Tori Spelling Is Back On Top

Today in show business news: Tori Spelling has a new show, Vampire Bill is going to be in The Sound of Music, and Ben Affleck's Batman takes its first victim.

Today in show business news: Tori Spelling has a new show, Vampire Bill is going to be in The Sound of Music, and Ben Affleck's Batman takes its first victim.

Tori Spelling never really disappeared exactly, she's been doing reality shows and TV movies and all that stuff for years, but it's been a while since she was in the ol' scripted series game. But not for long! ABC Family has ordered a comedy pilot called Mystery Girls, produced by and starring the Beverly Hills 90210 actress. She'll play a former TV starlet (wink wink, nudge nudge) who starts solving crimes with her old costar. That sounds fun! I mean, I'd rather they were doing a series based on Mind Over Murder, but this is close enough, I guess. This is good news for Tori. So good, in fact, that she and her husband Dean recently went out and celebrated in a canoe. Great canoeing guys! [Deadline]

Speaking of comebacks, Timothy Dalton, the two-time James Bond, has been cast as one of the leads on the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. That's the one about all the literary horror characters, like Dorian Gray and Frankenstein and Dracula and all those jerks, hanging out in London together. Oh, so presumably then Dalton will be playing the Beast from Beautician and the Beast. Neat. I wonder if they'll have Fran Drescher cameo. Probably! It sounds like that kind of show. And, come on, at this point they're a package deal. You get Dalton, you get Drescher. And vice versa. They're like Woody and Mia. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Stephen Moyer, who plays vampire Bill "Zzzzzz" Compton on HBO's Peabody Award-winning series The Wire True Blood has been cast as, get this, Capt. Von Trapp in the Sound of Music movie that NBC is doing. Bill from True Blood is going to be in a network television version of Sound of Music in which Carrie Underwood plays Maria. Oh, yeah, that's happening too. What on god's green Earth, right? To be fair, Carrie has sung the music before, but... not that well. (She's no Nicole Scherzinger doing Evita, that's for dang sure.) This all just sounds very odd, doesn't it? The hills are alive with the sound of a strange TV movie. [Deadline]

The big Ben Affleck-as-Batman casting has its first casualty. Because of scheduling, Affleck is dropping out of directing a big screen adaptation of Stephen King's magnum opus, The Stand. Nuts. That would have been interesting, a completely new genre for Affleck, but alas, the bat cave came a'calling. So instead it looks as though Scott Cooper may get the job. He directed the quiet country music movie Crazy Heart and the upcoming small-town crime drama Out of the Furnace. So, OK, sure. Woulda been neat to have Affleck do it, though. Stupid Batman. [Vulture]