Title: Firebreather
Title: Secrets In The Walls
It seems this is the season of the reunions, first with Robert Picardo for both Dana (China Beach) and Jeri (Star Trek Voyager) in episode 2.09 – I’m assuming here it is the actual ninth new episode and not the episode that will air as such with all the unaired ones from the first season in between – and now with Jamie Bamber for Dana as she was a guest star in an episode of Battlestar Galactica.
It looks like Dr. Megan Hunt’s personal life suddenly has a pulse.
Sources confirm to TVLine exclusively that Battlestar Galactica vet Jamie Bamber is joining the cast of ABC’s Body of Proof as a love interest for Dana Delany’s medical examiner.
His character, Scott Decker, is described as a blue collar and (duh) sexy. I’m told Bamber is on board for at least three episodes, the first of which is slated to air in late November.
As TVLine just reported, Bamber is also set to guest star as a patient with a big secret in the Nov. 7 episode of House.
Body of Proof | You may ask, “What’s cooking with the sophomore season of this ABC procedural?” But did you ask that literally? TVLine’s Inside Line has learned exclusively that Robert Irvine — of Food Network’s Dinner: Impossible and Restaurant: Impossible – has been booked for a guest star role. Specifically, Irvine will play Leon Gould, an enthusiastic professional chef with an upbeat manner who is questioned by the investigators about a murder. Hmm, a chef as a person of interest? I predict the butler did it.
Christina Hendricks’ profile keeps expanding. Not only is the Mad Men co-star appearing on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters tonight, but she also guest stars in an upcoming episode of ABC’s Body of Proof.
Below we’ve got the exclusive first look at Hendricks on the new crime drama, which stars Dana Delany as a medical examiner. Hendricks appears here alongside her real-life husband — Proof regular Geoffrey Arend. In this scene, Hendricks plays both the victim and the survivor of a crime, as “Karen” reacts to seeing her murdered identical twin. The episode airs April 19 at 10 p.m.
Video Link because apparently nobody is allowed to embed it… :S
In Body Of Proof, Dana Delany plays Dr. Megan Hunt, a genius medical examiner who coaxes dead bodies to give up their secrets. Surely Delany has contemplated asking her Dr. Hunt self to look at the corpses of some of her old TV shows to figure out what went wrong. No actress in television has displayed more talent or less luck than Delany over the past 25 years.
Two of her shows, the brilliant Vietnam drama China Beach and Pasadena, a fascinating but short-lived series about a sinister publishing dynasty, were in effect canceled by wars, their audiences lost during endless preemptions for news coverage of the first Gulf War and the Sept. 11 attacks. Another, the medical drama Presidio Med, featured one of the strongest female casts in the history of television, including Blythe Danner and Anna Deavere Smith as well as Delany, but viewers of all genders stayed away in droves. Delany took roles in movies that were determinedly non-commercial (the sex-comedy bomb Exit To Eden, the uber-chick flick Live Naked Girls) and turned down hits like Desperate Housewives and Sex And The City. Looking at this list, I’m already thinking I’m wrong about consulting a doctor. Delany probably needs to consider a human sacrifice or two in hopes of appeasing whatever dark god she’s crossed.
Certainly Body Of Proof, which has more scenes set in autopsy rooms than Friends did in coffee shops, could spare Delany a few corpses. Her character was a brilliant if driven neurosurgeon until an auto accident left her hands numb and crampy. Her impaired surgical skills forced her to switch careers: “You can’t kill somebody who’s already dead.” Turns out you can’t easily insult or offend them, either, a big plus for the terminally arrogant and abrasive Hunt. Her imperious chill and whiplash sarcasm have already driven off a husband, a daughter and countless colleagues. “Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about me,” she urges cops assigned to work a murder investigation with her. “The truth is much worse.”
At first glance, Body Of Proof looks like just one more police procedural, albeit with a muscular cast that includes Jeri Ryan ( Boston Public) as Hunt’s perpetually exasperated boss and John Carroll Lynch ( The Drew Carey Show) and Sonja Sohn ( The Wire) as long-suffering detectives assigned to work with her. And, to be sure, the show would profit immensely if it reduced the number of “Eureka!” moments erupting over microscope slides and petri dishes.
But Body Of Proof is much less about test tubes than it is about a lonely misanthrope tentatively trying to build her affinity for the dead into a rickety bridge to the living. Even Hunt’s CSIish credo that “the body is the proof, it will tell you everything you want to know if you just have the patience to look,” is an act of self-deception. No tests have ever identified the source of the physical dysfunction stemming from her accident; the problem is not in her hands but her head.
A character study of a disdainful intellectual bully — even one groping her way toward a semblance of humanity — may not sound likely as a candidate for appointment television. But Delany is at the top of her lofty game when playing characters with fractured souls such as the tormentedly vulnerable Nurse Colleen McMurphy of China Beach or the compulsively adulterous Dr. Rae Brennan of Presidio Med. Watching her construct a self from a handful of jagged fragments is a seductive pleasure. If we can just keep any new wars from breaking out for a few weeks, Body Of Proof has a real chance.
It takes a special type of procedural to entice us to tune into a show that we’d otherwise ignore. Unfortunately for BODY OF PROOF, ABC’s latest entrant into an already overcrowded marketplace, the only thing special about it is the astounding amount of disdain it seems to have for its audience.
From its overtly formulaic write-by-numbers nature, to its insistence on beating you over the head with its premise, BODY OF PROOF just about encapsulates everything that is wrong with the way modern day network television works. Almost to the point where we encourage you to watch tonight’s premiere in order to see just how little ABC respects its audience’s intelligence. But before we get into examining everything that is truly wrong with this show, let’s start with what is right.
Dana Delany is proof positive that unless your name is Meryl Streep, television is where it’s at for woman of a certain age. As Dr. Megan Hunt, a brilliant yet cantankerous Brain Surgeon who is forced to work as a Medical Examiner [ME] following a horrific car crash that leaves her incapable of operating, Delany single-handedly steals the show. Smart, sexy, hard-nosed yet vulnerable, it’s little mystery as to how the small screen staple has managed to carve out a career for herself that’s lasted the better part of three decades.Also solid are Delany’s supporting cast including partner Peter (Obligatory future love interest played by yet another Aussie import Nicholas Bishop), skeptical old school police detective (John Carroll Lynch) and her beautiful bombshell of a boss (the always welcome former numerical hottie Jeri “Seven of Nine” Ryan). Unfortunately where things get ugly are when the character’s start to open their mouths. And therein lies the problem.
It’s one thing to properly communicate the premise of a show (Read: Dr. Hunt, brilliant, hard to work with, pretty much the female equivalent of Dr. House or the Mentalist), it is another thing entirely to repeat said premise over and over and over again. Not only does every single scene feel the need to inexplicably reiterate Dr. Hunt’s current predicament (Again, she misses her previous life as a surgeon, regrets how her workaholic ways damaged her relationship with her daughter who is currently residing with her ex-husband who has sole custody and most importantly of all… plays by her on rules) it does so with the clunkiest of clunky dialogue. So much so that after 44 minutes of enduring one-liners like “She [Megan] seems to care about dead people more than she ever cared about the living,” “I know a lot of ME’s [Medical Examiners] and none of them are a big as a pain in the ass as you are,” and “You might try playing nice once in a while.” we can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be yelling to your TV… WE GET IT!