The Cooking Channel has announced a premiere date for a new primetime cooking special, Dinner at Tiffani’s, hosted by Tiffani Thiessen (White Collar) with special guests Willie Garson (White Collar), Nathan Fillion (Castle) and Lindsay Price (Beverly Hills 90210).
The series will premiere Sunday, March 23rd at 8pmET/5pmPT on the Cooking Channel. For complete details, check out the press release following the jump.
On Friday, I had the opportunity to take part in a teleconference Q&A with White collar’s [USA Network, Tuesdays, 9/8C] newest regular cast member, Hilarie Burton. Burton is charming and articulate so the experience was an enjoyable one – and unlike some of chats, stayed pretty much on target throughout.
Some of the participants in the call hadn’t seen the season premiere, so some of Burton’s required tactfulness might seem a bit odd, now. Just go with it…
USA Network’s White Collar has a fun premise: Jailed white collar supercrook helps FBI Agent catch other white collar crooks. Thus con man/forger Neal Caffrey is released from prison into the custody of the FBI [more accurately, Peter Burke, the FBI agent who caught him – twice] as long as he works with Burke to take down others of his ilk.
In White Collar’s second season finale, the show wrapped up two years of mythology involving the death of Neal Caffrey’s one true love, a mysterious music box, fractals and Nazi treasure. The final scene had the emotional impact of a typically perilous cliffhanger, but the impact came from the war of emotions raging within Caffrey. In tonight’s third season premiere of the USA Network hit [Tuesdays, 9/8C], we learn how that emotional battle plays out.
When you have a series, like White Collar, in which five core characters are usually ‘the smartest person in the room,’ you really have a challenge to bring them all together without slighting someone. White Collar’s Jeff Eastin surmounts this situation by giving each of these characters slightly different areas of expertise.
In season two of the series, Eastin and his writers’ room took the mythology they’d build up in season one and cranked it up a notch, thus ensuring that FBI Special Agent Peter Burke [Tim DeKay] and his favorite consultant/con man/forger/etc., Neal Caffrey [Matt Bomer] faced growing challenges right from the season one cliffhanger that saw Neal’s one true love, Kate, die in an explosion just before they would have been able to fly away to a life together.
That mythology included a music box with a code; separate investigations into who kicked Kate and the potential of looming major score. In and around the ongoing mythology, Peter and Neal – ably abetted by insurance investigator Sara Ellis [Hilarie Burton], Neal’s mentor and closest friend, Mozzie [Willie Garson], Peter’s fellow agents Jones [Sharif Atkins] and Barrigan [Diana Thomason] and, on one occasion, Peter’s wife, Elizabeth [Tiffani Thiessen] – take on the brilliant mind behind several bank heists; a lawyer who turns adoption of foreign babies into an extortion racquet, and a dirty FBI agent who leaks the names of witnesses to the accused, among others…
Following the jump, my five favorite episodes and fifteen moments/reasons that White Collar, Season Two was so enjoyable.
Sara Ellis, whom we met late in the first half of White Collar’s [USA, Tuesdays, 10/9C] current season, is a no-nonsense insurance investigator who does whatever it takes to close a case. If that means going to extra-legal lengths, then that’s fine.
Recently I had the opportunity to take part in a teleconference call with Hilarie Burton, the actor who plays Ellis. Burton, it turns out is both voluble and witty – when she’s finished answering a question, it stays answered! It’s easy to see that she’s having a good time in her recurring role on White Collar and that sense of fun is present in call.
White Collar [USA, Tuesdays, 9/8C] left fans hanging with its mid-second-season cliffhanger – Mozzie had been shot and his solution to a music box-related problem taken. The second half of the season begins with Mozzie being rushed to hospital in an ambulance.
One of the best things about White Collar is that its characters – regulars and antagonists – tend to be smart. Very smart. That continues to be the case in the mid-second season premiere.
Last week, I had the opportunity to take part in one of those teleconference Q&A’s that are becoming a way to connect networks and shows to a grassroots audience – in this case, with creator and executive producer of USA’s White Collar [9/8C], Jeff Eastin.
The witty, offbeat series is just into its second season, and Eastin talked with the usual gang of bloggers/journos about what to expect in terms of story, character development and how he and his writing team create worthy adversaries for the FBI/con artist team of Peter Burke and Neal Caffrey.
In the first season finale of White Collar [USA, Tuesdays, 9/8C], master con artist Neal Caffrey [Matt Bomer], caught between running away with his one true love, Kate, and giving up the life of a con on the lam, hesitated – and an explosion destroyed his getaway plane, killing Kate.
It’s no surprise, then, that in this evening’s second season premiere, Withdrawal, Neal, once more behind bars [however temporarily], has vengeance on his mind. Fortunately, he doesn’t have break out of jail [again] because good old FBI Special Agent Peter Burke [Tim DeKay] gets him back on the street to help nail a phantom bank robber known only as The Architect.
Wherever they go, White Collar’s [USA, Tuesdays, 9/8C] FBI Special Agent Peter Burke [Tim DeKay] and con man “consultant” Neal Caffrey [Matt Bomer] are the smartest guys in the room. This season starts off with one of the pair’s biggest challenges in a character called The Architect.
The comedy team of Matt Bomer and Tim DeKay [who joined us in progress] sat in on a truncated teleconference Q&A [when they have to be onset, they have to be onset] to talk about White Collar’s second season.
