Miami and The Sopranos. “We knew that we had key platforms,” explains Bob DeBitetto, the net’s executive vice president and general manager. “At the same time, we wanted shows that might be a little […]