ABC, which has been fond of stuffing its casts full of people you know from other TV shows and then rolling the dice since roughly 2003, has done just that again, adding three very familiar faces and a guy from Revenge to three of its pilots for the year. Who are they? Here are some bullet points to tell you just that, in serene corporate Power Point format.
- Sure, there’s a Heroes reboot, but if ABC’s new “aliens among us” show The Visitors takes off, then Milo Ventimiglia won’t be joining said reboot as Peter Petrelli. (This is probably a good thing.) The Visitors is loosely based on a Ray Bradbury story—probably “Zero Hour,” based on the very loose explanation of how the show’s alien invaders use Earth’s children against it. That could be really cool, but the description of Ventimiglia’s character over at Deadline sounds… strange. He’s “covered in tattoos and speaks a strange language”? Yes, that definitely sounds like it’s in Ventimiglia’s wheelhouse. Also joining The Visitors is Barry Sloane, who is a guy on Revenge. We haven’t watched that show in ages, so we couldn’t tell you if his character is dead or what, but if he’s not, maybe he soon will be.
- Morena Baccarin’s three-year stint on Homeland might have ended with a season that increasingly had little use for her, but she’s still gained a ton of industry cred from being on the show (as well as that second season Emmy nomination). So ABC, which worked with her on V, her last pre-Homeland gig, is bringing her back to the network for its new medical drama pilot, Warriors. According to Deadline, Baccarin will play the female lead in the new show loosely based on the lives of doctors and nurses working at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. She’ll be a psychiatrist specializing in PTSD, “who suffers a mild case herself having just returned from Afghanistan.” Once again, television thanks its lucky stars for the vocational irony narrative.
- Finally, in perhaps the best news of this trio of updates, Molly Shannon is joining ABC’s untitled Brian Gallivan-penned single-camera comedy about a family that moves to New Hampshire to take over a bunch of tourist cottages (because that is a thing people do). The project, once known as Bambi Cottages, will now star Shannon as the pragmatic, practical mom, putting up with her husband’s foolishness with weary but loving resignation. Is that a part Shannon could play in her sleep? Yes. Does that mean we don’t welcome her back to TV? No. The Hollywood Reporter has more.
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