The final piece of the 2012 fall TV puzzle has fallen in place. The CW’s plans for the new season include three new fall dramas, changes on every night of the schedule, and a midseason prequel to Sex and the City, featuring a younger Carrie Bradshaw…
The Sex and the City prequel, The Carrie Diaries, doesn’t show up until January 2013 – yet the drama, from the producers of Gossip Girl, easily is the network’s potentially hottest new show of the season. Its young version of Carrie Bradshaw is played by AnnaSophia Robb, co-star of the 2009 film Race to Witch Mountain, but we’ll have to wait a while to compare and contrast.
Meanwhile, one of the network’s three new dramas for fall also features an actress cast in a new take on a very familiar TV role. The 1987-90 CBS genre drama Beauty and the Beast is getting a reboot for the 21st century, starring an actress who helped launch a different successful TV franchise: Kristin Kreuk, who played Lana Lang on the WB/CW series Smallville. Instead of Ron Perlman, now of Sons of Anarchy, playing a brooding recluse, this new Beauty and the Beast presents Jay Ryan as a “doctor with a dark side” (wonder what he could be Hyde-ing?), and Kreuk as a homicide detective who falls for his animal magnetism.
The preview clip for this series, which is scheduled Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET after The Vampire Diaries, doesn’t make it look any better than it sounds. But here goes:
Another genre remake is Arrow, a new series starring Stephen Amell as the DC Comics character Green Arrow. That character was a regular in the final seasons of Smallville, but the actor playing the avenging archer was Justin Hartley. Arnell is a pre-CW veteran of WB, having starred as Nick Harwell on Heartland. And his co-star, Katie Cassidy, is one of CW’s home-grown farm-league successes: In recurring supporting roles, she’s played Juliet Sharp on Gossip Girl, Ella Simms on Melrose Place, and Ruby on Supernatural. That last series, in fact, follows Arrow this fall, as Arrow gets the 8-9 p.m. ET leadoff slot on Wednesdays.
Behind the scenes, Arrow boasts director David Nutter, who’s helmed episodes of Game of Thrones, Entourage, The Mentalist and The Sopranos (as well as the pilot for Smallville), and writer-producer Greg Berlanti, the Green Lantern movie producer whose TV credits go back to Dawson’s Creek. It’s tough to get too worked up by the preview clip – but it’s impossible to dismiss the show at this point, either. See for yourself:
Finally, CW, for its final new offering of the season, presents an actor imported from big-sister network CBS, and several very effective recurring guest appearances on The Good Wife.
Mamie Gummer, who played crafty young litigator Nancy Crozier on that show, did good enough that she need not be recognized, much less credited, primarily as the daughter of Meryl Streep. In the new series Emily Owens, M.D., she plays a newly arrived surgical intern at a hospital who finds herself competing with, among other equally ambitious young interns, her former high-school nemesis.
Emily Owens, M.D. comes from writer-producer Jennie Snyder, who’s made a specialty of romantic comedy-drama TV shows: She’s written and produced for 90210, Lipstick Jungle, Men in Trees and Gilmore Girls. The preview clip suggests some of the best elements of some of those shows – and also enough internal dialogue and amusing self-depreciation to make Emily Owens, M.D. seem like a winnable medical version of Ally McBeal. See if you agree: