Title: Body of Proof
Personally, I’m happy to know we’ll see Katherine there once more.
Wisteria Lane will be experiencing increased congestion this winter.
With Desperate Housewives inching closer to its series finale this May, the show is welcoming back three of its most popular graduates: Dana Delany (Katherine), Kyle MacLachlan (Orson) and Andrea Bowen (Julie).
The length and timing of the trio’s comeback stints are not known. (ABC declined to comment.)
After Housewives set its May 2012 Emmy date over the summer, showrunner Bob Daily made it his mission to lure back as many of the show’s alums as possible — beginning with Delany (who’s currently headlining ABC’s Body of Proof, which is nearing the end of its 13-episode second season).
“She’s working like a mad woman on Body of Proofbut I would love that,” Daily said at that time. “We want this season to feel like a bookend, so we would love to bring back some familiar faces and tie up some loose ends — and God knows there are plenty of loose ends.”
Thoughts? Which characters are on your DH Season 8 wish list? Hit the comments!
View more videos at: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com.
The video is from last year. Not this year.
While at an ABC party following the recent Fall TV press tour, we ran into Dana Delany just as she pulled away from a huddle with the “Desperate Housewives” creative team. Um, did we just stumble on a deal-making pow-wow?
“You just saw the deal go down right here: I’m coming back,” Delany tells PopcornBiz, confirming her intention to make a return appearance as Katherine Mayfair in the eighth and final season.
“I think we’ll make it happen,” says Delany, clearly excited to revisit the character she played in Seasons Four through Six. “We don’t know if it’s for sure – it’s all about scheduling. We’ll make it happen. I just want to resolve things. I would like Katherine to be happy. And gay – I want her to stay gay.”
Delany, who’s gone on to star in the network’s forensic procedural “Body of Proof,” admits she didn’t expect that her friends on “Housewives” would leave Wisteria Lane so soon. “I was surprised,” she says. “I thought they had at least a couple more seasons in them. And it’s still a successful show so I didn’t quite understand why ABC would want to end it, but from what I’ve heard it’s all about ending it well.”
Can we just name Dana the new Indie Queen, please?
Dana Delany has joined the cast of indie crime drama feature “Freelancers” from Cheetah Vision and Emmett Furla Films opposite Robert DeNiro, Curtis “50 Cent” Jacskon and Beau Garrett.
Jackson will portray the son of a murdered police officer who has succumbed to the “culture of corruption” that’s infected the force. Delany will play a woman from his past.
Film is directed by Jessy Terrero and written by L. Philippe Casseus, and produced by Mark Canton, Randall Emmett, George Furla and Jackson.
“Freelancers” is part of a 10-picture deal announced last fall that’s backed by a $200 million fund with Lionsgate releasing the films domestically. “Setup,” the first title under the deal, recently completed principal photography with Jackson, Bruce Willis and Ryan Phillippe starring.
Delany currently stars in the hit ABC series “Body of Proof.”
Like Tori well knows, I’ll keep bitting heads of each time someone spells wrong Dana’s last name. And if you wonder why I just said this, read this article.
FRIDAY’S PUZZLE — If you do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, you know that some of them are light repasts and some of them are multicourse feasts. Now that it’s Friday, we have survived another week of puzzle challenges, and I consider this one by Patrick Berry a sweet finish to the weekday hustle. An AFTER-DINNER MINT, if you will.
We have a special guest with us today, and I was very pleased to learn that she is not only a terrific actress and health issues activist, but she is an experienced crossword puzzle aficionado as well. Among many other roles, Dana Delany won an Emmy for her role on China Beach, co-starred on Desperate Housewives as Katherine Mayfair, and is currently starring in the ABC-TV series Body of Proof. She sits on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation and memorably underwent a televised mammogram to increase awareness on the live broadcast Stand Up 2 Cancer in 2008.
Let’s welcome Ms. Delany and see how she did:
Dana Delany’s Solving Notes
When I was a child, I used to watch my mother sit at the counter with a drink, peanuts and the New York Times crossword puzzle. Or at the beach in a low chair with her Bain de Soleil and the Sunday puzzle in the summer. It was the height of sophistication for me.
I dabbled with the Sunday puzzle when I was in my 20s, but I didn’t make the full commitment until I was 40. I was shooting a miniseries in Austin, Texas called “True Women” about the intrepid females who pioneered that wild west. They also had a LOT of hair. Which meant spending two hours in the make-up trailer adding extensions and crimping with a curling rod. Or rather, Joanie my hairdresser did; I just sat there bored. So my co-star Annabeth Gish and I started doing the puzzle. I wasn’t very good at first but I quickly became addicted and faithfully completed every day of the week. Over the years, I have cut back to only Friday and Saturday with an occasional Thursday for fun. I need to do other things!
Now, let’s discuss the iPad and the electronic crossword. It is my method of late, but I find the Google search way too tempting. And I do admit to succumbing once in a while. But not this puzzle. It was refreshing to pull out the ballpoint pen and remember the good old days. I am not sure if I found this Patrick Berry (for whom I have great respect) puzzle relatively easy because I used a pen or not. Maybe it’s a different neural pathway. Now that I am playing a former neurosurgeon on Body of Proof I should know the answer to that.
This was one of those puzzles where I didn’t know all of the answers, but they became clear the more I filled in. I usually like the long crossings, but they may have made things a little too easy.
There were a few movie references, which should be easy for me. However, I actually went to the premiere of The Children of Men (love Alfonso Cuaron films) and did not realize it was based on a P.D. JAMES novel (1A). But I got PIETA (1D) right away, which helped. Not a lot of Michelangelo works that would fit. Again, I saw Eastern Promise, but can only remember Viggo Mortensen wrestling naked in the steam room; was he tattooed? (17A). I knew that the Clint Eastwood movie was The Outlaw JOSEY Wales (3D) but who knew Josey was spelled like that? One movie reference I can never get is all the Harry Potter characters (38A). They appear everywhere now and I think I have only seen one of the movies. Never read any of the books. So I might have to rectify that if only for my puzzle solving abilities. Other film references were GRIPS (43D) and BAIO (52D). I kept wanting the last one to be Adam, because I think he’s funny. But I knew in my heart “Matter of contention” (52A) had to be BONE, hence the old crossword standby BAIO. There were a few too many crossword gimmes for me: EER, EELS, LAM, ACHE, APSE. Do people actually pray in an apse? Thank god for churches – what would we do without “nave”?
I did like the crossing of SURGEON GENERAL with POLICE SERGEANTS. Those are two words where I constantly have to think twice about their spelling. Which leads me to my final story: My name is a good one for crossword puzzles. As my mother reminds me, it’s not because I’m famous, it’s because I have a lot of vowels. However, I am famous for being one of the few errors ever made in the New York Times crossword puzzle. They used me as the clue, but spelled my last name “DELANEY” instead of “DELANY.” [Deb says: Hat tip to Patrick Merrell for setting up this link.] Which, of course, threw the whole puzzle off. I happened to be doing the puzzle that day and quickly realized what the problem was, as I am used to people spelling my name wrong. DELANEY is much more prevalent. If the clue had been “Star of NYPD BLUE” it would have been correct. Kim Delaney is a lovely actor and a friend of mine, but no, we are not related. I felt kind of bad about the whole thing, but honored to have a place in the annals of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Thanks for playing, Ms. Delany (no “e”).
Your thoughts?
In Body Of Proof, Dana Delany plays Dr. Megan Hunt, a genius medical examiner who coaxes dead bodies to give up their secrets. Surely Delany has contemplated asking her Dr. Hunt self to look at the corpses of some of her old TV shows to figure out what went wrong. No actress in television has displayed more talent or less luck than Delany over the past 25 years.
Two of her shows, the brilliant Vietnam drama China Beach and Pasadena, a fascinating but short-lived series about a sinister publishing dynasty, were in effect canceled by wars, their audiences lost during endless preemptions for news coverage of the first Gulf War and the Sept. 11 attacks. Another, the medical drama Presidio Med, featured one of the strongest female casts in the history of television, including Blythe Danner and Anna Deavere Smith as well as Delany, but viewers of all genders stayed away in droves. Delany took roles in movies that were determinedly non-commercial (the sex-comedy bomb Exit To Eden, the uber-chick flick Live Naked Girls) and turned down hits like Desperate Housewives and Sex And The City. Looking at this list, I’m already thinking I’m wrong about consulting a doctor. Delany probably needs to consider a human sacrifice or two in hopes of appeasing whatever dark god she’s crossed.
Certainly Body Of Proof, which has more scenes set in autopsy rooms than Friends did in coffee shops, could spare Delany a few corpses. Her character was a brilliant if driven neurosurgeon until an auto accident left her hands numb and crampy. Her impaired surgical skills forced her to switch careers: “You can’t kill somebody who’s already dead.” Turns out you can’t easily insult or offend them, either, a big plus for the terminally arrogant and abrasive Hunt. Her imperious chill and whiplash sarcasm have already driven off a husband, a daughter and countless colleagues. “Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about me,” she urges cops assigned to work a murder investigation with her. “The truth is much worse.”
At first glance, Body Of Proof looks like just one more police procedural, albeit with a muscular cast that includes Jeri Ryan ( Boston Public) as Hunt’s perpetually exasperated boss and John Carroll Lynch ( The Drew Carey Show) and Sonja Sohn ( The Wire) as long-suffering detectives assigned to work with her. And, to be sure, the show would profit immensely if it reduced the number of “Eureka!” moments erupting over microscope slides and petri dishes.
But Body Of Proof is much less about test tubes than it is about a lonely misanthrope tentatively trying to build her affinity for the dead into a rickety bridge to the living. Even Hunt’s CSIish credo that “the body is the proof, it will tell you everything you want to know if you just have the patience to look,” is an act of self-deception. No tests have ever identified the source of the physical dysfunction stemming from her accident; the problem is not in her hands but her head.
A character study of a disdainful intellectual bully — even one groping her way toward a semblance of humanity — may not sound likely as a candidate for appointment television. But Delany is at the top of her lofty game when playing characters with fractured souls such as the tormentedly vulnerable Nurse Colleen McMurphy of China Beach or the compulsively adulterous Dr. Rae Brennan of Presidio Med. Watching her construct a self from a handful of jagged fragments is a seductive pleasure. If we can just keep any new wars from breaking out for a few weeks, Body Of Proof has a real chance.
It takes a special type of procedural to entice us to tune into a show that we’d otherwise ignore. Unfortunately for BODY OF PROOF, ABC’s latest entrant into an already overcrowded marketplace, the only thing special about it is the astounding amount of disdain it seems to have for its audience.
From its overtly formulaic write-by-numbers nature, to its insistence on beating you over the head with its premise, BODY OF PROOF just about encapsulates everything that is wrong with the way modern day network television works. Almost to the point where we encourage you to watch tonight’s premiere in order to see just how little ABC respects its audience’s intelligence. But before we get into examining everything that is truly wrong with this show, let’s start with what is right.
Dana Delany is proof positive that unless your name is Meryl Streep, television is where it’s at for woman of a certain age. As Dr. Megan Hunt, a brilliant yet cantankerous Brain Surgeon who is forced to work as a Medical Examiner [ME] following a horrific car crash that leaves her incapable of operating, Delany single-handedly steals the show. Smart, sexy, hard-nosed yet vulnerable, it’s little mystery as to how the small screen staple has managed to carve out a career for herself that’s lasted the better part of three decades.Also solid are Delany’s supporting cast including partner Peter (Obligatory future love interest played by yet another Aussie import Nicholas Bishop), skeptical old school police detective (John Carroll Lynch) and her beautiful bombshell of a boss (the always welcome former numerical hottie Jeri “Seven of Nine” Ryan). Unfortunately where things get ugly are when the character’s start to open their mouths. And therein lies the problem.
It’s one thing to properly communicate the premise of a show (Read: Dr. Hunt, brilliant, hard to work with, pretty much the female equivalent of Dr. House or the Mentalist), it is another thing entirely to repeat said premise over and over and over again. Not only does every single scene feel the need to inexplicably reiterate Dr. Hunt’s current predicament (Again, she misses her previous life as a surgeon, regrets how her workaholic ways damaged her relationship with her daughter who is currently residing with her ex-husband who has sole custody and most importantly of all… plays by her on rules) it does so with the clunkiest of clunky dialogue. So much so that after 44 minutes of enduring one-liners like “She [Megan] seems to care about dead people more than she ever cared about the living,” “I know a lot of ME’s [Medical Examiners] and none of them are a big as a pain in the ass as you are,” and “You might try playing nice once in a while.” we can pretty much guarantee that you’ll be yelling to your TV… WE GET IT!
Suffice to say, TV audiences deserve better, and so to does star Dana Delany.
Like Fox with “Chicago Code,” ABC saved its strongest new drama for late in the season.
“Body of Proof” stars Dana Delany as Dr. Megan Hunt, a brilliant, obsessed, irritating and unhappy neurosurgeon who can’t perform neurosurgery anymore.
Because an auto accident left her with a rare condition in which her hands can suddenly go numb, she can’t be trusted to cut open the living.
She tried it once. Her hands failed in the middle of the procedure and the patient died.
So now Megan has downshifted to medical examiner because, in her words, “You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.”
She’s much too driven and smart to take her new job passively, however, so she immediately begins trying to figure out not just how this person died, but why and who might have done it.
Technically, that’s the job of the police. Specifically, in this case, Detective Bud Morris (John Carroll Lynch). When Bud discovers the meddling Dr. Hunt will be working on his cases, he’s about as happy as if someone had frosted his doughnut with stink bugs.
Nor does it help that when Megan is right, which is often, she talks more trash than the entire NBA Atlantic Division.
This would make her very obnoxious very quickly if we didn’t know she also has a flip side that she works overtime to cover up.
She has a young daughter from whom she is mostly estranged, thanks to an angry ex-husband who felt even before the accident that Megan was ignoring her family to pursue neurosurgery stardom.
“I lost my daughter because of my career,” says Megan. “And then I lost my career.”
That’s not the assessment of a happy woman, and Megan is now driven by three things, only one of which is becoming the smartest crime-solver in the room.
She also wants to win back a relationship with her daughter and she wants to atone to the family of the woman who died on her operating table.
She makes these tasks harder because she tries not to let anyone past the titanium walls she has built around herself.
Fortunately for her and for viewers, though, those walls aren’t impenetrable. Her junior partner, Peter Dunlop (Nicholas Bishop), a former cop, not only can tell her the truth, but get her to occasionally listen.
And yes, this also sends a potential whiff of romance into the air. Megan doesn’t know that yet and it’s abstract to Peter, but it will definitely occur to viewers.
“Body of Proof” would be interesting enough if it were just “Quincy” with better legs. Add the other elements and you have something worth checking out at 10 o’clock.
Dana Delany deserves a lifetime achievement award for capturing our hearts on “China Beach,” coming off fairly well in “Exit to Eden,” goosing “Desperate Housewives” and not once complaining about being confused with Kim Delaney.
Her prize: this starring vehicle, in which Delany plays a former neurosurgeon trying to redeem herself as a medical examiner.
The procedural is maddeningly by the numbers. Dr. Megan Hunt has a colorful trench coat that embraces her femininity (see: “The Closer”) and an uncanny ability to tell people’s life stories just by looking at them (see: “The Mentalist”). Lesser doctors clamor after her for medical advice (see: “House”), but no proof is really needed when Dr. Hunt simply accuses the killer to his or her face and extracts a confession (see: “Perry Mason”).
Visually, you couldn’t ask for much more in a series. Everything Delany does seems calculated to convey sex, whether it’s striding stairs in a leather skirt and boots or slapping on some rubber gloves. She’s 55, and she’s spectacular. For backup, the luscious Jeri Ryan has been cast as Hunt’s boss.
Delany is as likable as possible in an extremely unlikable role. But the writing is a bit too tidy, and Delany’s smarty-pants approach gets old in the first 10 minutes. I’m sure Dr. Hunt’s road to redemption will be touching, but I doubt anyone is going to stick around to see it.
There’s a video of the interview in the website for those of you interested.
Dana Delany has a thing for dead bodies.
In researching her new role as a medical examiner on the new Citytv show “Body Of Proof” Delany watched numerous autopsies, but says she hasn’t completely got the hang of the whole doctor thing.
“I went and observed four different autopsies which I loved — it was fascinating. That part is easy because I like the science. The hard part was the terminology because they’re just words that don’t make any sense to me,” Delany said in an exclusive interview with CityNews.ca.
Delany plays Megan Hunt, a doctor whose life is turned upside down by a tragic accident. She’s forced to navigate a new job and difficult family relationships.
The show premieres Tuesday March 29 at 10pm on Citytv.
As part of the interview, Delany spoke about how the show centers around a life-changing event; the vast amount of medical terminology required in the role, her interaction with the cast and whether it has made her view doctors in a different way.
Delany says there’s “a procedural aspect” to every episode: “We’ll have a mystery, and a different body and you’ll find out how that person died. But more than that we also have a lot of humour in the show, and we have a family drama aspect too.”
Dana Delany doesn’t have to prove to anyone that she’s a TV star of the highest caliber. Her body of work, starting with the indelible Vietnam War classic China Beach, speaks for itself.
But not since China’s Colleen McMurphy has Delany had a role so well suited for her foxy, sardonic magnetism as Dr. Megan Hunt, neurosurgeon-turned-medical examiner/crime solver in the new Body of Proof. It’s ABC’s latest attempt to launch a crime drama to compete with the hit procedurals on other networks; only the more comedic Castle has had any traction in recent years. (ABC’s latest casualty: the underrated Detroit 1-8-7.)
From the few episodes I’ve seen so far, Body of Proof is just ordinary enough to be a success. There’s nothing in it you haven’t seen several hundred times before: a blend of CSI science, Bones banter, Mentalist uncanny acuity, House haughtiness, Rizzoli & Isles eye candy. In an encouraging sign, the problems of this week’s often-unbearable pilot episode are for the most part being addressed by Episode Two.
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