Buffy Saves CBS from Time-Warner Cable

What better way for Buffy star Sarah Michelle Geller to return to television than to immediately kick some ass of the corporate kind?

Time Warner Cable was refusing to pay CBS for broadcasting in major markets such as New York and Dallas, but pressure from both football fans and especially Buffy fans anticipating a new Geller series, "The Crazy Ones," they backed down.

From Businessweek

The month-long staring contest between CBS (CBS) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) is over, now that Time Warner has blinked first. The cable giant agreed to pay significantly more than its prior rate for the right to beam CBS signals in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas, though not quite as big an increase as the network was seeking. It’s “hard to believe this isn’t a CBS victory,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG in New York, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.
. . . With CBS airing its first pro football games of the season on Sunday, including Chicago’s beloved Bears, Time Warner Cable was in store for some serious ire if it didn’t get the network back on its platform.
CBS, however, had an additional programming ace up its sleeve in recent negotiations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. More precisely, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who stars in The Crazy Ones, a CBS comedy about an ad agency that will premiere on Sept. 26.
In large part because of the seven years she spent hunting the undead, Gellar still carries a cultish fan-base, according to Networked Insights, a New York-based data-analysis shop that helps such big companies as General Electric (GE) deploy advertising dollars. Buffy vanished from the airwaves in 2003, yet Gellar still sparks more conversations on social-media platforms than any of CBS’s actors. That’s a group that includes Robin Williams, who headlines Gellar’s new show, Will Arnett, Carrie-Anne Moss, and all kinds of other top-flight talent that wasn’t in Scooby-Doo 2 or I Know What You Did Last Summer, as Gellar was.

Behind the Scenes with "The Crazy Ones"

Funny new behind-the-scenes trailer for "The Crazy Ones" TV show starring Sarah Michelle Geller and Robin Williams.

Fall 2013 on CBS.



I haven't seen it confirmed anywhere, but the title of the show seems to come from the "Think Different" ad campaign in the 1990s from Apple Computer. Below is the quote and the video, with a voice-over by Richard Dreyfus

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine.
They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
are the ones who do…

From Wikipedia

"Think different" was an advertising slogan for Apple Computer (Apple Inc. as of 2007) in 1997 created by the Los Angeles office of advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.[1] It was used in a television commercial, several print advertisements and a number of TV promos for Apple products.

. . . The words "think different" were created by Chiat/Day art director Craig Tanimoto. The text of the various versions of this commercial was written by Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall. Music was composed by Chip Jenkins for Elias Arts.

The one-minute commercial featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th century personalities. In order of appearance they were: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon (with Yoko Ono), Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog), Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso. The commercial ends with an image of a young girl opening her closed eyes, as if making a wish. The final clip is taken from the All Around The World version of the "Sweet Lullaby" music video, directed by Tarsem Singh; the young girl is Shaan Sahota, Singh's niece.[4]

Nicholas Brendon at Awesome Con

Hilarious interview with Nicholas Brendon (Xander on Buffy) via ReelFilm News. Currently he is co-starring on "Criminal Minds," after his Fox Show "Kitchen Confidential" was cancelled. He talks about that in detail, as well as "Firefly" and "The Avengers."

This is only Part One - I will add Part Two when it is posted.

Sarah Michelle Geller in New TV Comedy

Exciting news: Sarah Michelle Geller will co-star in a new comedy for CBS called "Crazy Ones." This will be her first acting gig since giving birth in September to her second child, a baby son named Rocky with actor Freddie Prinze, Jr. The couple have been married for ten years and also have a young daughter, Charlotte Grace.

Entertainment Weekly

Gellar is set to co-star in the CBS pilot Crazy Ones, a single-cam comedy about a father (Williams) and daughter who run an advertising agency together. The former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star will play Sydney Roberts, the intense and driven daughter of Williams’s Simon Roberts.

Gellar last headlined CW’s one-season drama Ringer, a role that was billed as her post-Buffy return to television and was part of the 2011-2012 TV season.