The Box: T.V. & Electronic News – 4/18/08

1) J.J. Abrams has hired Jeff Pinkner, producer and writer for cult hit Lost, to be the show runner of his new scifi television pilot Fringe, which will debut in the fall on the Fox Network. Fringe stars Joshua Jackson, Anna Torv and John Noble, and is about an FBI agent who has to work with a lunatic scientist to unravel an epidemic of unexplained phenomena.

2) Two short-lived, comic-based t.v. fantasy series are coming out on DVD in July. Witchblade: The Complete Series starred Yancy Butler as a cop who gains superpowers from an otherworldly sword, but at some cost. Birds of Prey: The Complete Series was also based on the DC comic book series that featured Oracle (formerly Batgirl,) Huntress – the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, and Dinah, the daughter of Black Canary. The television series starred Ashley Scott, Dina Meyer, Rachel Skarsten and Mia Sara. The DVD will also include the animated tie-in Web series Gotham Girls. 

3) NBC are releasing more weekly webcomics for the superhero drama Heroes. The latest batch are centered on characters involved with the mysterious Company that tracks, hunts and uses superpowered individuals. Around 80 comics from the two seasons of the show are available at Heroes WebComics

4) Battlestar Galactica will be getting a MMO space game. The game will be designed by Auran Games, who also did the BSG flight simulator game, and put out by Sierra Online. The game will take place during the first Cylon War in the series’ history. A BSG board game is also coming out in the fall from Fantasy Flight. Each new television episode of Battlestar Galactica will be made available online at http://www.scifi.com ..

5) A&E cable channel in the U.S. is remaking Michael Crichton’s medical SF doomsday novel, The Andromeda Strain, about a satellite that crash-lands near a small town in Utah, unleashing a deadly plague that kills virtually everyone except two survivors, who may provide clues to immunizing the rest of the world population. A&E will air the movie on Memorial Day weekend. The Andromeda Strain was also made into a feature film from Robert Wise in 1971.

6) In addition to J.J. Abrams’ Fringe and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, Fox Network in the U.S. is upping its scifi quotion by planning to air Ronald D. Moore’s new SF pilot Virtuality. Moore, who created the new Battlestar Galactica, has teamed up with Universal Media Studios and producers Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun, who invented the show’s premise, for a tale about a starship on a ten-year journey to explore a distant solar system.

7) NBC Universal Digital Studio has signed a deal with Stan Rogow, Brent Friedman and Jeff Sagansky's Electric Farm Entertainment for the U.S. domestic rights to their upcoming Internet SF series Gemini Division, starring Rosario Dawson. They have also acquired the rights to Electric Farm's next scripted online series, the zombie comedy Woke Up Dead. Sony Pictures TV International will co-produce and distribute the two series internationally on mobile, broadband and traditional TV. The 50 three-minute episodes of the Web series will run on various NBC websites, including NBC.com. Gemini Division, which starts airing in the summer, is about a New York cop who uncovers a global conspiracy to create simulated life forms and sneak them into the unsuspecting human population. Woke Up Dead concerns a USC student who wakes up underwater in the bathtub one morning and finds himself to be a zombie.

8) Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky is doing a new supernatural thriller series with the AMC cable channel, called Riverview Towers. The show is about a family who move into an apartment building with paranormal activity. The script will be written by John J. McLaughlin, who worked with Aronofsky on the film thriller Black Swan. 

9) Rob Bowman of The X-Files fame will direct the pilot of the supernatural series Castle, for the ABC Network in the U.S. Castle is about a horror novelist who serves as a consultant for the NYPD on weird cases. Andrew Marlowe wrote the pilot and will executive produce.

10) Emmy-winning actor Bobby Cannavale will play the title role in ABC's remake fantasy series Cupid. The original series, created by Rob Thomas, had a one-season, highly acclaimed run in 1998, and starred Jeremy Piven and Paula Marshall. Piven played Trevor Hale, a man who believes he is Cupid, banished to Earth without his powers until he manages to match 100 couples, and who just might be the actual Greco-Roman god of love. Cannavale will reprise Piven’s part and the new version of the show is scheduled to air in 2009.

11) Alexandra Breckenridge and Adam Rothenberg have joined the cast of new CBS fantasy series Mythological Ex, about a woman, played by Elizabeth Reaser, who learns from a psychic that she has already dated the man she's supposed to marry, and so decides to revisit all her past relationships in search of him.