This past weekend, the final three episodes of Paramount ’s “The Madison” premiered. A second season already got filmed, according to director Christina Alexandra Voros, who also pulled back the curtain on the show’s production process.
Set in Montana and Manhattan, Voros said “The Madison” filmed in Montana and at series creator Taylor Sheridan’s new film studio in North Fort Worth, Texas.
Voros said the Montana shoot happened first “because we had to get out of Montana before it snowed.”
While cabin exteriors were in Montana, the interiors were built on stages in Texas, which means months passed between filming portions of the same scene if, for instance, the scene began outside and then the characters walked inside the cabin.
“Walk inside, hold that, come back two months from now in a different state (to finish the scene),” Voros said. “Kudos to our script supervisor for keeping us honest, emotionally and with all forms of continuity. Things were somewhat (filmed) in order when we were in Montana and somewhat in order when we were in Texas, but they were out of order in the big picture.”
Dramatic TV shows and movies often film out of chronological order — “The Pitt” is a rare exception — but Voros said she tries “as hard as possible to build a (shooting schedule) that moves in chronological order. I think it helps the actors. It sure helps me.”
Voros said one thing that helped when scenes were filmed months apart was the production had a rough cut of what filmed in Montana by the time they shot scenes in Texas “so you weren’t scrubbing through hours and hours of dailies trying to find where you were emotionally.”
For Season 3 of Netflix’s live-action “One Piece,” Mt. Lebanon’s Joe Manganiello described the show’s “block” scheduling, where a season of a show — or a block of episodes within a season — films more like a movie, setting up in one location and filming all the scenes on that location or set even if those scenes may be scattered throughout different episodes.
“Prior to getting here,” Manganiello said earlier this month in a virtual interview from Cape Town, South Africa, “I had all the scripts ahead of time. I could map out the arc for the character. But all the actors have to track their arcs because we will jump around (from episode to episode) quite a bit.”
Voros said it helps her efforts as a director that Sheridan’s scripts are full of details — screen directions, character descriptions — viewers will never read but they inform what viewers see in the finished program.
“There’s an entire roadmap built into the scripts that make it to the screen by virtue of the fact that that is the show that is felt and experienced by audiences watching it,” Voros said. “But I don’t think people realize how much of that guidance is really built into the script itself. And he is very, very clear with what he sees, and how he sees a landscape, how he sees a fight on the kitchen floor. There’s a specificity with which he writes these things that actually makes the work very easy to navigate.”
‘Bait’
Coming on the heels of last week’s third and final season premiere of “The Comeback,” the chronicle of a star trying to stay relevant, Amazon Prime Video’s “Bait” introduces a desperate actor attempting to become relevant.
Now streaming all six episodes, Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) stars in “Bait” as Muslim London actor Shah Latif who’s in the running to become the next James Bond. The show follows him over four days as he auditions, makes some unforced errors and gets a callback audition.
It’s certainly a darker and weirder take on insecure actors than “The Comeback.” At one point, Shah talks to the severed head of a pig and the pig talks back in the voice of Patrick Stewart (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”). In another scene, Shah looks at responses to social media posts about him (“He looks like a baffled meercat”).
“Bait” also explores racism and cultural conundrums through cringeworthy comedic moments (Shah is constantly mistaken for Dev Patel.)
“I’ve got tremendous respect for Islam,’ says Shah’s white security expert, “especially after six tours of Pakistan.”
“The war criminal is right,” Shah’s elderly father says without missing a beat.
Ahmed created the series, and he’s clearly having a blast making fun of himself and wringing laughs from the situations he puts his alter ego into, absurd as they often are.
Kept/canceled
CBS renewed new drama “CIA” after just two episodes.
Apple TV renewed “For All Mankind” for a sixth and final season days before Friday’s debut of Season 5.
Paramount renewed “School Spirits” for a fourth season and will bring back “Criminal Minds” for a 20th season to stream in 2027 with the 19th season streaming May 28.
Disney renewed “Wonder Man” for a second season.
Paramount will end “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” which started rocky but grew into a better version of itself through its first season, after just two seasons because of low viewership. A second season has already been filmed.
Channel surfing
HBO Max’s “Hacks” returns for its 10-episode fifth and final season at 9 p.m. April 9. … Disney will debut a one-off “Punisher” special, “The Punisher: One Last Kill,” on May 12, the same day as the “Daredevil: Born Again” second-season finale. … Beth (Kelly Reilly) and Rip (Cole Hauser) return in the nine-episode first season of “Yellowstone” spin-off “Dutton Ranch,” debuting with two episodes May 15 on Paramount . … Former CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane joined online social media company MeidasTouch Network as its chief Washington correspondent.