Here’s all the TV news you need to know (read: a dozen news items you don’t need to know but are fun anyway).
- A Baltimore man was arrested on a handgun charge recently, and he happens to share the same name as a notorious character on The Wire: Omar Little, Jr.
- FOX chose not to renew Terra Nova for a second season, but word on the street is that Netflix is interested in picking it up.
- Keri Russell has joined the FX pilot “The Americans,” as a KGB spy living with an arranged husband in Washington D.C. during the 1980s.
- Nickelodeon is bringing back 1990s game show Figure It Out, in which a panel of celebrities have to parse out the layperson-guest’s unique talent.
- Sigourney Weaver is set to play a divorced-First-Lady-turned-Secretary-of-State in a new series on USA entitled Political Animals.
- A&E is developing a series called Bates Motel, which provides the backstory of Norman Bates, the killer in Psycho.
- Matthew Perry will make a return to dramatic television in a multi-episode arc on The Good Wife.
- The cast of Parenthood lent their lip-syncing talent to a music video for Landon Pigg (boyfriend of series star Mae Whitman), and it’s adorable. (The video is embedded at the end of this post, too.)
- Speaking of which, Bill O’Reilly has his panties in a bunch that Parenthood aired a scene in which 16-year-old Drew has sex with his girlfriend. Let alone that Parenthood is just about the most endearing, innocuous show you’re ever likely to find on the tube.
- FOX has American Idol, NBC has The Voice, and now ABC is trying to get in the celebrity-mentored singing competition game with Duets. The show will feature Kelly Clarkson, Lionel Richie, Jennifer Nettles, and Robin Thicke finding talented voices and performing duets with them until America picks one winning duo.
- The crew of FOX’s drama Alcatraz happened to knock on the door of a woman whose parked car was impeding the filming of a car at the same time as said woman was having a cardiac event. Thanks to their fast acting, the woman lived to tell the tale, saying, “The next thing I knew, it looked like 10 handsome men were in my room. […] I clearly needed to go to the hospital. I didn’t know what was happening to my heart.”
- Glee is planning a Whitney Houston tribute episode. That the episode in which Mercedes sang “I Will Always Love You” aired mere days after Houston’s death was apparently just a coincidence.