TV News and Reviews @ KickAssTV.com

With the movie franchise hobbling on its last leg (”Trinity” was a disaster in almost ever respects), the Powers That Be made the most sensible decision (didn’t they?) and transplanted their franchise into TV form. So “Blade: The Series” was born. On basic cable network Spike TV, no less. With original “Blade” star Wesley Snipes spending his days in Romania making crappy direct-to-video action movies, the franchise producer, David Goyer, has tapped rapper Sticky Fingaz (no kidding, this is his name) as the new Blade. He’s a younger, shorter, but just as black, version of Blade. Well, at least they didn’t make Blade white, so that’s something.

This isn’t news news, but I just ran across it today, so it’s news to me. As we all know, Jack Bauer got shanghaied (literally!) at the end of Season 5 when Chinese agents snatched him and tossed him into a cargo container, and the last we saw of Jack he was being taken to China via a large cargo ship. And so everyone thought Season 6 would of course be set in China. Well guess again, kiddos!

Here’s a great idea for a primetime network TV show — “Heroes”, about a group of seemingly normal people who discover that they have some sort of “super DNA” that gives them superpowers. Basically they’re mutants, and they band together to save the world. Ali Larter, Adrian Pasdar, and Milo Ventimiglia are part of the cast.

“I don’t know things that I’m supposed to know, but I do know things that I’m not supposed to know,” says John Doe (Dominic Purcell) to a hotdog vendor 12 minutes into the pilot episode of “John Doe”. Hey, we’ve all been there, right? Well, probably not. Premiering on Fox TV in 2002, I remember “John Doe” being a pretty high-profile series, but it never really went anywhere. The show was axed after Year 1, leaving fans wondering what the secret behind John Doe’s ability to know everything in the world except, as he relates to the hot dog vendor, everything he’s supposed to know, such as his name or anything about his past, a mystery. (The producers actually spoiled this sometime ago at a convention; keep reading for it at the end of this review.)

I never watched “Saturday Night Live” during its heyday (late ’70s and ’80s), but I did start watching during the late ’90s and now, and I’ve noticed one thing: the cast don’t seem to have bothered learning their lines before the Saturday night taping. I say this because it’s painfully obvious most of them are reading from teleprompters during the skits. We’re talking about even the veterans of the group.

I absolutely believe that CBS’s “Numb3rs” is the best thing on TV that no one is bothering to talk about or even notice, but there’s apparently enough of an audience (diehards like myself, no doubt) who tunes in for every episode, or it would have been yanked mid-season like all the great shows no one notices or talks about.