the event

['The Event' – 'Your World to Take']

As you may have heard, NBC has scheduled a roughly three-month hiatus for 'The Event' after next week's Fall finale. Such a plan didn't exactly work out for shows like 'Flash Forward' or 'V' last year, although 'V' did manage to stay alive for another season. Will 'The Event' suffer the fate of the former, or get a stay of execution like the latter? It's hard to say right now, but then again, it's hard to say anything about the show as this point. While its characters seem to have a vague sense of what they want, the audience was probably left largely scratching its collective head after tonight's episode, 'Your World to Take.'

The initial run of this show has been hobbled by its title: at first, 'The Event' seemed to refer to the disappearance of a plane over Miami. Then, it seemed to refer to the crash landing of a plane full of MaybeAliens. Now, it involves something to do with little girls that are eight going on 80. Add in some White House incompetence, a bland love interest, and lots of things that go BOOM, and you've certainly got no lack of things going on. But what those events lack is anything resembling coherence and/or importance.

Ladies and gentleman, Mary Murphy is back! That's right, the 'So You Think You Can Dance' veteran is returning to the judging table, replacing choreographer Mia Michaels.

"Last year when I was sitting on the [judges] panel, I knew it wasn't the right fit because I felt too glossy sitting on the panel," Michaels told E! Online. "People were so focused on what I wore and my hair. I wanted to get dirty and back to the work. I am an artist and I'm a visionary. I need to paint my world now and not be constantly linked to 'So You think You Can Dance.'"

Michaels' post-'SYTYCD' time with a Bravo reality series, writing a memoir and developing a Broadway show.

Look for Murphy to return next season.

In other TV news ...

• Fans of 'The Event' (yes, we know some of you are out there still), hang onto your hats: A fall cliffhanger is upon us. Look for some big reveals about Sophia and her people, plus a military crisis. And you know, "events." [TV Guide]

• CMT has renewed 'The Singing Bee' for a season 3. The karaoke competition is hosted by 'Reba' veteran Melissa Peterman. [Deadline Hollywood]

• Ice-T: Rapper, actor and reality star? The 'Law & Order: SVU' star and his wife Coco were seen with a film crew at the Covet lounge in Manhattan. The couple reportedly shot footage inside the lounge and people on the set said it was for E! [NY Post]

Welcome to the third installment of Ask Mo. Thank you for your great questions! Sorry if I didn't get to your query, but I'll be doing another edition of Ask Mo in early December, and I'll try to tackle more questions then. Of course, feel free to leave new queries in comments below as well. (Previous editions of Ask Mo are here and here.)

Tardispilot: Do 'The Event's' sagging ratings mean we've seen the end of 'Lost' clones, or will there be more next season?

Lyle: Why are all these 'Lost' clones failing to captivate audiences ('The Event,' 'FlashForward,' etc)? In your opinion, what made 'Lost' stand out and what are these other shows missing?

Tree: What is your take on 'The Event'? I'm trying to decide if I want to continue investing time in it. I like the premise, but I don't feel an emotional connection to it like I did to 'Lost.'... Should I continue watching?

Mo says: I'll try to take on these questions one by one. I think we'll continue to see networks trying out shows with supernatural flavoring, although there appear to be fewer of those kinds of pilots in the pipeline, thanks to the rocky receptions of shows like 'The Event,' 'FlashForward,' 'Invasion,' etc. I don't think the networks will stop making those kinds of shows, but I think they will probably keep missing the point regarding what 'Lost' actually was when it started.

['The Event' - 'For The Good of Our Country]

'The Event' has often been described as a hybrid of '24' and 'Lost.' What tonight's episode demonstrated was that if that assumption is correct, then audience members should be glad for the latter's supposed influence. Because as a straight '24' ripoff, 'The Event' simply isn't very good.

Stripped of all things alien/alterna-human, this episode slogged along with plot but little character, action without motivation and, in the end, left its primary players no different than when they started. Think of it like Dempsey's head at the end: Sure, it changed momentarily, but things went right back to the way things were at the outset.

Promos for tonight's episode promised a 'Rashomon'-esque retelling of the pilot episode, with the show retelling events from different perspectives in order to illuminate new truths. In actuality, all we got was a singular flashback to that day in which we learned Vice President Jarvis helped indirectly to order the plane attack on Coral Gables. This revelation would have meant something if we knew more than the most cursory things about Jarvis before this episode. We've seen him on several occasions, but he's been all but absent during Thomas's freeing of Sophia, and his scenes before that had little impact.

Hey, NBC, why don't you just rip up your whole schedule?

Well, OK, NBC didn't shift every show on its roster, but it did a whole lot of rearranging in the mid-season schedule it released on Monday.

There's one very large, mustachioed upside to all this: 'Parks and Recreation' finally returns Jan. 20, which is when NBC will debut a three-hour comedy block.

News and notes on NBC's big mid-season shuffle are below, as is a complete early-2011 schedule for the network:

Despite its not-so-hot ratings, 'The Event' has already landed a full-season order from NBC. But in an attempt to drum up more viewers, the network is planning a relaunch strategy for the show's post-holiday hiatus return.

According to Entertainment Weekly, NBC will air a one-hour clip show before 'The Event''s first January installment to get viewers up to speed on the drama's storyline.

"We will finish up with our first 13 [episodes] and then there will be a break, and then we'll come back with a one-hour compilation clip show of the first 13 so everybody can catch up with story," Bill Smitrovich, who plays Vice President Raymond Jarvis, said. "I hope that will spark another increase in the audience."

'Friday Night Lights' star Connie Britton is in talks to join NBC's freshman drama 'The Event.'

According to Deadline Hollywood, producers are actively wooing the Emmy-nominated star. The recurring role in development is that of a senator's wife who sets out to prove herself worthy of his seat when he unexpectedly dies.

Britton is the first choice for the role. The actress spent five years as Tami Taylor on the critically-acclaimed 'Friday Night Lights.'

In other TV news ...

• Larry Wilmore may be going from senior black correspondent on 'The Daily Show' to sitcom star. Wilmore has sold a pitch to NBC that would see him as the father of a family who become the subjects of a British documentary. [Live Feed]

• Prep your ears for Disney's 'Madison High,' it's bringing more singing teens to TV. The comedy project about tweens and teens who are working toward producing an original theater production based on their lives is from Lester Lewis and Paul Hoen. It's expected to go to pilot. [Deadline Hollywood]

• TLC ordered a new reality series called 'Bama Belles.' The one-hour series will premiere Dec. 6 and follow the everyday activities of rural Alabama women. [Variety]

['The Event' – 'I Know Who You Are']

'The Event' returned tonight, picking up moments after the climatic events of last episode. In addition, it carried over all the strengths and weaknesses of that previous hour. 'I Know Who You Are' continued to actually strengthen some of the show's core elements, even while its worst parts keep dragging the whole endeavor down. There's a potentially good show in here, buried under an unnecessarily tangled narrative. Streamlining the show's focus should yield increasingly stronger results, but for now, it's saddled with about one story line too many.

There were a lot of moving pieces in tonight's episode, with the three facets of the overall conspiracy in play. But on a fundamental level, the problems tonight were all the same. Each story, at its core, lay around themes of trust and family. While 'The Event' has often succeeded at telling a fairly interesting story with fairly bland characters, the protagonists tonight all made decisions in relatable fashion. Let's break things down by the type of familial problem at stake.

According to Jason Ritter of 'The Event,' it's not easy following in his father's footsteps. Ritter said he's occasionally insecure when trying to measure up to his late, great father John on 'Live With Regis and Kelly' (weekdays, syndicated).

['The Event' – 'Loyalty']

'The Event' might be one of the most schizophrenic shows on television that doesn't concern a high school glee club. It's not so much that the show varies wildly in terms of tone, but in terms of the stories that it's simultaneously trying to tell. Sean and Leila were supposed to be our emotional 'in' to have a toehold for this worldwide conspiracy, but you know what? They are not especially needed. There's a half-decent show in here that combines '24' and 'The X-Files,' but currently that only makes up half of the actual show. So we've got a series of diminishing returns on our hands with the show as presently constructed.

Now, many of you have complained when previous shows get invoked when discussing 'The Event,' but sorry: it's as much a response, reinterpretation, and mutation of what's come before it as anything else. Individual aspects smack of originality, to be sure. On a micro level, it zigs where other antecedents have zagged. But on a macro level, the show's DNA is as close to its predecessors as Sophia's People are to the humans around them. So comparisons are inevitable, even if some find them odious.

['The Event' – 'Casualties of War']

For those of you worried that you wouldn't get the chance to really learn the nature of 'The Event,' there's added hope today. Not particularly because of anything that happened in tonight's episode, 'Casualties of War,' but in the news that NBC ordered a full season for the first-year drama. In some ways, NBC didn't have much choice: even though ratings for the show have been dropping faster than D.B. Sweeney falling from the roof of a police precinct, it's not as if the network has a slew of backup shows ready to roll out, either.

But the guaranteed longer run for the series is hopefully a good thing. Right now, 'The Event' isn't so much a global conspiracy show as an hour of television in which apparently unrelated programming occurs. You'd be forgiven if a roommate or family member intermittently passed by you watching tonight's episode and wondered if you were channel surfing between multiple programs. It's one thing to have temporarily unrelated strands narratively untouched for the time being. But as 'The Event' currently stands, these particular strands are moving away, not toward, each other.

NBC has ordered full seasons for three of its freshman shows, 'The Event,' 'Law & Order: Los Angeles,' and 'Outsourced.'

According to The Ausiello Files, the network has not made a decision regarding two of its other new shows, 'Undercovers' and 'Chase.'

NBC has already canceled Jimmy Smits' legal drama 'Outlaw.' The series failed to capture an audience on Friday nights, and the remaining episodes of the series are being burned off on Saturday nights. The network's other new Friday offering, 'School Pride,' flopped in the ratings department.

['The Event' – 'A Matter of Life and Death']

When 'The Event' first premiered, conventional wisdom dictated that the show would be a multifaceted narrative that dealt with the singular incident implied in the title. As the show moves from simple pilot into actual series, the title of the show reflects less where the narrative is going and more about whence it started.

As far as one can tell, the title refers to the crash landing of Sophia's People in Alaska just after World War II. But that event is a simple prologue for the story the show now wants to tell. That's not a criticism; that's just a re-evaluation, and one worth making in order to make sense of the story this show wants to tell.

'A Matter of Life and Death' refers not only to the on-again, off-again, on-again survivors of Flight 514, but also Leila Buchanan, who got significant face time throughout the hour. Ostensibly, the two story lines will connect down the line through the connection in the Buchanan family, of which Sean is an unofficial yet integral part. But for now, it's best to look at each story line separately.

['The Event' – 'Protect Them From the Truth']

Say this for 'The Event': the show knows how to do a cliffhanger. The sum total of an entire episode hasn't held together quite yet, but each ending has yielded a sufficiently decent "What the heck?" ending to give enough people enough reason to tune in the following week. Just as man can not live on bread alone, television programs cannot live on cliffhangers alone. But this week's episode, 'Protect Them From the Truth,' at least went a good way toward giving our hero some needed integrity, the intra-government conspiracy some added heft, and the threat from those at Mount Inostranka added gravitas.

Let's start with Sean, our blank-slate hero finally given some color this week. Having him earnestly search for his girlfriend? Fine, but hardly enough to sustain long-term interest. This week, we learned about his computer hacking skills: quite helpful when you want to access a database within an FBI office to track down the one lead on your girlfriend's disappearance. Sean's skills were as impressive accessing the database physically as accessing it once on-site. Using Agent Collier's underestimation of him to sneak into the FBI's car to get into the building was a stretch, but not TOO far a stretch within the world of this show. After all, the Yuma branch of the FBI isn't exactly as impenetrable as Fort Knox.

According to Jason Ritter, starring in 'The Event' isn't all fun and games. The show's many action sequences can take a toll on an actor's body, and he's got the scars to prove it, he said on 'Rachael Ray' (weekdays, syndicated).