Fanatical Pupil

One of my friends just “shared this with me on Facebook”: ‘Mass Effect 2′ role departure for ‘Chuck’ actress. The long and short is that Yvonne Strahovski is playing “the woman” (aka Miranda Lawson – you might recognize her as the well-endowed woman in white from the commercials if you’ve watched any TV at all lately) in Mass Effect 2. BioWare even did the creepy thing where they scan the person’s face and then make the character look just like them. (Sorry, I like it when video game people look like people, but not people I know – unless they’re actually supposed to be that person)
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My wife was scoping NPH’s bio on IMDB, which purports that he auditioned for the role of the doctor on Firefly. One has to wonder (okay, I suppose one doesn’t have to) if NPH had been the doctor (no disrespect to Sean Maher) if Firefly would have made it more than 15 glorious episodes. On the one hand, the doctor was the only character who wasn’t ever really funny, and NPH seems like he’d have to have some humor in the character – I just don’t see him playing a serious guy who only cares about his sister and is super serious all the time. On the other hand, NPH is awesome. On the third hand (since we’re talking about SciFi here, we can have a third hand, I think), Firefly started and ended before NPH launched himself back to the forefront of awesomeness in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (yeah, sorry, Starship Troopers didn’t quite do it). So, maybe he wouldn’t have made a difference without the extra built-in fan base…

On a related note… Too bad when they canceled Dollhouse I was kind of relieved, because, while it’s a decent show, I wasn’t all that into it, but as soon as they announced it was canceled the show has had some of its best episodes so far. Oops. (Sorry, gotta do the hands thing again) On the one hand, maybe we all should have been more patient to let Joss Whedon develop his fairly complex idea of a show before writing it off. On the other hand, Firefly was awesome right from the start, so… sorry, there is no third hand on that one.

Harper’s Island is a murder mystery starting in April on CBS that will pair with webisodes and a social networking website to (hopefully) enhance the experience of viewing the program. You can click on the Harper’s Globe header above for a larger view that will reveal a little bit more of the social aspects of the site.

TechCrunch has a brief overview and intro clip for the new Harper’s Island combo web-TV show (as well as the teaser preview). The official CBS website has a different (and much less scary) intro clip. The main site associated with the web show and social network is Harper’s Globe. This seems like one of those things that I always want to get into but never have enough time to actually participate in (see also: Heroes Evolutions). I would probably enjoy the show anyway, even without the “new teevee” concept additions. The premise (if you haven’t already clicked on one of those other links) is that a bunch of people go to a destination wedding on an island near Seattle and get killed off one by one (one per episode).

NewTeeVee has info on the release dates of the webisodes and the broadcast episodes:

The online part of the show will debut on March 18, weeks before the show debuts on TV on April 9, and the old and newteevee shows will coexist throughout the show’s weekly run, which will conclude on July 2.

Now, if only CBS would get their shows on Hulu (sorry guys, Sling isn’t cutting it for me) so they’d get queued up for me automatically (I probably won’t be watching the show live since it’ll be too scary for my wife, and because we get really crappy reception for CBS). Supposedly, I’ll receive email alerts when new episodes are up, but I think that’s probably just for the webisode part. Hopefully they’ll keep more than just 2 most recent episodes on CBS (see also: How I Met Your Mother – which I would totally watch online now that CBS has a decent video player, but I’m 3 seasons behind and they don’t have 97% of what I need to watch).

Last up, SciFiWire has an interview with the producers which doesn’t really reveal all that much more about the show, but re-emphasizes the points made in the other posts above.