TV Heartbeat! The Debut of the Trailer for Avengers: Age of Ultron! Constantine! Two movies from The Chair! New Series for Mr. and Mrs. Darcy! TV HB Health Chart!

It’s that time again! Fox’s TV schedule does the wacky while baseball teams bundle up to play the final games of the season and networks begin to reveal the fate of their shows! Before I get into who’s in and who’s out, here’s what’s up this week!

The Chair, airing on Starz, has been a fascinating look at the creative process and how a director gets his/her vision made (hence the name which refers to the director’s chair). From Chris Moore (Project Greenlight) and Zachary Quinto, the show picked two first time directors and gave them the exact same script. The directors had to adapt, cast, direct and figure out how to market their films. The results are going to be wildly different. Starz is airing the two films this week and viewers get to vote on their favorite. The winning director will be awarded $250,000 on November 8th when the final episode airs and the winner is revealed!

Anna Martemucci (Director), Shane Dawson (Director), Drew Monson (Actor) and Chris Moore (Executive Producer) from upcoming Starz show “The Chair”

One candidate is Hollidaysburg, the film directed by writer Anna Martemucci. With her background in writing, Anna took the original screenplay and re-wrote it into a coming of age story, much to the frustration of the original screenplay writer.

The other film is Not Cool, the brainchild of YouTube star Shane Dawson. As someone who stars and writes his own short YouTube videos, his take on the script became a raunchy comedy that stars himself in various roles (several in drag). With millions of subscribers in his fan base, I think Shane has an unfair advantage when it comes to voting for a winner…

Extremely different trailers so how can these movies start with the same script?! Now you can appreciate why the director is such an important person on set!

Constantine makes its TV debut this week! Matt Ryan starts as the title character who battles demons here on earth. Let’s see if NBC can get its own comic book TV series up and running (this is based off of the Hellblazer comics) since I’m personally not holding out hope that the new Heroes series will do comics right.

In celebration of Halloween and the huge success of its uber uber marathon for The Simpsons, FXX is showing every single Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode on Sunday and then showing different themed episodes during the week.

While it may sound like Jane Austen’s idea of Halloween, Death Comes to Pemberley is an adaptation of a mystery novel by PD James which features Mrs. Darcy as a sleuth. (Well, everyone has to have a hobby since Colin Firth can’t be diving in the lake all the time!) This incarnation of Darcy and Lizzie are brought to life by Matthew Rhys (The Americans) and Anna Maxwell Martin (Becoming Jane, North and South)

Can’t wait for the new Avengers movie next year?  Catch the first glimpse of the trailer during Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on Tuesday!  If you gave up on SHIELD midway through last season, you may want to watch anyway.  The show has embraced its true destiny and has stepped away from the family-adventure-time incarnation and is more action/comic book. The SHIELD/HYDRA conflict has been great and the characters have gotten a lot more layers.

Tonight: The 100 season premiere (The CW), Web Therapy season premiere (Showtime)
Thursday: Project Runway season finale (Lifetime), Project Runway Threads debut (Lifetime)
Friday: Grimm season premiere (NBC), Constantine debut (NBC), Dateline season premiere (NBC), Alpha House debut (Amazon)
Sunday: Death Comes to Pemberley debut (PBS), The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror marathon (FXX)
Monday: 2 Broke Girls season premiere (CBS), Mike Tyson Mysteries debut, Hollidaysburg (Starz)
Tuesday: Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer debuts on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC), Not Cool (Starz)

Health check

Cancellation notices seem to be trickling in slower this year. Networks may be struggling with understanding how to factor in the delayed DVR numbers, but (rumor has it), networks aren’t too secure in the shows they have waiting in the wings. Ergo, pink slips are coming in slower!

We have had news on a few summer series including FX’s The Bridge which had critical acclaim for the first season, but couldn’t quite reach enough viewers. Lifetime’s summer series, The Lottery, wasn’t a winner despite an interesting premise that was killed by problematic execution.

While not an execution order, Fox reduced the number of episodes of struggling comedy, Mulaney, so it’s basically been cancelled.

On the flip side, The CW gave a full season order to the shows which debuted to the biggest number the network has seen in some time: The Flash and Jane the Virgin. The network already ordered more episodes from those shows so this wasn’t a huge surprise.

Syfy’s Z Nation will continue its journey to find that zombie cure with a second season on the way.

ABC has ordered a few more scripts for Selfie, Manhattan Love Story and Forever. While it’s an encouraging sign for those shows, it’s an order for more scripts and not episodes. So these shows may not be cancelled outright in the next week or so, but it’s not a full vote of confidence either. While I’m not fond of the comedies, Forever is fun with Ioan Gruffudd as a very charming Sherlock Holmes-ish medical examiner.

Crystal Ball

Can’t wait until 2016 for season 3 of Twin Peaks? Co-creator Mark Frost has announced that a new book, The Secret Lives of Twin Peaks, will reveal what’s been happening to some of our favorite character for the past 25 years.

Yep, this may tie up some of the many, many loose ends from the season 2 cliffhanger which frees up the focus of season 3. The book will be released in late 2015 so, sigh, we still have a while to go!

Stay tuned!

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