Oddity! Spanish filmmaker and maestro of melodrama Pedro Almodovar will head to the small screen with a serial adaptation of 1988′s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. It’ll be shot in English and developed by Fox TV Studios. Note: This isn’t the same as Fox TV. Fox TV Studios typically produces series for cable, partial to those with potential international appeal.
This tidbit puts a little poison in my gazpacho: Mimi Schmir, who’ll write the pilot script and exec produce with Almodovar, tells The Hollywood Reporter that the Women series "will be a suburban drama about a group of women whohave known each other for a long time, perhaps from college, who are inthe middle of their lives and looking at the second half of theirlives." Suburban?! All of Almodovar’s distinctive (read: I want to go to there) sets and locations strongly inform his films, but late-’80s Madrid — specifically its freakout-inducing pay phones — was practically a main character in Women on the Verge. It’s unlikely you’d find Pepa’s eccentric cabbie — he of the tiger-upholstered seats and obsession with mambo music — tooling around in the ‘burbs. (Twice!)
The prospective plot has very little to do with the original movie, so I’m guessing the powers that be simply couldn’t turn down a series with one of the hands-down greatest titles in history. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. If you’ve never heard of it, you want to see it now based on the title alone. Right? Hello. Youngster Antonio Banderas in his native tongue. And gazpacho. Go. Rent. Now.
Could this series have international Betty le Fea-like potential, or does it strike you as Desperate Housewives with a way cooler title?
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I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s episode of NBC’s new cop drama Southland — especially the scenes with the divine Regina King, one of the most underappreciated actresses working today. (I’ve loved her since 227. Holler!) But then, some 18 minutes into the ep, the show had to go and commit one of my biggest pet peeves: actors walking around with take-out coffee cups that are so clearly empty they scream "I’m a prop! I’m a prop! What you’re watching is a TV show, not reality!" There was C. Thomas Howell, standing next to his cruiser, clutching two paper goblets, one of which almost tipped over sideways…yet without spilling a single drop! Give me a break. In this age of Starbucks — or Peet’s, the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Dunkin’ Donuts, or whatever outlet of caffeinated beveraging you prefer — we all know what a cup filled with a hot liquid looks like. It has a certain weight and heft, and anyone who handles it does so gingerly, for obvious reasons. Yet on the big and small screens, characters continue to sip from receptacles whose absurdly obvious emptiness shatters our belief in the fictional world we’re beholding and forces us back to stale reality. It’s the proverbial "exit sign" in a movie theater: You’re enjoying a juicy moment of drama or whatnot, then happen to glance at the bright red letters near the door and remember you’re in a room with a bunch of strangers, staring at a piece of celluloid. Downer!
Aww Alert! Photos of Slumdog Millionaire‘s Frieda Pinto and Dev Patel 
