The big cinema names now working on small screen
Jeff Goldblum is in talks to star in crime drama Seeing Red, as a detective who can speak to the dead.
Paul Haggis, writer-director of this year's Oscar winner, Crash, directs his own script for the pilot of the New York Irish gangster thriller The Black Donnellys.
Bruce Beresford is directing the pilot for CBS-TV's Orpheus, to be co-produced by Tony and Ridley Scott, about a man drawn into a sinister religious cult.
Barry Sonnenfeld, director of Men In Black, has an untitled buddy-cop pilot in the works, and F Gary Gray (of The Italian Job) helms ABC's FBI drama Enemies. Even an old hand like William Friedkin, who got his start as a director in TV's first 'golden age' before directing The French Connection and The Exorcist (and cannily marrying the CEO of Paramount), will return to TV to direct Anything But Murder, based on the life of a fugitive Boston crime boss.
Steven Spielberg, master of the studio picture, teams up again with the cable-based Sci-Fi Channel for the 12-part miniseries Nine Lives.
Jerry Bruckheimer, a byword for success (and excess) in big-budget movies of the Top Gun variety, will continue his invasion of the small screen (CSI, Without A Trace, Cold Case) with American Crime, about an LA law firm. Shark, another crime drama, directed by Spike Lee, has a cast that includes Ray Liotta, Virginia Madsen and Jonny Lee Miller, as well as James Woods as a celebrity attorney turned prosecutor.
George Clooney, bona fide movie star deluxe and about as thoroughgoing a child of television as you could find (most notably in ER), will return to TV to direct a live-in-the-studio version of the greatest movie ever made about broadcasting, Network.
Aaron Sorkin wrote A Few Good Men before moving to TV and creating the highly influential if little-seen comedy Sports Night. He went on to build The West Wing, that parallel universe for people who wish Bill Clinton was still in the Oval Office.
JJ Abrams, a movie writer and director of Mission: Impossible III, created Felicity, Alias and, most recently, the huge hit Lost.
Keeping House In Order
David Shore, writer-creator, House
"Movies are getting worse," says Shore, partly to explain the move into TV. "So much money is getting thrown at them, they become about the spectacle, not the story. TV is story-driven, so it's attracting more talent." Shore should know.
Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects and the upcoming Superman Returns, was sufficiently impressed with the script for the pilot of House to sign on even before Hugh Laurie did. And then along came Laurie. "Without Hugh, it could have got pretty boring pretty quickly - a straightforward medical procedural show," says Shore. Laurie has since been nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe for his performance as the growling, unshaven, misanthropic medical genius.
It's little wonder that Shore, who started his TV career on Due South before working on The Outer Limits and Law & Order, is behind the notion that there's a new golden age in US television: "There were years when it was the same five shows up for Emmys; now there are at least 10 shows you wouldn't be surprised to see win an award. The standard is higher, there is more variety. Though, as a writer with a show on at the moment, I'm biased, obviously."
House, 9pm, Thursdays, on Channel 6