The year is 2040, and the United States has collapsed caused “a mass exodus of its citizens.”  Oz writer Bradford Winters is developing the concept as a television series for HBO. The show, Americatown, will tell the story of a cluster of newly arrived American immigrants who form a Chinatown-like district in a big foreign city.
Winters has been trying to see this concept through for the last decade in various incarnations in different mediums (miniseries, movie, book). Aside from it’s obvious topical elements, the concept seems like a great way to retell the immigrant story from a totally different perspective.
If I were HBO, I would get this project [...]

Is it just me or does the television show adaptation of Paul Haggis’ Academy Award winning film Crash look really REALLY bad?
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Pretty much every red-blooded Whedon fan is following the production of Dollhouse with extreme trepidation. After all, it was Fox’s stupidity that killed Firefly, forever cementing Fox as the Alliance to the Whedonite’s Browncoats. So when word came today from Zap2It that Whedon was shutting down Dollhouse’s production for the next two weeks, you can imagine the shouts of “sonofabitch” from his followers.
Luckily, it seems that this decision (just like his decision to reshoot the pilot) is entirely his own. The story goes that Whedon was busy directing two of the first three Dollhouse episodes already put to film, and when he finally left the directors chair he realized that [...]

So after much ballyhoo, J.J. Abrams’s Fringe premiered last night on Fox. I’m curious to know how you guys felt about the pilot episode, and if this is a show you’d like to see covered on Slashfilm in the future. The ratings are in—roughly 9 million viewers—and while it’s not necessarily a homerun off the bat, word of mouth will play a large factor in the proceeding weeks. Do you expect the show to reach the heights of The X-Files in its prime? Did the 90-minute $10 million premiere grab you?

Not so great news for 24 fans. EW is reporting that production of the new season of 24 will shut down for more than two weeks so that the series writers can “reshape the upcoming season’s creative direction”. Howard Gordon admits that they “just couldn’t get this direction to work,” so they “found another one” and “wound up retooling it.” Last season was lackluster by every account, and a production shutdown is never a good sign, especially considering this season was already postponed an entire year (partly due to the writers strike). You would think that with all the extra time, they would have figured everything out…
And if that [...]

For some time now, the idea of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer animated series has been something that has left Joss Whedon fans salivating with anticipation. According to Wikipedia, we know that Whedon and comic writer Jeph Loeb started working on the series around 2001–but various complications prevented any real development until 2004, when a 3 1/2 minute pilot was produced featuring most of the show’s original cast members. The role of Buffy was played by Giselle Loren, best known for voicing the character in the Buffy video games.
The pilot was never picked up, and the project eventually died as Whedon and Loeb moved on to other projects. (Loeb is [...]

Warner Bros is launching a Hulu competitor on TheWB.com, which will include ad supported seasons of popular WB shows like Friends, The OC, Veronica Mars, One Tree Hill, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Smallville.
According to TechCrunch, the site will offer a bunch of features not offered by Hulu or other television network sites. For example, you will be able to search the entire library for words spoken within the episodes. I can see this being useful for someone trying to find a certain episode, or even a certain part of an episode. They will also have a feature which will allow users to mash-up selected clips from [...]

Entertainment Weekly has discovered that Michelle Rodriguez will reprise her role as Ana Lucia in one episode of the upcoming season of Lost. The last time we saw the character, she was (spoiler warning) shot to death, which means one of three things: 1. Anna Lucia will return from the dead as a zombie on the Lost island 2. Anna Lucia will be featured in a flash back 3. Hurley or one of the other Oceanic 6 will see her in a hallucination I’m betting on #3, possibly #2, but with a show like Lost, you can’t discount #1, however unlikely it may be.
Discuss: What do you think [...]

Okay, the headline is just a little misleading. I just didn’t want to lead with “ABC and Jennifer Lopez are in negotiations to create a television series based on the 2002 romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan“, because, who is going to read a story about that?
But yes, 80’s teen film legend John Hughes did in fact write the story (originally titled The Chambermaid) which became the basis for Maid in Manhattan. Hughes dropped out of filmmaking in 1991, but continued to do some work for hire script work under the pseudonym Edmond Dantes (a reference to the main character in Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo). So the [...]

ABC is developing a small screen adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. You might remember that George Miller brought the book to the big screen in 1987, with Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer. Warner Bros TV has been trying to bring the franchise to the small screen for almost two decades. The book has also been adapted for the stage. Written by Maggie Friedman (Dawson’s Creek, Jack and Bobby) , the new supernatural tv series will apparently be a variation of the 1987 film. The story will focus on three witches who are seduced by a devil-like character, who teaches them how to further [...]

The dystopian future imagined by Trent Reznor is synergy-friendly. Some have argued that it’s cliche. The savvy Nine Inch Nails frontman tells the LA Times that he recently met with HBO about adapting the themes of his Year One concept album (and cultish alternate reality game) into an ambitious sci-fi series…
“I just pitched it to HBO two weeks ago in L.A. It went great. Ideally, we’re trying to get them to do a two-year limited series. I prefer that over a film. We would have a second ARG tying into the second album and ties into the series and they all happen together with a budget needed to pull that [...]

Comic Con’s entire hour long Battlestar Galactica panel, which was hosted by Kevin Smith, is now online at SciFi.com.

Up until a few months ago, I’ve never seen a episode of Battlestar Galactica, nor did I have any desire to. When the summer started, that meant the television shows I watch like Lost had ended. It’s really a bother when you start to get into a habit of enjoying a show week to week, only for it to end leaving you with nothing else to do. Usually when this happens, I try to find a show on dvd that I’ve been curious about. This summer was a harder one, so after countless recommendations I finally gave into Battlestar. And damn it, I love it. I was hoping all week [...]

As a special treat for Comic Con attendees, creator Tim Kring joined the entire Heroes cast onstage with a metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and proceeded to pull out a burned DVD with the handwritten text “Heroes Volume III (Episode One)” written on it. This could only mean one thing, and as the lights dimmed, fans erupted in applause.
For those, like myself, who found the second season of Heroes to have been incredibly weak but with a small handful of redeeming qualities toward the end, you’ll be happy to know that for the most part things do seem like they’ll be getting better. Whereas last season’s premiere was both [...]

It was announced at the Heroes panel that the Season 2 DVD release will actually include some unaired episodes which were shot but apparently cut due to the writer’s strike. Not much more information is known, but I’m sure we’ll find out more in the coming weeks. The DVD will hit stores on August 26th.