News Brief : Renewals and Cancellations

.... Lifetime cancels Army Wives after 7 seasons
Lifetime has decided to divorce Army Wives—its longest-running original series—after several mostly happy years together. The show concluded its seventh and now final season this past June.

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.... FX Renews The Bridge for Season 2
I get the feeling that FX wasn't too sure about this one, but the network has gone ahead and ordered a second season of The Bridge anyway. Season 2 will run for another 13 episodes and reclaim the show's status as a summer series in 2014. The renewal comes late in The Bridge's first season.

... ABC Renews Mistresses for Season 2
Mistresses, the trashy summer series will be back for a second season. That's right, Mistresses, the ABC soap starring Alyssa Milano, will be back next year. Apparently, the show was the number-two scripted network drama of the summer behind Under the Dome.
Mistresses left literally dozens of viewers hanging by a thread with a Season 1 finale that was bloated with awesome and full of insane, unresolved cliffhangers. Now we'll finally find out whether Milano's character Savi survived her terrible merge onto the freeway in her sweet ride, we'll see how her white husband reacts to her half-black baby (oopsie!), and we'll learn whether Yunjin Kim's character was shot by a crazy Penelope Ann Miller.

.... HBO renews Boardwalk Empire for Season 5
HBO has put some extra cash in the pockets of organized crime and re-upped Boardwalk Empire for a fifth season, just three episodes into Season 4. The move continues HBO's tradition of quick renewals, and was likely nudged along by Boardwalk's performance at this year's Primetime Emmy Awards: In addition to Bobby Cannavale's surprising win for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama on Sunday, the series also bagged trophies for Outstanding Art Direction for a Single-Camera Series, Outstanding Hairstyling for a Single-Camera Series, Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour), and Outstanding Sound Editing for a Series. HBO hasn't announced an episode count or target air date for Season 5, but if history is any indication (and shouldn't it be, for a period piece like this one?) "12" and "fall 2014" would be pretty safe bets.
Boardwalk Empire's still-young fourth season is averaging 7.5 million viewers per episode, according to HBO, and the show is almost certainly hoping that it will continue to earn critical recognition now that it's introduced even more potentially award-winning characters in Ron Livingston's Roy Philips and Patricia Arquette's Sally Wheet. Jeffrey Wright's Dr. Valentin Narcisse may even be an Emmy lock. Only three episodes in, the guy is quite an intriguing villain, and a perfect foil to Michael Kenneth Williams' criminally underutilized Chalky White.

... BBC America cancels Copper
I regret to inform you that BBC America has decided to pull the plug on its period drama Copper after only two seasons. The series followed Detective Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) in post-Civil War era New York City as he struggled with his own personal demons and the demons that plagued the slums of Five Points New York. The Season 2 finale on September 22 will now serve as a series finale.

AMC, HBO and Showtime .......... Troubling times at Cable powerhouses

AMC vesus Showtime versus HBO

News Brief : Game Of Thrones castings, Show renewals and Who's the best 'Anti-hero' character on TV

.... FX's plan for The Strain 
The network's upcoming adaptation of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hagan's trilogy of vampire novels is already pretty highly anticipated around these parts: Lost and Bates Motel showrunner Carlton Cuse is working with del Toro to bring it to the airwaves, and House of Cards' Corey Stoll is starring. But at FX's TCA executive session, network head honcho (and all-around smart guy) John Landgraf announced that they already have episode and season limits (39-65 and 3-5, respectively) in mind for the show. Pre-planning doesn't always work, but knowing end dates early, especially for high-concept series, is a really good idea.

News Briefs: Game of Thrones Is the Most Pirated Show of the Season

... Congratulations, Game of Thrones! A lot of people are so addicted to you that they are willing to break the law to watch every one of your episodes. The HBO fantasy series was the most pirated show of the spring by a wide margin, averaging approximately 5.2 million illegal downloads per episode. That's almost the same number of people who watch the show legally—an estimated 5.5 million viewers. Rounding out the top 10 pirated shows of the season are The Big Bang Theory (2.9 million), How I Met Your Mother (2.85 million), The Walking Dead (2.7 million), Hannibal (2.1 million), Vikings (1.9 million), Arrow (1.85 million), The Vampire Diaries (1.8 million), Modern Family (1.75 million), and Revenge (1.7 million).


BUSINESS TIME
.... Under The Dome, CBS new summer show debuted to very impressive numbers, earning 3.2 ratings with 13 - 14 million viewers. Impressive numbers, ratings-wise and viewership-wise for a new summer show, they don't normally perform well outside of the Main TV season.

... Apparently AMC's Mad Men had an up-and-down season creatively, but when it comes to ratings, it was pretty much the same old, same old. Last night's Season 6 finale pulled in an audience of 2.7 million viewers, about the same as last season's (give or take a hundred thousand people), but it was just big enough for AMC to tout it as the highest-rated Mad Men finale ever.

... Lifetime debuted Devious Maids, a.k.a. Los Housewives Desperados, this past weekend and it did rather pedestrian in the ratings. Just 2 million people tuned in to watch the latest from Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. Lifetime's top shows hover around the 3 million mark.

.... Stars has ordered "Battlestar Galactica" executive producer Ronald D. Moore's Outlander, based on Diana Gabaldon's bestselling books. The Outlander series follows Claire Randall, a married combat nurse from 1945 who is swept back to 1743, forced to marry Scottish warrior Jamie Fraser and finds herself torn between two times. The show's 16 episodes will begin filming in Scotland this fall and premiere next year.

CASTING NEWS
... Expect a very cranky American person to arrive at Downton Abbey. Legitimately great actor Paul Giamatti will drop by the fourth season of the PBS import as Harold Levinson, brother of Cora and uncle to Mary and Edith. His character is described as a maverick playboy, and will appear in the Season 4 finale next year.

... Hunky twins Charlie and Max Carver have been cast in the HBO pilot The Leftovers, the Rapture-themed drama from Lost's Damon Lindelof. The facsimiles, best known for playing the Scavo twins on Desperate Housewives, will play—you guessed it—twins who befriend the main character's daughter.

... Boardwalk Empire's Julianne Nicholson has landed the lead role on Sundance Channel's original drama The Descendants. A straight-to-series order for six episodes, The Descendants follows a sheriff who's struggling to prevent a small town and a Native American tribe from tearing each other apart. Nicholson, whose other credits include Law & Order: Criminal Intent and She will play the sheriff's boozing wife.

SAD NEWS
... Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Family Ties and Spin City, passed away on Sunday at the age of 68. The multiple-Emmy winner helped launch the careers of Michael J. Fox and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence (Lawrence co-created Spin City with Goldberg). Goldberg's other credits in varying capacities included The Bob Newhart Show, Alice, Brooklyn Bridge, and The Tony Randall Show.

... Discovery Channel continued to look like a shell of its former self last night with a live broadcast of daredevil tightrope artist Nick Wallenda walking across the Grand Canyon on a two-inch wide high-wire with no harness and only Jesus to guide him along. And lots of people tuned in to watch him fall to his death (he made it safely to the other side)! The broadcast averaged 8.5 million viewers, but at its peak, 13 million viewers took a peak at the program, crushing everything on network television.