• Michael Mann staple and “Hey! It’s That Guy!” Bruce McGill has joined the cast of the Area 52 pilot, reports Zap2it.com. The Animal House star will play a general in the NBC comedy set at a secret government installation, where he’ll be telling co-star Matthew Lillard to ‘wipe that smirk off your face!’ Area 52 also features the totally awesome and hilarious Jane Lynch.
  • There are certain actors who do more with silent moments than they do any amount of dialogue. Freshly minted Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker is one of them. So is Lance Henriksen, and so is Charles S. Dutton – and Dutton is joining the cast of Suspect, reports Yahoo. The three-time-Emmy award-winning actor (two for acting, one for directing), best known to meatheads the world over as the groundskeeper from Rudy, will play an overweight, emotional detective in the police procedural for ABC. I like Dutton quite a bit – he’s a hardworking actor who has never achieved mainstream success. Suspect could very easily be that role, a standard CSI knockoff elevated by a great actor. (And my Jason Robert Brown membership card mandates I tell you that Dutton played Tom Conley in The Murder of Mary Phagan, so there you go.)
  • Jailbait Alert! Jailbait Alert! All the men who were drooling over Leighton Meester’s guest spot as a teenage girl with the hots for Gregory House last fall now face an agonizing dilemma: Explaining to their significant other why they added Gossip Girl to the TiVo when the teen soap from O.C. guru Josh Schwartz premieres this fall. Meester, who was way hotter as Carrie Bishop on Veronica Mars, will star opposite Blake Lively (she of the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants) as a couple of rich girls at a fancy prep school in New York. Gossip Girl, if it gets picked up, airs on the CW, and the THUD Department of Standards and Practices wants me to clarify that neither of these girls is technically jailbait – Meester is 20 and Lively is 19.
  • I have not been a huge fan of Sara Ramirez, aka Callie O’Malley on Grey’s Anatomy, but I suppose she’s a good fit for the wet blanket that is T.R. Knight. This weekend, however, I found some clips of her in the role she won a Tony for, Spamalot, on the YouTube and I must conclude: Goddamn. She has pipes. My new opinion of her aside, she’s a favorite character for fans of the show, and it looks like she’ll be getting a little more screen time when Hector Elizondo guest stars on the shark-jumping-and-proud-of-it drama later this season. The Gary Marshall staple and star of CHUD Essential The Taking of Pelham One Two Three will play Mr. Torres, the father of Ramirez’s character. Elizondo is no stranger to medical shows, by the way – he won an Emmy for his role on Chicago Hope.
  • Tony-award winner Kristin Chenoweth, fresh off her starring role on Studio 60 on the…oh, wait? That wasn’t her? From what I heard, it sure seemed like it was! My bad. Anyway, the former West Wing star signed up to play a dead woman (not a zombie) in the ABC pilot Pushing Daises. Not to be confused with CBS’s Babylon Fields, the comedy-drama focuses on a man who figures out how to bring the dead back to life. Complications, they ensue. I like Chenoweth, and the article from Variety says that this comes from Dead Like Me mastermind Bryan Fuller and the totally uneven Barry Sonnefeld (who did do Maximum Bob). I’m in. 
  • Since Kiefer Sutherland did such a good job promoting Rocco DeLuca, he’s decided that he should aim a little higher the next time around. And by aim a little higher, I mean “convincing West Point cadets that torture is bad and that Jack Bauer is a fictional…character.” Disturbed by reports from within the U.S. military that soldiers are using the FOX actioneer 24 as an interrogation technique playbook, Sutherland told the Daily Star tabloid “If it takes an actor to go to West Point to help officer cadets differentiate between reality and fantasy, then I’m happy to do that." This kind of reminds me of when William Daniels got asked to give medical school commencement speeches in character as Dr. Mark Craig from St. Elsewhere. While I admire Sutherland’s intentions here, I kind of want to see Jack Bauer give a West Point commencement address. FOX News, you listening? Cross-over!