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TV Tidbits: Site of 'Lost Colony' to be featured on premiere of new show
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Published: July 3, 2009
One of North Carolina's most famous historic locations is being used to start the new PBS series Time Team America.
The series will begin at 8 p.m. Wednesday on UNC-TV. In each episode, a team of archeologists, geophysicists and historians visit an archeological site for three days to help explore it using state-of-the-art technology.
The first episode visits Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the location of the Roanoke Colony, in what is now Dare County. It was the first English colony in America, and the disappearance of its inhabitants about 1590 led to it being known as the "Lost Colony."
"When we were first planning for the Time Team show, a number of us archeologists who were involved in it were asked to put up a wish list of the best sites to look at," said Eric Deetz, one of the show's archeologists. He specializes in researching the colonial period.
"I'd already had an association with the First Colony Foundation, the people who have been studying out there for a number of years," Deetz said. So he suggested the Lost Colony as a possible location for the show.
When the show got its funding last year, the first thing that the producers looked for was a site where they could start filming in the first week of May. Deetz knew that the First Colony Foundation had already planned to be in the field then. The Time Team production team was careful not to disrupt their work, but contribute to it, according to Deetz.
"Part of the thing we brought to it was extra crewmembers (for the dig), which -- the First Colony Foundation being a labor of love -- they appreciated," he said. "We brought more bodies, more trained archeologists…. We did end up finding some interesting stuff."
Later episodes of the series will include visits to South Dakota, South Carolina, Utah and Illinois, where the team examined New Philadelphia, a town founded by a freed slave in 1830.
The series is an American version of a long-running British series.
Titan Books, a company that specializes in TV-related books, has just released a book for fans of the series Lost -- which may help fans pass the time until 2010, when the show will return for its final season.
Lost: Messages From the Island is a collection of interviews, storyboards, behind-the-scenes photos and more, taken from the pages of Lost: The Official Magazine.
Titan Books has also just released Primeval: Fire and Water, a novel based on the recently-canceled British series Primeval. The series follows a team of scientists who investigate prehistoric monsters that have come to modern day through holes in time.
A reader called this week to ask if Harper's Island -- a low-rated murder mystery set on an island in Washington state -- would return or come out on DVD. The answer to both questions is yes. Harper's Island will draw to a close next weekend on CBS, with two episodes that will be shown back-to-back on July 11. The 13-episode series is scheduled to be released on DVD Sept. 8 from Paramount Home Video. The series was conceived as a limited-run series with a resolution in the 13th episode.
The first season of Eastbound & Down, an HBO comedy that was filmed in Wilmington by alumni from the UNC School of the Arts, came to DVD this week. UNCSA alumnus Danny McBride, who is also one of the writers, stars as a former baseball star.
Also new on DVD this week: the first season of Jockeys, the Animal Planet reality show about life at the race track; "Season 3.0" of Eureka, the Sci Fi Channel's quirky comedy about life in a town filled with crazy inventors and scientists; the fourth set of Blue Murder, a British series about a woman who juggles home life with work on a murder-investigation unit; and the fifth seasons of the science-fiction series Stargate: Atlantis and the HBO comedy Entourage.
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournalcom.
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