Leave it to The CW to screw up a show before they even film it.

The TV Addict got ahold of the casting breakdowns for the upcoming Arrow series which will be based on the DC Comics character of Green Arrow.  From these listings its pretty obvious that just like the network did with Smallville the comics background doesn’t matter.

Oliver Queen
A 27 year old reformed bad boy, who after having spent five years shipwrecked on a tiny, brutally dangerous island in the South China Sea returns to town a different man. Or to be more specific, a tortured, thoughtful master of the bow with a ferocious determination to make a difference.

Dinah “Laurel” Lance
28 years old, smart sexy, Laurel is a legal aid attorney determined to use her life as a one-woman war against the 1% following the death of her younger sister Sara. A sister, who as luck would have it, just so happened to have died aboard Oliver’s yacht.

Tommy Merlyn
28 years old and devil-smooth, Tommy is a trustafarian like Oliver, a spectacularly rich young man whose life revolves around parties, clubs, liquor and lots of anonymous sex. Unlike Oliver, he can’t seem to understand his former best friend’s sudden change of lifestyle and direction.

Moira Queen
48 years old, a beautiful woman, Oliver’s mother Moira is a very wealthy woman who is not used to being shaken. Having remarried during the five years that former husband Robert and Oliver were both presumed dead, Moira has had free rein over the Queen billions. Not surprisingly, she’s deeply interested in learning whether or not Robert will also return unexpectedly, to ruin her present marriage and go over the books with a fine-tooth comb.

John Diggle
35 years old, African-American, Diggle is really, really big, a former military man who served with the Army Rangers in Afghanistan, and has been a bodyguard for hire for the last four years. Hired by Moira to be Oliver’s chauffeur and protector, Diggle soon finds he is trapped in a battle of wits, as Oliver repeatedly eludes his protection. But in fact, Diggle’s primary conflict is one of loyalty — he has to show that he’s working for Oliver, not Moira, before Oliver will give him a smidgen of trust.

Thea Queen
17 years old (suggest 17-22 years), Oliver’s Lolita-esque sister, Thea was a 12 year old girl when he went on his infamous yachting voyage — but now she’s a celebutante who’s testing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Thea loved her big brother with all her heart, and is delighted to have him back in her life — but she’s spreading her wings, and is unprepared for Oliver to become the Bad Cop in the family, restricting her access to boys and drugs.

Thea Queen?  Well that’s a totally new character.  And imagine that, a bratty teenage girl character on The CW.  I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!  And Dinah “Laurel” Lance?  You mean the Black Canary, Green Arrow’s long time girlfriend?  Well, no mention of her being her super heroine alter ego, but perhaps they’ll add that down the road?  Who knows, it’s The CW, they could decided this is the “wrong” Dinah Lance or some other crazy idea.

Just once I’d like to see The CW do something faithful to a comic, but I guess that’s just too much to hope for.

[via The TV Addict]

It seems that The CW can’t give up on the concept of some TV series based on a DC Comics series.

With the end of Smallville, DC has been fishing around for another TV series they could launched based on a comic series with reports of series being possible developed on The Spectre, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold and, most notably, Deadman.  Now the rumor is that the network is taking a look at Green Arrow.

Previously Justin Hartley played the character on Smallville, and while there has been no information if this is the same version of the character, it has been reported that they are not looking into him playing the title character in this series.

Just because The CW is exploring these different series, it doesn’t mean any of them will make it to air, but seeing as Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC Comics, is part owner of the network, it only makes sense that the two would want to get another series on the air, it’s just a matter of finding the right property.

No word has been announced as to when we’ll hear a final decision on any of these.

Michael Rosenbaum is returning for the series finale of Smallville.

Smallville is one of those series that is excruciatingly painful to watch, and no matter how many times you try to pull yourself away from it, you end up coming back to see if the train is still plowing into the car on the tracks.  I gave up watching it regularly around season five or so, but I still drop in from time to time when I hear of them doing something promising, and always walk away disappointed.

That being said, one of the only save graces to the series was Michael Rosenbaum who played Lex Luthor for the first seven seasons of the series.  He left at the end of his contract, never to be seen again except in a few unexceptional movies.  Apparently he has taken up writing and not spending much time on his acting.

The series is coming to and end this year, its tenth season, and there had been talk of bringing Lex back for the finale to wrap up the storyline of him coming into the role of being Superman’s arch-nemesis.  There had been rumors that Mr. Rosenbaum wasn’t interested in returning, but it was announced yesterday that he was indeed going to appear in the final episode in May.

In a statement released on the matter, Rosenbaum said:

I’m delighted to return for the series finale. I’m simply doing it for all of the fans out there who made Smallville the great success it is. I appreciate all of their passion, their relentlessness, and even their threats. Ha ha.

While I’m sure it will still be horribly written, at least there’ll be a reason to tune in come May 13^th … and then celebrate that fear where those horrible writers will end up landing.

What do you do if you’re a network that’s about to lose a comic book-based series that has had ten successful series for you? Do you spin off one of the existing characters in the series, which there have been many? Do you find another well known character from the same comic book company? Or do you go for a self-loathing character who is filled with angst that hardly anyone knows of?

Yeah, number three wouldn’t be my first choice either, but, then again, I don’t work for The CW.

As most people have heard, Smallville is (finally) leaving the air this season with its tenth season.  The CW apparently really wants another comic book-based series to replace it, but instead of spinning off one of the umpteen other super heroes they’ve introduced on the show, they are instead opting for a character that barely anyone has heard of.

Raven is a half-demon girl who, in the comics at least, formed The New Teen Titans back in the 1980s to help her fight off her demon father, Trigon.  She is an empath, teleporter and a witch who has fought giving herself over completely to her dark side for as long as the character has existed.  This has mad her a favorite of goth kids for years, but she has never really been a “mainstream” character in the DC Universe.

She did appear in the Teen Titans cartoon on Cartoon Network, but even there she had some minor changes made to her, but they did keep the demon father.

While I’ve always found her an intriguing character, I’ve only ever been able to handle her in small doses because her introspection and “what am I?” monologues did tend to get on your nerves after a while.

This is a character that has worked best in a team setting.  With the other Titans to play off of, she makes sense, bt there is little to no chance of the others showing up.  Robin?  No way due to the Batman films.  Starfire?  an orange alien princess showing up?  Once in a while, maybe.  Cyborg?  Maybe since he’s been on Smallville.  Beast Boy?  An all green guy who changes into animals?  Again, maybe once in a while.

The idea of this character working in a weekly hour-long drama just boggles my mind.  I would imagine she was chosen for the aspect that they can market her to the Twilight/Vampire Diaries type fans.  My suspicion is they will make her into a high school student and give her some dreamy boy for her to get feelings for that she can never be with because “he will never accept her if he knew the truth …”.

In other words, it’s only going to kinda-sorta be Raven as we knew her.  Just like The CW with the painful Smallville.

So far only one script has been ordered, but something tell me we’ll be seeing this on our TVs in the not too distant future, and like all shows currently on The CW, the pain will begin.

I want to know what the producers of Smallville have on the executives at The CW. Did they get pictures of them with German Shepards?  Did they kidnap their children and are holding them hostage?  There has to be something such as this going on to explain how this show has been renewed for a tenth season.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that Smallville is indeed returning for a tenth pain-filled season.  If you are unfamiliar with the show, it is the story of Clark Kent in his formative years before he became Superman, but the show has departed so wildly from the source material that it is barely recognizable any more.

The problem is, the show could be good if it wanted to.  I don’t even care about the fact it is so far away from the original any more, it has set up its own mythos, and that’s fine.  What annoys me is the fact that writing is just so silly as to be insulting.  I’m not sure who they think is watching this show, but the scripting is so insanely bland that it almost makes you wonder if they are trying to drive viewers away.

I recently started paying attention again due to the fact they’ve been adding other characters from the DC universe to the series, which has made it mildly more interesting, but the scripting is still atrocious, the sets laughable and the costuming looks like a high school production.  At least have some pride in your work, which no one involved with this show seems to have any more.

Oh well, the show will be back for another year to torture us all … oh joy.

I don’t know why I never checked out Google Trends until recently, but now I am hooked.

I have known about this tool for ages, but I only recently started using it seriously.  Essentially it allows you at any time to see what the top 100 most searched on terms are on Google.  Click on the search term and you will see the top results people are seeing when they look it up.  It also gives bloggers great ideas for something to blog about… unless you are me, and then you just say, “why not blog about the actual tool?”

… not that I have ever done that.

The thing that always gets me is how the top results are almost always soemthing that has recently aired on television.  For example, the first two entries in the pictured results relate to tonight’s episode of Kitchen Nightmares.  While the Hudson river plane incident from today is mixed in, you can also see tonight’s episode of Smallville being looked up for information about the Legion of Super Heroes.  All of this is quite common: if it’s on TV, it’s on Google trends shortly thereafter.

It isn’t just for blogging reasons I find this fascinating, but it’s almost a form of people watching rom my perspective.  I have always been fascinated by people and the things they do, and this is like a window on to the Internet at large, and what it is that interests them.  It also sometimes reveals our stupidity as Adam Ostrow, one of my editors on Mashable, pointed out the other day on Twitter.

that’s pretty sad … “American Idle” is the 54th most popular search term on Go ogle this hour

That kinda sums up the day and age, doesn’t it?