• Casino is one of my favorite Martin Scorsese movies, and one of the reasons is because of the behind-the-scenes look into Vegas, baby, Vegas that the Academy Award winner gives us. Now, Scorsese is re-teaming with his Departed star Mark Wahlberg to give television audiences the same look – only this time, it’ll be about the Vegas of the East Coast, Atlantic City. The pair has optioned Nelson Johnson’s book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City and plans to turn it into a drama series for HBO. While Scorsese will executive produce the project with Wahlberg, there’s no indication yet if he’ll be directing any episodes of the series. This is fantastic, exciting news, though.
  • George “Didn’t I Look Sad At The Oscars?” Lucas confirmed at the Museum of Television & Radio’s Paley Festival that he’s currently in production on the 3D animated Clone Wars series, but that the live action-series based on his Star Wars films is still “a few years away.” Lucas’s plan is to complete the 100 installments of the animated series before offering them to a network. Lucas said at the Festival that he’s become “disillusioned” with feature films, and that television is “a lot more fun…nobody seems to care…you just get to do whatever you want to do.” Yeah, if you’re George Lucas.
  • Fans of Lucas’s last foray into television, the staple-of-my-childhood The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles also learned Lucas has been “pestering” Paramount regarding the series through several studio regimes, but offered no details on the long-rumored massive DVD set. Lucas sees the series as a means of teaching history to high school students, which corresponds with the rumors that the reason the DVD’s taking so long is he’s filming a full-length documentary to go along with each episode. I’m glad he wants the show to mean something and have some kind of value, especially since Young Indy and the tie-in books was responsible for a number of childhood obsessions (archeology, Pancho Villa) and obsessions that continue to this day (jazz, the mob), but I just wish the damn thing would come out already.
  • Last week, Television Without Pity ran a poll asking which terrible and snark-worthy former tv actor should come back to television so their horrible acting skills can be mocked once again on a weekly basis. James Van Der Beek of Dawson’s Creek whomped the shit out of the other contenders, and it looks like those voters are getting their wish. Van Der Beek, who recently played a psycho on Criminal Minds, has joined the cast of Football Wives as an NFL rookie. Oh, James. Whatever happened to the football king who told us “AH. DON’T WANT. YER. LIFE!”? For those of you thinking, “Dude was good in Rules of Attraction” right about now (funk soul brother), I direct your attention to the classic television moment forever known as the poo face.
  • Curb Your Enthusiasm is on a very long list of television shows I should watch but haven’t had the time or inclination to. However, I think Steve Coogan is one of the funniest men alive, and I’ve only seen 24 Hour Party People, where he was post-modern, before it was fashionable, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story, where he got away with being eighteen, nineteen (but until then, he was played by a series of child actors, one of whom was the best of a bad bunch). The Sun is reporting that these two great tastes will now taste great together – Coogan will be appearing as a shrink on the latest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. That might just be enough to get me to check this show out. The sixth season of Curb will air on HBO later this year.
  • Molly Parker’s portrayal of Alma Garrett on Deadwood was excellent, but I’m not going to lie – she could really bug the shit out of me, especially in the early episodes. I don’t really go for that breathy, hopped-up on laudanum, stoned-out-of-her gourd stuff – it brings back memories of that horrible actress from Tombstone. Anyway, Parker wound up being pretty great by the end of the series, and I liked what I saw of her on Six Feet Under as well. (She sucked in Max, though.) People who don’t get HBO and are unwilling to shell out 80 bucks for the DVDs will be able to appreciate the uneven greatness that is Molly Parker this fall, though – the actress will play a swingin’ housewife in the swingin’ seventies in CBS’s Swingtown. She’ll play a (desperate) housewife with teenage kids.
  • Here’s yet another bit of stunt casting from the Law & Order multiverse: Star Jones Reynolds, best known as the plastic surgery tragedy who got shitcanned from The View, will play an attorney on Law & Order: The Rape Show (SVU) during May sweeps. The episode also stars the best thing about Paul Haggis’s Academy Award-winning After School Special (Crash), actor/rapper/bane of Bill O’Reilly Ludacris.