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September
/ october 2006:
Fall
TV Preview
by Gerri Miller
 JORDANA SPIRO | Series Premiere: My Boys on TBS, November
Portraying a poker-playing sportswriter named PJ with a posse of male friends but no luck in romance in the TBS sitcom My Boys has been a blast for self-described tomboy and baseball fan Jordana Spiro. “This is the best job ever — I get to learn how to play poker, watch a lot of baseball, and drink beer. Everybody should be so lucky,” laughs Spiro, who grew up in Manhattan and later shared a house with six guys. “I was definitely more of a guy’s girl, but as I get older I’m trying to figure out how feminine I can be and also stay true to myself, like PJ is,” she says. “And I’ve been learning a lot more about sports since I got cast in the show.”
GREG GRUNBERG | Series Premiere: Heroes on NBC, Sept. 30 @ 9:00 pm
Felicity, Alias and Lost alumnus Greg Grunberg has the power to read minds in the new NBC series Heroes, about eight ordinary people who suddenly acquire super powers. He begins appearing in the second episode as a Los Angeles beat cop and family man whose new ability changes his life. Grunberg says he wouldn’t mind having the same ESP. “It’s sad at times but very empowering to know exactly what people are thinking about you and also being able to take advantage of situations so I think mind reading would be unbelievable.”
His three boys are certainly impressed. “They love that daddy is a hero.”
VICTOR GARBER | Series Premiere: Justice on FOX, Aug. 30 @ 9:00 pm
There was no unemployment line for Victor Garber, who segued from espionage to the law after Alias wrapped its final season and his new FOX drama Justice was picked up. “I was actually shooting Justice as Alias was ending so I was doing both at once,” says Garber, who has a heavier workload now but nevertheless leapt at the chance to headline the courtroom series and portray a character with arrogance and bravado who’s convinced of his rectitude. “He’s the lawyer we all want if we’re in trouble.”
JEFFREY TAMBOR | Series Premiere: Twenty Good Years on NBC, Oct. 4 @ 8:00 pm
Jeffrey Tambor didn’t have time to lament the untimely demise of Arrested Development. Even before the show was officially canceled, he was asked to co-star with John Lithgow as the more timid half of a senior odd couple in the NBC comedy Twenty Good Years. “Literally, one door closed and another opened. I’m a pretty lucky guy,” observes Tambor. “I have friends my age who don’t even work anymore.”
Tambor, on the other hand, has his hands full with roles — he’ll also be seen as the villain in the drama Slipstream, written, directed, and starring Anthony Hopkins — and babies. He’s both father and grandfather to toddler boys, born four days apart in December 2004. “It keeps me very young,” he says. “I can’t believe that I’m 62.”
JEFF GOLDBLUM | Series Premiere: Raines on NBC, TBA
Waiting in the wings until midseason — or the quick death of another NBC fall series conscripts it — is Raines, starring Jeff Goldblum as an LAPD homicide detective with a vivid imagination: he has conversations with his dead former partner (Luis Guzman) as well as crime victims in the cases he investigates.
Goldblum has an equally unusual role coming up in a Paul Schrader film called Adam Resurrected, playing a circus clown who survives the Holocaust and ends up in an Israeli asylum. “It takes place over a few decades in Germany and in Europe and Israel,” says Goldblum, who visited the holy land for the first time during the summer. “I spent most of the time in Jerusalem. Saw the Wailing Wall, the Old City. Floated in the Dead Sea. It was richly emotional and delicious.”
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