Channel Guide Staff, Author at Channel Guide Magazine

“Lights Out” is a KO for FX

January 11, 2011 Channel Guide Staff 1

By Stacey Harrison It often holds true that a fighter’s toughest bout comes after he hangs up his gloves. That’s certainly the case with Patrick “Lights” Leary (Holt McCallany), a former heavyweight boxing champ who is the subject of FX‘s new drama Lights Out, which premieres tonight. Leary lost his title by a controversial decision following a particularly brutal fight, and retired immediately afterward because of an ultimatum laid down by his wife (Catherine McCormack). While he’s happy in his mansion taking care of his three daughters, financial troubles brought on by bad investments — including a gym he operates […]

William H. Macy on “Shameless” … and loving it

January 7, 2011 Channel Guide Staff 1

By Stacey Harrison William H. Macy doesn’t impress easily. Having been a professional actor for decades, with more than 100 film titles and countless stage productions to his credit, the dependable everyman has pretty much seen, laughed, cried, and got angry at it all. He knows what he likes, and what bores him to tears. All that experience has only deepened his appreciation for Shameless, his audacious new series that airs Sundays beginning Jan. 9 on Showtime. “It’s hard to make me laugh,” he says. “I generally find comedies work too hard for the laughs. This thing has consistently made […]

R.L. Stine offers family frights in “The Haunting Hour”

December 20, 2010 Channel Guide Staff 2

By Stacey Harrison Back when R.L. Stine was known as Jovial Bob Stine and writing joke books for a living, not many people could have foreseen that he would one day revolutionize the young-adult horror genre. Not that there really was much of a young-adult horror genre before he wrote Blind Date back in 1986. One day an editor friend of Stine’s took him to lunch and told him she needed a horror novel for teens. Though he’d always been a fan of the genre, he’d never considered writing it himself, so he researched what was out there and came […]

Animal Planet to get “INFESTED!”

December 15, 2010 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

Debuting Jan. 9 on Animal Planet, the three-part miniseries INFESTED! features true stories of ordinary people plagued by frighteningly extraordinary infestations. Among the unwelcome critters are mice, scorpions, spiders, bedbugs, rats, roaches, raccoons and snakes, all of which are filmed in reenactments with macro-lens photography for maximum up-close effect. Each episode of INFESTED! relives the unimaginable, intimate nightmares of three families with three different types of infestations and a boatload of dread. Cameras show an up-close image of a cockroach planted on the bristles of a toothbrush and a mass of reproductive mice running through clothes, on children’s toys and […]

Gold Rush: Alaska Can Six Rookie Miners Find A Mother Lode?

December 4, 2010 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

Most don’t need to read the paper to know we live in hard times. We all know families struggling to get by, or others almost at the end of their rope. That’s the situation that each person in the reality series Gold Rush: Alaska faces. Underemployed, unemployed and most with families to support, each man is desperate enough to risk everything for a chance to strike it rich. And with the price of gold skyrocketing, the estimated $250 billion in gold buried in the Alaskan wilderness looked better and better. Led by Todd Hoffman and his father, Jack — who […]

With 18 Contestants Returning And Anthony Bourdain Presiding, “Top Chef All-Stars” Delivers On Its Name

December 3, 2010 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

It may be a dish best served cold, but for the contenders of Top Chef All-Stars to have their revenge, they’re going to have to turn up the heat. After seven seasons of Top Chef, beginning Dec. 1, Bravo is dragging 18 of the best contestants never to win the coveted title back onto the show for Season 8, where they’ll don their aprons and do battle over the burners to see who can redeem themselves. As the series heads back to New York, there will be a new — and appropriate — face on the other side of the […]

Bob Saget’s “Strange Days” at A&E

December 2, 2010 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

By Stacey Harrison As evidenced by his two very distinct public personas — some know him as the hugs-and-kisses dad on Full House, others as a particularly lewd standup comic — Bob Saget likes to play with expectations. So instead of trotting out yet another reality show that follows around a celebrity in his personal life, Saget decided to forge a new path with his new series Strange Days with Bob Saget, which airs Tuesdays on A&E. In what he likes to call a “comedy-documentary,” he explores subcultures and experiences that have always intrigued him, from camping out with Bigfoot […]

Talking with Megatron (Frank Welker)

December 2, 2010 Channel Guide Staff 1

With Transformers Prime, The Hub has reinstated one of the cartoon world’s fiercest rivalries. No, not Optimus Prime vs. Megatron. That battle has been going on steadily throughout the franchise’s nearly 30-year reign. We’re talking about the men behind the giant robots, Peter Cullen, who voices Autobot leader Prime, and Frank Welker, who provides the signature sinister tones behind Decepticon leader Megatron. Both have worked on Transformers off and on since the original 1980s cartoon, but the new series — which is finishing up its five-part miniseries premiere “Darkness Rising” this week — is the first time they’ve worked together […]

Jacqueline Bisset Visits Hallmark Channel For “An Old-Fashioned Christmas”

December 1, 2010 Channel Guide Staff Comments Off

How do you make a sequel to a Louisa May Alcott story when there is no sequel in Alcott’s œuvre? Very carefully. In Hallmark Channel’s case, the follow-up to its successful 2008 holiday film An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving had to involve a proper script, the right setting and the right cast — and it would have to include Jacqueline Bisset, who starred as the strong-willed Isabella Crawford in the original. Well, they must have done something right, because she’s back for An Old-Fashioned Christmas, premiering on Hallmark Channel Dec. 11. What is it about this character that drew you back to […]

Optimus Prime speaks: An interview with Peter Cullen of “Transformers Prime”

November 30, 2010 Channel Guide Staff 3

The main draw of Transformers — whether it be in an after-school cartoon or a blockbuster feature film — is that it features giant robots changing shapes. But a deeper appeal is what hasn’t changed. Peter Cullen first provided the voice of Autobot leader Optimus Prime in 1984 when Transformers (known to fans as the Generation 1 era) was created. Prime was killed off in the 1986 movie version of the series, a move that simultaneously confused Cullen and permanently scarred movie-going children everywhere. While Transformers continued in various forms over the next two decades in cartoons and video games, […]