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TV Column: AMC at a loss for words over ‘The Killing,’ ‘Hell on Wheels’

By Lisa de Moraes,July 28, 2011

(Page 2 of 2)

BBC America has ordered its first original scripted series, “Copper,” from Barry Levinson (“Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Rain Man,” “You Don’t Know Jack”) and Tom Fontana (“Homicide: Life on the Street,” “St. Elsewhere”).

“Copper” captures the immigrant experience in 19th-century New York City through the eyes of a young Irish cop. It’s set to debut in the summer of ’12.

‘The show maintains our U.K. connectivity” and allows the network to cast actors from both sides of the Atlantic, BBC America General Manager Perry Simon told TV critics and columnists and bloggers at Summer TV Press Tour 2011.

“I didn’t want our first original series to be the London cop who got transferred to Las Vegas. I really couldn’t do it,” Simon joked.

Simon, a longtime NBC programming executive, has a long relationship with Levinson and Fontana; he was head of drama series development at NBC during its “Homicide” years, and was head of Viacom’s TV production when that division took over production on their HBO series “Oz.”

“Copper” is being produced by Canadian company Cineflix Studios, whose executives include Christina Wayne, the former senior vice president of scripted series at AMC, where she shepherded two of its most successful series, “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” Wayne is one of the producers of “Copper.”

A disappointed Belafonte

Singer Harry Belafonte, subject of an upcoming HBO documentary about his political activism, was asked what he would say to the White House and Congress about the gamesmanship in which they are engaged over the national debt.

“My question would be, to Congress and the president: What happened to moral truth? What happened to moral courage?” Belafonte said.

He’d also like to tell them: “Politics without moral purpose, really more often than not, winds up as tyranny.”

“Barack Obama and his mission has failed because it lacked a certain kind of moral courage, a kind of moral vision . . . a kind of courage we are in need of,” said the King of Calypso.

“When he said ‘Yes, we can,’ it was politically clever, but he never defined what it is we can do. So we filled in those spaces — what we thought he meant — only to find we were disappointed, because none of those points was satisfied.”

Steinem on bunny nostalgia

Feminist Gloria Steinem, who is the subject of another upcoming HBO documentary, called “Gloria: In Her Own Words,” and who famously worked as a bunny for the Playboy Club to write an article about the bunnies’ labor conditions, was asked Thursday what she thought of NBC’s new “Playboy Club” series, as well as ABC’s 1960s stewardess romp “Pan Am,” and the remake of “Charlie’s Angels.”

“Are they aggrandizing the past in a nostalgic way, or are they really showing the problems of the past in order to show we have come forward? Somehow I think the shows are not doing that,” Steinem said, noting wryly that when times get tough, the “white male response” tends to swing to either sadomasochism — or nostalgia.

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