Tim Allen all abuzz about Toy Story special
Thanks to Fox, Tim Allen is all over the place on television. Not only does he star in One Man Standing, but Thursday he’ll once again voice spaceman Buzz Lightyear in the TV special Toy Story that Time Forgot on ABC. While Allen has flirted with doing drama, he admits he’s a dedicated comedian.
“My focus is to find out what Tim Allen is,” he says ... “I have a lot more comedy that I can do. I am a real serious guy. And I love design and I love art and I love spiritual stuff and I love talking about God and making fun of God and the devil. There’s a lot of stuff about me that if you focus in, there is potential. I just have so much potential as an entertainer. I’ve been a great stage entertainer. I’ve been through radio. My dream was to be Bob Hope forever. He was vaudeville, which I’ve done, radio, which I’ve done, television, which I’ve done. And then he became one of my favourites in that genre when he did film. So it is possible [to do drama.] And it certainly would be my focus. But I’m not going to force feed it. I’m not going to do Othello.”
Tis the season for Christmas specials
TV is hanging its stockings and festooning its trees for all-out Christmas-related programming. NBC is offering Lego Jurassic World: The Secret Exhibit Parts 1 and 2 on Thursday with a repeat on Dec. 19. Three disgruntled dinosaurs must be moved to a new clandestine exhibit at Jurassic World, but moving them is no walk in the park . . . On Dec. 4, audiences will be treated to the best Christmas-related sketches gleaned from years of Saturday Night Live . . . . Oxygen will sport some “killer” episodes with its Homicide for the Holidays specials premièring Dec. 9. The series begins with Christmas Rager, and the discovery of a young mother’s body in a cremated car.
Actor returns to Berlin Station
Michelle Forbes, as chief of station Valerie Edwards, manipulates her team through the machinations of international politics in Season 3 of Berlin Station, returning Sunday.
Forbes, so memorable as the distraught mother in The Killing, says as a kid she didn’t know what she wanted to do. “My poor mother ran me around because one week I wanted to be a gymnast, the next week I wanted to be an equestrian, the next week I wanted to be a ballet dancer. Water ballet was thrown in there somewhere.
“Just by luck I came into this and I realized I got to do all those things without having to be proficient at any of them.
“They made me look like I could do that, and you could put yourself into the mindset of that. And I think, for me, it just makes me a far more empathetic person. The empathy is sometimes a bit of a curse because I can always feel what somebody’s going through. But when you think there are people who walk through this life who don’t think about what it must feel like to be in that person’s shoes, maybe that’s why we have a lot of intolerance in this world.”