The Point Radio: DIG & THE RETURNED More Must See TV

Two more additions to your TV Must See list should be the USA multi-part event, DIG and the much anticipated remake of the acclaimed French thriller, THE RETURNED on A&E. We talk to the producers and cast of DIG about how they grew their story, then actor Mark Pellegrino explains why all it took was Carlton Cuse to get him onboard for THE RETURNED.

BATES MOTEL opens up for season three in a few days, and Main Mama, Vera Farmiga, tells us just how far the show will go this time – right here in just a few days. Be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. Two more things to add to your must-see list. First of all, there's the USA event series, Dig, that comes from the folks who brought you Homeland and Heroes.

And the French supernatural drama, The Return, finally makes it to USA with a new version produced by the folks who did Lost and True Blood. We cover them both. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. Murder, Mystery and Armageddon. All parts of the new USA multi-part event series, Dig. The show has a lot of pieces built into it, but you've got to start somewhere,

and that's the foundation. Where it all got started with former Homeland producer Gideon Rapp. Well, it started actually on a plane. I was heading back from Los Angeles to Israel, where I was born and raised,

and I was sitting next to the head of Keshet Networking. And our partner's in this. And I've been near his name, and he said to me, I always wanted to make a show about archaeology and Jerusalem. And I said, okay, let me think about it.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem, and I love the city. And I immediately started researching possible conspiracies and possible characters, and that was the beginning of it. And very quickly, I found out that there's a thing called legal attache in every embassy around the world, an American embassy.

And these are really FBI agents that are investigating crimes against or committed by Americans on foreign soil. So I thought it could be really cool if our lead guy is an American FBI agent stationed in Jerusalem investigating a crime that will uncover a big conspiracy. That was the kernel about the beginning of it.

Along with Gideon was his partner from Heroes, Tim Krang. Well, you know, there's a whole series of things. First of all, it was a relationship that was arranged. We met through my agent, and my agent and Gideon's agent, I'm repeating this, and we'd share an agent who was very instrumental

in bringing over shows from Israel in treatment and homeland. And so Gideon had already begun to think about doing a show set in Jerusalem, in an archeological setting, a murder mystery. And so he hadn't had that much of a couple of pages of outline. And so when I met, and he was looking to partner up,

I was actually looking to partner up. I'd been involved in doing my own shows for a long time. And to be really honest, it was a sidelined thing, to be honest. Because we were doing it on spec, it was not developed. It was our own dime.

And so there was no pressure on it. And so it didn't have to meet a lot of criteria for me. I was like, oh, I like Gideon instantly. I loved the idea for all kinds of reasons. I've always been a fan of 70s psychological, paranoid thrillers,

like Three Days at a Condor, and Parallax View, and those kind of things about the little guy, the lowly little character who scratches the surface of something really big and then finds himself embroiled in something he can't get himself out of. And so it had that hallmark.

It had the element of shooting in a foreign country, in a foreign place. I had made a career out of shooting shows that took place in other worlds, other places, other cities, other locations, and never left a 35-mile radius of my office to do so. And while that's really exciting to create Paris on Pico Boulevard,

it's also really challenging. And so the thought that this had already sort of been prearranged, that if this was going to happen, it was going to happen in Israel with the help of the city of Jerusalem and Israel itself. And so I was really fascinated with that idea of doing a show set in another place.

And then the subject matter was infinitely fascinating to me. It's a world… I'm a history buff. I was a religious studies major in college, so I have an interest in sort of religions and ancient, you know, and some ancient biblical ideas and prophecies and all of that.

And so it connected on all those levels. Ting has familiar faces in the cast and some fresh ones too. Like Alison Sudol, who as a recording artist was anxious to move into acting. It's very different, but it's actually weirdly similar in that in music and in acting. You're essentially trying to tell the most truthful story you can.

And with music, I write my own stories. And in this, I get to be a part of a story written by brilliant people. And there's so much truth within this character that it was quite natural. But basically, I just wanted to expand as an artist, and I've always loved films. I'm a total cinema nerd, and acting always just terrified me.

And then one day I woke up and thought, I keep saying, someday I'll act. Someday, someday, someday. And then it's kind of like, if I don't make someday now, it's never going to happen. So I did, and this was only my second role. And I can't believe that it's this. Like, it's just ridiculous, you know, I hear people's stories

of the terrible things that they've worked on. And I'm like, oh, yeah. Out of the center of it all is actor David Constable, who finds a lot of good points about being evil. It's really fun to play bad guys. Like, it's not as fun to play good guys. It's fun to play bad guys, right? Because you get to be secretive and mean and do, like,

you know, we all like to get to fantasize about, like, the darker edges of the world. And, you know, most of us in our lives don't do that for a good reason, because we should not, right? But when, like, this character on some level has made a bunch of wrong, right turns, right? He's turned, then he turned, then he turned. And then if any one of us did that, we would get into a situation where we were like, oh, I found myself on the wrong side of the law,

morality, common sense, all sorts of shit that you should not have done, but you are now doing. And when you get there, it gets to be fine, right? You haven't had to make those turns. I haven't had to make those turns. But now I just get to arrive in that world where things are, you would do things that you normally would not do. And it requires a lot more secrecy and hiddenness and stealth than, you know,

that I think all of us can sort of, you know, in our pretend mind when we were kids, we imagine, again, sneak around here, and I do this sneaky thing over here. I know, I did. And now I get to do that for a living. And that's great. See more about Digg at usanetwork.com and new episodes every week on USA. Will you stop and think about it? It is the longest-running fan magazine in comics, Famous Monsters.

The imprint began by Forrest Ackerman back in 1958. Now we'll launch a new comics line under the imprint of the American Gothic press. First, a title that will kick it off will be Gunzoots, written by Eisner Award-winning Paul Tobin. Steve Niles will be one of the other creators involved in books that will come out as the summer progresses with more titles from American Gothic. And of course, there's the Famous Monsters magazine imprint as well, which is still existing. Look for the first American Gothic press from Famous Monsters in comic stores in June.

Bad news if you're a fan of the group or the IFC series with the Scarf Ungl and Odes, the network has canceled that show that will not be a second season. Episodes will continue, though, on IFC with repeats of the first season for the next few weeks. Sci-Fi has announced a kickoff date for a couple of their signature series, including Lost Girl. The fifth and final season begins on April 17th on the network.

Also on that same day, season two of VITNIL premieres on Sci-Fi, and then the series moves to its regular time, Fridays on April 24th at 9 p.m. Sarah Michelle Geller joins her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. in the voice cast of the Disney XD series Star Wars Rebels. The actors will have a recurring role in the second season of the animated series, which is set to premiere on Disney sometime later this year. So are you tough enough to hang with Marvel for over 24 hours?

The ultimate Marvel movie marathon takes place coming up at the end of April and leads right in, of course, to the premiere of the New Avengers movie. Movie chains like AMC and Regal are doing a movie marathon that begins on April 29th at 6 p.m. and rolls all the way into a 7 o'clock premiere of the Avengers movie Age of Ultron the next night, April 30th. In between those times, you can catch all Iron Man movies, The Incredible Hulk, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Captain America films, The Thor movies, and, of course, the first Avengers film as well. For more information, check the AMC and Regal theaters in your area. The new series, The Return, is also moving to Netflix.

Netflix secured the rights to the series and they'll air each new episode 24 hours after they're on the A&E network. Meanwhile, stick around for our coverage of The Return and to talk with star Mark Pellegrino. Coming up. The point, the point. The concept of the new show The Return might seem a little familiar.

A small town turned upside down when several local people long presumed dead suddenly reappear. But this is no copycat. The Return is actually based on the original series done in France with a lot of critical acclaim a few years back. And this version has a pretty good pedigree, too. Executive produced by Carlton Cuse from Lost and Rayl Tucker from True Blood.

And among the stars, Mark Pellegrino, who is happy to tell me about his role. Sure. My part is a drag queen ship. I play the father of Camille Winship, who is the first to come back from the dead. And she comes back four years after she was killed in a tragic school bus accident to find that the nuclear family that she left behind has now been pretty much shattered by her death.

And I'm living a separate, more or less separate life now from my wife and from my surviving daughter. And so this is the world that Camille comes back to. With Carlton as an executive producer, Mark knew right away he was in. Carlton, I've wanted to work with him again since Lost. Such a tremendous…

Pretty much a force of nature, I would say. So creative and thinks out of the box. And pretty much anything that he does is not going to be typical and it can be very inventive. And I wanted to work with him again. And especially after reading the script and watching the French show, which was tremendous.

I mean, tremendous in its ability to carry on a mystery and not answer a question deliberately to keep you in suspense. And I think that's the element that Carlton and Raelle took into the American version. They didn't just focus on sci-fi. They made it the dimensional story of a character-driven drama that has a great deal of mystery to it. And I personally as an audience member, not just acting in it, but I personally want to get to the bottom of this mystery and have a piece of me reaching for it.

So I'm really excited. So what got Mark into show business? I started acting by accident. I wanted to be a marine biologist for a while and then went to college and found out that I wasn't very good in science. So I had to make a career change.

And my career change was to sing in a band and kind of roam around for a year or so, not quite knowing what I wanted to do. And just on a whim, I went into the commercial workshop that was being offered for free. And I started learning these commercial kind of techniques, not really knowing how to act. And the teacher thought I had some ability. And he sent me over an agent.

And I started going out on auditions before I even knew what acting was. And then my agent came back. And after a couple of good auditions, I came close. I wasn't closing the deal. So he discreetly set a list of acting teachers down on the desk for me and said,

which one would you like to go to? And I picked one. And that became the theater company that I've stayed with and now teach at some time and time. It kind of introduced me to the finer point of craft, which has become now the center of my life. I fell in love with acting.

Probably about four or five years after I started. There's so many great roles on his resume. There have to be a couple of big ones. Well, that just got away, right? Yeah.

You know, I don't have that Gene Packman, you know, once a little bit of Coogan's Nest story, the Charles Grodin graduate story. God, I don't know what I would do if I had some kind of story like that. But, you know, for me, I mean, because the craft kind of has just soaked into me by osmosis, I wish I knew, you know, at 22, 23 when I was starting what I know today, of course.

I mean, that's kind of probably what anybody says as they get older. But I feel like that, you know, when you're young, you're kind of just feeling your way around and blindly and don't quite know exactly what direction you want to take. There's probably tons of, you know, unseen opportunities that you miss. But thank God I don't know that those are the risks.

So it's just an abstraction. All right. So how about this? Of all those jobs that he's done, is there any he'd like to, well, do over again, maybe a little differently? Definitely. Once it's on cellular, it's there forever. And you can always look at something you've done and say, wow, I wish I did this.

Or, you know, a few years later, you're a few years older and more experienced. And you can always make it better. I think De Niro said something like that. You can always make it better. So I haven't spent too much time thinking about that.

I'm definitely just looking forward to developing this character, Jack Winship, and seeing where our story goes is going to be a very intriguing project for me. AETV is where you find out everything about the return. And there are new episodes every Monday on A&E. That's it for right now.

We're back in a few days with Bates Motel Season 3, described in only three words, over the top. The Bad Momma herself helps us kick off her coverage. We'll have Vera Farmiga to share for you coming up here. And you can catch it only on websites like ComicMix.com, MichaelDavisWorld.com, and GetThePointRadio.com, plus in the iTunes podcast directory.

Stay ahead of the game with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram under the point radio. See you right back here in a few days. GetThePointRadio.com