Patrick Wilson and Ashley Judd have become the latest film stars to be lured to television, which is where all the good donuts are. Judd, whose last and only series role was as one of three actresses to play Swoosie Kurtz’s daughter on quirky early-’90s drama Sisters, has been pursued seemingly every pilot season for years now, and seems to have finally found what she was looking for in ABC’s Missing. Which is to say, a show that echoes her late-’90s heyday as a thriller star, as the show casts Judd as a single mother and ex-CIA agent on a mission to find her kidnapped 18-year-old son in Europe. (If that premise sounds a lot like Taken, that’s ridiculous, because in Taken it was a girl who was kidnapped and it starred Liam Neeson.)
Patrick Wilson, meanwhile, has signed on to star in the Jonathan Demme-directed pilot for an untitled CBS medical drama—one that, like so many other shows coming this fall, also has a supernatural twist. It stars Wilson as an “ultra-competitive surgeon” whose ex-wife begins communicating with him from beyond the grave and teaching him about the real meaning of life and stuff, such as the fact that work isn't everything, presumably. Because it's not. Take it from ghosts.