The Point Radio: The Significantly Talent Krista Allen

You’ll instantly recognize Krista Allen from so many great roles, ranging from X-FILES to LIAR LIAR to her latest, the buzz worthy comedy SIGNIFICANT MOTHER on The CW. She talks about her journey and her appreciation of smart TV writing. Plus we begin our look at the new television season with NBC’s THE PLAYER. Wesley Snipes and Phillip Winchester talk about the high concept thriller, created by former DC Comics writer, John Rogers.

Be sure and follow us on Twitter now here.

Transcript

The Point Radio. It's Mike Raub. We start our look at the new TV season with one of those shows that already has a lot of buzz. Wesley Snipes comes to series television and NBC's The Player.

And we talk to him and the rest of the cast about what's coming up. Plus, Krista Allen is along to talk about her new project and how much fun she's having on The CW's significant mother. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. The Point Radio. Krista Allen has one of those beautiful faces you'll recognize well from a lot of different

TV. From X-Files to unscripted, even to Baywatch. And her new project? The show is called Significant Mother. It's on The CW network.

It's really funny and the premise is my son comes home from a business trip and finds out that his mom has now started a relationship with his best friend who's also his roommate. And it follows how his life goes and what happens to our whole family trying to adjust to this new life. And so each character has to deal with how we're going to keep moving forward.

So what got her involved with this one? Well, I mean, it's a funny show. The script was really amazing and I was laughing from the beginning. And I really loved the writing and thought it was really cute and I wanted to do it. And it happened.

With a huge resume like hers, what it feels most to Krista. Comedy or drama? You know, a good role is a good role. And I don't think there's a comfort in either one. I really love comedy and I really love drama.

I'm an actress so I do it all. And I think it just depends on the material. I don't think there's anything that I'm more comfortable with. But I really do love comedy and it's really fun. Okay, so if we were to offer her a do over, a chance to repeat any of the great roles she's

done so far, is there anything she'd like to have another crack at? Probably every single thing I've ever done. I think that probably, you know, I mean, guys, you have a do over on every and on any project. Sure. I can't think of what those would be off the top of my head.

But let's just say everything. I think you grow all the time. So you know, with this show and with the significant mother specifically, I've had a really fun time with this. It's interesting, you know, when you have good writing, a lot of the stuff, you know,

some of the stuff I've done hasn't been the best writing or maybe, you know, the plot wasn't as fun or whatever. But this show, it has everything. So it makes it really fun. Not quite so challenging as other things where, you know, you kind of have to, or at least

I used to have to feel like I had to push it a little bit more. But yeah, I think I'd go back to every project I've ever done and do a do over. First, I've worked on some of the best shows and with some of the best creative people. So ask if there's any desire to ever step behind the camera. For sure.

I have all kinds of creative ideas that are bouncing around in my head all the time. So I collaborate with a bunch of different people and a lot of my friends that are actually really, really successful at doing this writing thing generally bounce stuff off of me and I'll go in and I'll punch up some jokes or I'll, you know, go through different things with them.

And that's been really fun. So I'm dipping my toes into the writing part of it all, which is really fun. And it's interesting that people trust me enough to, with their projects, to find some new jokes or some new ways to go with stuff. So that's been really fun.

Producing super fun, all of it. I mean, I just, I love the business. So if we could offer Krista a golden ticket, one that could get her a role in anything, either on the big screen, television, streaming, any role, any series, anything she'd ever like to do, what would that be?

I don't know. I think it's something with amazing writing, something that is, I love comedy, so that would be great. And I just, all I care about is that it's well written. I don't know what that role would be.

I don't, we get to play around with so many different characters and stuff as actors. So I don't know. It could be anything. Catch Krista right now on the Significant Mother, new episodes every Monday on The CW. And you can stream episodes too on CW now.

We might be getting that shield spin off after all. That's part of what's going on right now in pop culture. Hulu has ordered a half hour comedy pilot from Seth Rogen and his producing partner Evan Goldberg. It's called Future Man and it centers on a janitor by day, a world ranked gamer by

night who's got the job of preventing the extinction of the human race from mysterious visitors from the future. Rogen and Goldberg will direct the pilot and you can more than likely look for it on the streaming service, sometime late this year or early in 2016. Add the Inhumans to the list of newly relaunched and rebooted Marvel titles this year.

The all new Inhumans will be a sister series to the Uncanny Inhumans. It will be drawn by Stefano Casselli and be in comic stores in December. During pilot season last year ABC gave us the possibility of a new spin off series from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It would star Mockingbird and was going to be called Marvel's Most Wanted but by the

end of pilot season the idea was pretty much on the shelf. Now it looks like it's back on the table and again will star Adrian Felicky and Nick Blood as the two characters that will be brought over from the regular S.H.I.E.L.D. series. Keeping the original concept title of Marvel's Most Wanted but ABC execs say it's not a

spin off but a new show that focuses on these two characters and their story. More than likely it will appear sometime in 2016 maybe as a pilot for next year's television season. If you want to stay in touch with Wizard World Chicago next weekend without even leaving your house well you can do that with ConTV, a new service that Wizard has put together

in cooperation with Verizon. Live panels will be covered as well as other original programming and there will even be some free giveaways online as well. You can sign up at WizardWorld.com and keep in mind there's also a free promotion going on this month as well.

If you're waiting for Apple's new live TV service to be delivered over the internet well it's not going to be here for a while. Latest rumors are it's been postponed until sometime early next year due to a number of deals that still weren't completed yet. Little rumors over the summer told us so that it would come along with a few other

Apple announcements sometime next month. All the things that Lucasfilm, Disney and Marvel didn't tell us at Comic-Con are coming out over the last weekend at D23 the Expo in Anaheim including a new director for Episode 9, a new poster they revealed for Star Wars The Force Awakens and a lot more as well. Jurassic World director Cullen Trevorrow has been announced as the director for Episode

9, the third in the new trilogy of interconnected films. Ryan Johnsittle will direct Episode 8 which will be released in 2017 by the way on the very same date given 40 years as the release of the original Star Wars film. Hollywood types are calling the concept The Office meets the DC Universe but what it really is is powerless.

A half hour work place comedy series set in the DC Universe came from creator Ben Quinn who did A to Z last year for the network. And the story takes place in a world where superheroes and villains are everywhere and normal people need insurance to survive the catastrophes that are caused every time those two factions run into each other.

No word yet on which official DC characters will appear in the series and again NBC has just ordered a pilot so far. The Player is a new NBC series about an action-packed high-stakes crime-fighting game that takes place in Vegas. It also stars Wesley Snipes and Phillip Winchester and it comes from the mind of former comic

book writer John Rogers who talked to me about the shifting focus of TV series over the past few years and where the player fits into that. I think what happened is that we were all procedural and then we got really excited about serialization and like all American television they went totally all the way one way and we're kind of just balancing it back out.

You know and I learned to write comics from Keith Giffen and he always taught me like you know not continuity but coherence. Like you don't have to make sure you see every single episode but when you bomb in you understand what's going on. If you just want to show up and see the biggest most badass high-concept show of the week

great you're there. But if you pay attention and you start seeing the hints and we actually dropped a giant hint to how old the game is right in the middle of the pilot and in the line of charities and how old it is and how they figured out how to do what they're doing it's right there it's like they've got a spotlight on it.

You know if you pay attention if you pay attention over that season we want you to be able to figure it out just a little bit ahead of us. We want the audience engaged to go like oh wait they're not pulling this out of their ass. I mean predictive policing exists.

The character that Charity Wakefield is playing Cassandra is really just Jessica Chastain's character in Serial Dark Thirty if she's broken back. You know we do profile we do predictive stuff we have people whose job it is. The houses edges they have the best data in the world because they were there when they built the infrastructure and they built they're not hacking.

She doesn't have to go oh look I'm hacking they just have all the passwords. But one of the fun themes of the show is you know data is not information is not knowledge and she can get you all the data you want. It's up to Alex to figure out what to do with it and then figure out how to use that to stop the crime of the week.

The part of Alex belongs to Philip Winchester. Man so I play Alex Kane on the player. Alex Kane is an ex he's an ex FBI systems analyst so he was the guy who would go in after the Marines or after the SEALs would go into a room and he would analyze the situation talk to the people that they captured and he realized in some of the missions that he

was on that he was a lot better if he was the guy with the gun and if he was the guy that if he was the guy not not asking the questions but smashing out the door and pulling the trigger. So he kind of goes rogue. He opens up a security firm in Vegas and we find him working on the security firm in

Vegas where the pilot starts and he gets wrapped up in this high concept conspiracy by thwarting kidnapping that is happening in Vegas and in doing so he gets basically totally entangled in Wesley Snipes and Charity Wakefield he gets involved in their organization. Yeah it's deep he's got a lot of things going on. Philip isn't intrigued by how TV these days is so affected by social media.

I've learned through John Rogers our writer that there's a lot of things that are going on out there that we have you know we basically have no idea. I've learned to turn my phone off when I go to bed. I've learned to watch my back when I walk into a restaurant. It's incredible you know most of it is military grade stuff.

All this stuff though we're I mean we live in the future. It's incredible. I mean the fact that this goes straight on the internet all this stuff is immediately streamable. We sat down at the in one of the rooms this morning and we viewed we viewed the pilot

with everybody and you could see people tweeting and people talking about it live time right now it's happening. It's incredible to me. I came out of a theater background where there was immediate gratification on stage and then you'd walk out and meet the audience.

But this is it's like we're mixing the two worlds again. You know it's like we're doing sort of something on television that has taken three months to make months ago. And then you're also getting the immediate feedback globally as it happens. It's just it's an incredible medium we're working in.

Really cool. Coming from the big screen I talked to Wesley about the differences in doing regular series television. It's going to be interesting. I mean the time commitment is unusual.

The hands in the pot. That's very unusual. A lot of cooks in the kitchen. Very unusual. And the prep time is a little shorter.

But I'm actually intrigued by that. You know I say this because I come out of a repertory theater background where we were always developing a show working on a show and prepping for another show at the same time. That's kind of my that's kind of the clock that I'm spun from.

I'm a little bit of a that's kind of my that's kind of the clock that I'm spun from. So I'm looking forward to getting back into it. And maybe this is a way for me to practice up. So when I get ready to go back to theater my skills would be on on point.

You know because I won't have a lot of time to develop the characters and now you have to make them work. If I want to do an accident for one of the characters I got to be spot on. You know we don't have time to figure it out. Or you'll never see that character with that accident on the screen again.

But it's good. We'll see. So how does he see this show? An intriguing show that's interactive. When I say interactive there will be plots and little gems and clues that will be dropped

throughout the show to give you an idea of the direction of the story. And we'd like to you know have the show branded as a lifestyle show. An aspiration show. In places that you would like to go. Worlds that you would like to see.

Worlds you would like to be in. Clothes you would like to wear. Cars you definitely want to drive. Money you'd like to win. Yeah you know so it's a lifestyle show as well.

And dynamic action. As doing a weekly series changes lifestyle ending. Well we're going to have to be ahead of the game. And that means that you know not as much partying because we're going to have to prep. And the challenge with doing action especially if we need to do martial arts action or boxing

action. There's not so much doing it the first day. It's getting over the soreness to come back and do it the second day. And then the third day and with a TV series we're talking about week to week to week to week.

We're going to have to get in shape. So will the player pretty much be centered in Vegas? I talked to Phillip about that. No actually I was you know the premise of the show is Las Vegas. I mean Las Vegas plays sort of another character in the show because it's this moving breathing

beast that Vegas is. I think there's going to be some episodes though where we bounce around the country. I think there's one in Hollywood. I think there's going to be some stuff in the middle of America you know in the deserts maybe in New York.

My buddy Sullivan Stapleton has another NBC show called Blind Spot. So we're hoping for a little crossover. I don't know if we can get that in there but that would be fun. Winchester and Wesley Snipes in the player it debuts September 24th on NBC. You can see more right now at NBC.com.

That's it for right now but there's more on the way including a visit from Philly Bob Thornton to talk about his latest project which by the way is music. And of course we'll be digging deep into the new TV season as well. You'll find it all on websites like ComicMix dot com, GetThePointRadio.com and in the iTunes podcast directory.

E-mail with us on social media, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook under The Point Radio. Have a great weekend. See you back here in a few days. GetThePointRadio.com