Jennifer Ehle, a Winston-Salem native, is in the cast of a possible fall TV series. And though her character dies in the first episode, that won't keep her from being part of the show, if it gets picked up. It's one of CBS' pilots, which is as-yet untitled. Patrick Wilson plays a competitive surgeon whose ex-wife (Ehle) dies and returns as a ghost to teach him life lessons. CBS and the other networks will announce their fall lineups in May.
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Producer-director David Gordon Green, a UNC School of the Arts alumnus who was profiled in last week's Relish, has a possible TV series in development for Comedy Central. He is producing "Black Jack," a pilot about a former special-ops agent who has to adapt to civilian life. Green is already working on another show for the fall, MTV's animated comedy "Surf's Up," and he will likely direct several episodes of the HBO show "Eastbound and Down" with Danny McBride, a fellow UNCSA alum.
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The mid-1970s were a great time for kids who loved dinosaurs, with two rival Saturday morning shows about lost valleys filled with the prehistoric beasts. "Land of the Lost," the more popular of the two, has been widely available for years — so much so that two companies have put out complete boxed sets. But its timeslot rival "Valley of the Dinosaurs" has been hard to find. WarnerArchive.com, an online company that produces made-to-order DVDs of Warner Studios titles, has just released the show in a complete-series set.
Both shows premiered the same day, Sept. 7, 1974. They had strikingly similar setups: A modern family on a rafting trip is thrown into a lost world filled with dinosaurs. Local cave-people come to their aid, and the family adopts a baby dino as a pet. But where "Land" was filmed in live action, "Valley" was a cartoon. Its stories aren't as elaborate as "Land," which had several prominent science-fiction writers on its staff.
Warner Archive has also just released "The Last Dinosaur," an unintentionally campy TV-movie from 1977 that I recall drawing comic-book sequels to as a third grader. Richard Boone stars as Masten Thrust, a rich, big-game hunter whose oil company discovers — you guessed it — a lost valley of prehistoric beasts. Thrust goes in search of the biggest game of all. The special effects are terrible, with people in rubber suits duking it out as the dinosaurs, and Boone overacts wildly. And considering he's 40 feet long and weighs eight tons, the T-Rex is surprisingly good at sneaking up on people.
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NBC won't start showing the fifth — and final — season of "Friday Night Lights" until April 15. But fans who don't want to wait for the broadcasts can pick up the whole season Tuesday, when Universal Home Video releases it in a boxed set. These episodes previously aired on satellite service DirecTV, which joined NBC Universal in paying for the show. The cast of the show includes Matt Lauria, a UNCSA alumnus.
The boxed set has commentaries, deleted scenes and a feature about the cast and crew saying goodbye to the series after five seasons.
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Also new on DVD on Tuesday: "Life Unexpected: The Complete 1st and 2nd Seasons," a drama about two people who had a baby and gave her up for adoption 15 years earlier reconnecting with their now-teenage daughter; and "Lark Rise to Candleford: The Complete Season 4," a British costume drama about two rival towns in the English country in the late 19th century, the gentle hamlet Lark Rise and the bustling market town Candleford. In addition to the fourth season set, BBC Home Video has also released "Lark Rise to Candleford: The Complete Collection," with all four seasons and features about the show and about the book series that inspired it.
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