Apparently 2013 is going to be a big year for people you already know from that thing or that movie (you know the one) coming to television, because in addition to Michael J. Fox, Anna Faris, Robin Williams, and Martin Short landing roles in new comedies, and Kyle Chandler, John Malkovich, and the RZA starring in dramas, these things also happened this week:
- John Stamos will appear in a season-long arc on USA’s Necessary Roughness as the ruthless founder of a global sports and entertainment company. They had me at “Stamos.”
- Kate Walsh is in talks to star in a Ferrell/McKay-produced NBC comedy called Bad Judge, where she would play “a hard-living, sexually unapologetic woman who plays with the law, and whose life on the edge is constantly in balance as she also happens to be a judge in the Criminal Court system.”
- James Spader will star in NBC’s Blacklist as “the world’s most wanted criminal who mysteriously turns himself in and offers to give up everyone he has ever worked with” on the condition that “he will only work with a newly minted FBI agent, Elizabeth Keen, with whom he seemingly has no connection.”
- Cate Blanchett has signed on for an HBO adaption of Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s memoir Cancer Vixen, in which she will portray “a cartoonist for magazines like The New Yorker and Glamour with a supercharged Manhattan lifestyle who is about to get married but must re-examine her life through wit and her animation when she is diagnosed with breast cancer.”
- Alfred Molina is in talks to co-star with Kristyn Ritter in NBC’s Assistance as the former Don’t Trust the B— star’s demanding boss.
- Justin Bieber’s hamster died. Not TV-related, I guess, but I figured you might want to know.
So there you go. All these famous people landing TV shows, and still no word on my pitch for Keanu Reeves: Philosopher Assassin. Unbelievable.