With Cheryl Hickey hosting, Global's Massey Hall ad upfront played like one long episode of E.T. Canada. Things got a little draggy by the second hour when good sport Howie Mandel appeared on stage to play a cheesy version of his hit game show Deal Or No Deal. Mandel pointed out the cheap, battery-operated plastic closet light substituted for Deal's red button. "This is like the play at home game," he quipped.
Former China Beach star Dana Delany, who co-stars with Timothy Hutton in the NBC drama pickup Kidnapped, confirmed that she turned down the part of Bree on Desperate Housewives. (The juicy tidbit turned up in Bill Carter's new book Desperate Networks.)
Any regrets?, she was asked. "I regret the loss of the money," she said.
Bree was too much like the part she briefly played two seasons before on the quirky and short-lived Fox drama Pasadena. "I got to play all those (Desperate Housewives) characters in one person," she said.
Delany admitted she was very picky when it came to parts. "I'd hate to tell you all the things I've turned down."
The actress was so disheartened when Fox abandoned Pasadena in favour of 24 that she never got on the Jack Bauer band wagon. Now she's on a taut thriller that seems modeled on 24's success. "To be honest with you," she said, "I've never seen 24 for petty reasons that I have to get over."
Prison Break buddies Wentworth Miller and Robert Knepper worked the Massey stage as well as the Global press room. Knepper, who plays Break's resident psycho "T Bag," admitted fans sometimes freak out when they spot him on the street. "People just shriek, 'Oh my God, you're that guy I love to hate,'" he said.
The grisly season finale where his 'cuffed character had his hand chopped off was "the very last shot of the very last day of the first season," he said. On the first take, the phony severed hand flipped up and landed beside Knepper's face. To crack up his castmates, he started sucking his thumb. Yech!
Miller says the show will be reinvented next season with the gang finally out of the Big House. The big question, he said, is, "Do you care enough about these characters to follow them outside the walls?" Global hopes the answer is yes.
More Artists
