Arieanna at gilmoregirlsnews.com has confirmed that Patterson has been cast in the show.
From Arieanna's article at
http://www.gilmoregirlsnews.com/2007/06/29/scott-patterson-vs-dawn-ostroff/ :
UPDATES: I have a bunch of updates about the Scott Patterson situation, but I’ll keep them brief:
* On June 29, Scott Patterson accepted a position on Aliens in America as the father, Gary Tolchuk
* CW and SP’s people cleared all misunderstandings, as they were, last week and were able to come to negotiations on this matter
* Lots of things were decontextualized and misunderstood on both sides, but things are now totally fine
* The CW has nothing but respect for Scott Patterson and did not mean for anything to be misrepresented as otherwise
* Scott Patterson was more than happy to audition, once he cleared things up, in order to give the creative team his take on the character
* Scott Patterson picked Aliens in America as the new CW show he wanted to be a part of (with his contract, he was guaranteed one). He is very much looking forward to working with this creative team. He thinks the show is exciting and has a lot of potential.
* Scott Patterson was never angry nor upset at the CW, although there were misunderstandingsI posted the following reaction to the comments for the article at ggn:I'm gonna put my stage manager cap on right now -- when you've been a lead on a TV series already as Scott has, it's an insult to have to audition for another series. It's not unheard of, but it's still considered an insult. Particularly if it's for a show that's going to air on the same network as your previous show -- for instance, it would be far less of an insult if SP were having to audition for a show on CBS or NBC, which would be an upward move, but auditioning for a starring role on a CW show or a basic cable show would be a lateral move. For a lateral move like a CW show to a CW (or basic cable show), you build the show around someone like Patterson, not the other way around *because* Patterson has paid his dues and because Patterson has done so much work on Gg that if you don't already know what he can do, you shouldn't be in showbiz at all, much less asking him to audition for a lateral-move show.
Arieanna's update on the situation is interesting, wherever she got the news from, and I'm assuming that the news comes from an inside source at the CW, the show's production team at Paramount-Warner, or even Patterson's camp. The details of the update, even if they're only a distillation of a larger press release or news report, are quite hilarious in the way that they try in a zillion ways to say that "stuff happened but everything's hunky dory now." Problem is that they did confirm large parts of what was already reported: Patterson still had to audition, misunderstandings *did* happen, feelings *were* hurt. Interestingly, the update makes it sound to me like the audition that Patterson *did* have after all ended up being more of a "meet and greet" more than anything else -- which is a substantially different type of meeting than an audition.
So what we have is a list of updated newspoints that essentially confirm everything in Arieanna's original version of the post, that pretty much everything happened the way it was described with the caveat that one or more people in the middle of it didn't know what they were doing and made some hugely amateur mistakes. Purely speculatively, what might have been intended to be a meet-and-greet all along might have been initially described to Patterson as an audition, which would be a major protocol breach.
Then there's the mandatory ego-stroking of:
"Scott Patterson picked Aliens in America as the new CW show he wanted to be a part of (with his contract, he was guarranteed one). He is very much looking forward to working with this creative team. He thinks the show is exciting and has a lot of potential."Which means that he's taking it just to get out from under the holding contract as soon as possible, likely *because* he thinks it'll get cancelled quickly (I'm speculating here). The show has had a troubled development history over the past two years (more below) and, moreover, the show is clearly doomed because the mere fact that Patterson is replacing one of the lead actors means, with the (high) quality of Patterson's acting being entirely beside the point, the show has been in creative disarray all along.
The last point brings even more obvious speculation, turning the whole thing into a non-denial denial -- or, in other words, everything reported initially is true, no matter how much they try to put the genie back in the bottle.
The point reads,
"Scott Patterson was never angry nor upset at the CW, although there were misunderstandings."IMO, that's pure B.S. The line translates to Scott saying, "Okay, you can say I was never angry in the first place as long as you don't tick me off again."
And I'm totally disregarding the bit that Patterson was not angry or upset at The CW -- that's boilerplate language like the apology that Jack Rudolph was trying to strongarm out of Simon to deliver to the press throughout the last four episodes of Studio 60. An empty attempt at damage control.
Now, that last little bit about Aliens In America's doomed history: go to the link above and take a look at that article in today's NY Times about the show (written before Patterson signed on, with a cast photo that, of course, doesn't include him).
I'll distill the article into severel points and give my take on them:
1) It's about a Pakistani Muslim exchange student moving in with a Typical American Family to go to school. Interesting premise. Do-able, but . . .
2) The pilot has already sat on the shelf for a year. Hardly a vote of confidence.
3) The show was originally pitched to NBC, which passed. Given NBC's horrible recent track record with launching comedies, this would be a point in the show's favor except that . . .
4) The show has been created by two long-term staffers of Mad About You, whose last three seasons, to put it mildly, were awful and THEN . . .
5) . . . they were the showrunners on the last three seasons of Just Shoot Me, which were just about the worst three seasons of a sitcom ever since Richie Cunningham left Happy Days.
6) NBC gave the creators of the show permission to shop it around to other networks after it passed, but remained the producing studio. It's a rare show of confidence that the network allowed the creators to shop the show around and it landed at The CW, where Ostroff became a fan of it.
7) The CW wanted to pick it up for only 8 episodes which -- as those like me who have been watching Hidden Palms have found out -- makes the pickup far less of a vote of confidence that it looks like at first glance. What it means is that the CW was intending only to speculate on the show, air it just to see what would happen. But . . .
The only way that NBC would agree to let the CW pick the show up was going to be for 13 episodes, which requires a reduced budget and the move to film it in Vancouver (which indicates that it's not a (three-camera) sitcom, it's a (one-camera) half-hour comedy. So there's already heated negotiations about budget and location. But there's even more . . .
9) THEN NBC walked away from the show, which became a co-production of Paramount and Warner, or, in other words, an in-house production of The CW. And still, there's more:
10) At least some of the actors from the original pilot balked at moving to the colder climate of Vancouver to film the show.
11) Due to the racial and political situations in the pilot, it's already had and is getting more bad buzz.
12) Add to that the inner turmoil of getting it greenlit in the first place and NOW the inner turmoil of getting Scott Patterson signed onto the show and, well, it's a canellation just waiting for the first three weeks of the season to happen.
13) The booby prize: The show is going to air on Monday nights at 8:30pm, after EHC, within a bloc of urban comedies. Which show is not like the others? Which show is airing against Prison Break (Patterson fans also tend to be Wenty/Purcell fans) and IIRC, Old Christine? Yep, Aliens In America.
So, IMO, what does this mean for the Mandate?
Absolutely Nothing!They may film the entire 13-episode order, but if it gets past episode 6 or 7 before getting cancelled, it'll mean that the showrunners made substantial changes that IMO they aren't capable of making. Moreover, since we're pushing for Gg as a midseason replacement, miniseries Event or movie, the show will be cancelled long before Patterson needs to be signed back onto any Gg revival.
-- Rob
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