AFewGoodMen

One of my favorite actresses is joining the cast of America's most watched drama series. That means about 20 million viewers a week will get to see her in action. The actress is Rena Sofer and she's been cast on NCIS as a hard-nosed, no-nonsense lawyer. The role could be long term or recurring, they're not saying yet.

In fact, they're not giving much away at all. Not even the character's name or when she starts. Thus far, it's hard to see where a lawyer would be needed in the current storylines, so it's likely that there's an arc on the way that will bring her along as a key element.

Rena has a load of primetime experience, having appeared on Heroes, 24, Couples, Blind Justice, Just Shoot Me... but for me she was never better than when she was on General Hospital as Lois Cerullo.

(S07E05) Happy Halloween from your friends at NCIS! There was definitely some creepy stuff going on with this case, and for the first time in weeks, the concentration of the show was strictly on the mystery. No Ziva flashbacks, no Gibbs questions about Mossad, no Vance at all. It was just about how a Marine recently back from Afghanistan wound up dead in his car on the night before Halloween.

(S01E09) After a week off, the Panthers have another big game. And although there was a lot of hype about how tough this game would be in the promos, the game itself was almost an afterthought. As the show moves along there is less and less focus on the actual football. If my clock is right, we didn't get any actual game footage until 53 minutes into the hour. And that's fine by me. All three of the stories from this week were great, and the little bit of the game that we did get covered everything we needed to know.

First up, lots of development for the William's family. The Smash on steroids story seems to suffer from some of the time issues that the Street recovery does. It's all happening a little fast. Given that he just started on his cycle last week, I don't think he should be seeing a skin reaction or whatever the episode during his workout was. I'm willing to accept that time moves faster in Dillon though, because I really liked the William's family story this week.

Just because Rob Lowe left The West Wing during the fourth season doesn't mean he was made at creator/writer Aaron Sorkin (Lowe wanted more screen time and money and it was on the studio end that things broke down). Now Lowe and Sorkin are reteaming for another version of Sorkin's stage play A Few Good Men. You might remember it from the film version, responsible for every comedian in the world doing a "You can't handle the truth!" impression). Lowe will play the Tom Cruise role. The play opens on August 18 at London's Royal Theater Haymarket.