TVSquad

Actress Brea Grant just landed a pretty cool role on the hit NBC series Heroes. According to TV Guide's Michael Ausiello, the young actress was cast as Joy, a woman in her early twenties with the power of superspeed.

This recurring character is said to be introduced in a scene set at a museum. Hiro meets the woman at the museum and asks her if she has powers and is using them to steal art. As expected, Joy will lie to our beloved hero Hiro and leave the scene with a few paintings. Is she part of the villains or is she one of the good guys and somehow lost her way? Only time will tell!

Gossip Girl is getting a lot of exposure these days. A week after the OMFG scandal, the cast of Gossip Girl has made People magazine's list of the most beautiful people of 2008. No argument here. Eye candy is one of the main reasons why I love the show. My only complaint is that Matthew Settle and Kelly Rutherford were left out. Rufus Humphrey and Lily van der Woodsen are currently two of the hottest parents on TV.

Other familiar TV faces made the list, including: Desperate Housewives' Eva Longoria Parker and Marcia Cross, Sarah Silverman, Ugly Betty executive producer Salma Hayek, Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, Dancing With The Stars' Carrie Ann Inaba and Jason Taylor, Vanessa Hudgens, Mad Men's Christina Hendricks, and Minka Kelly from Friday Night Lights.

There's an interesting little blurb over at Digital Spy about NBC's TV Box. The network is currently working out distribution deals in up to ten European and Asian countries, building their global video-on-demand service. They don't detail exactly which shows will be a part of the package, other than a mention of both current and past series being involved.

That's all fine and dandy, but the interesting bit comes from something NBC's Belinda Menendez says. Apparently, the big shows, like Heroes, may be available before they are broadcast for an extra price. And that leads us to the question in the post title.

For the sake of argument, let's assume this all works out for the peacock bunch in Europe and Asia and they make it a global policy. Would the prospect of getting Thursday's episode of The Office on Monday be enough to let those sticky Donaghy fingers into your wallet?

According to Scifi Wire, the NBC show Heroes has been given a return date of September 15th of this year. However, the proposed spin-off series titled Heroes: Origins has been canceled before it was even broadcast.

As they have done with many shows, NBC plans to kick off the new season by showing a one-hour clip show. This will be followed by a two-hour season premiere. That's three hours of Heroes in one night. That's enough to cause a brain aneurysm for the more ardent Heroes fans.

Some of you know her as Candice Wilmer, the Heroes character who had the ability of illusion (she could mimic someone or an environment), others know her as Andi from The CW's Reaper. With roles like these, you have to admit that Missy Peregrym is a TV star on the rise.

25-year-old Melissa "Missy" Peregrym was born on June 16, 1982, in Montreal, Quebec, but was raised in British Columbia, where Reaper is shot. As it is the case for many actors, Missy never dreamed of being an actress when she grew up. Actually, she wanted to be a coach. After graduating, she took on a job as a basketball coach. Peregrym eventually made it to the business by first being a model for print advertisements and then appearing in TV commercials for companies such as Mercedes Benz and Sprint Canada. These commercials paved the way for her first gig on TV: a guest starring role on FOX's Dark Angel.

First we had the lawsuit that claimed the idea for Heroes was stolen, then we had the controversial comments from ex-Zach, Thomas Dekker. Now comes what could be the most intriguing Heroes controversy of them all.

Was the first season tag line "Save the cheerleader, save the world" borrowed from a short-lived NBC show from the mid-80s?

That's the news from the B-Side blog, which discloses that the classic, campy NBC sci-fi show Misfits of Science (which starred Courteney Cox and ALF's Max Wright) had the catch phrase "Save Adele, Save The World." Now, this would be just a cute coincidence if it wasn't for the fact that Heroes creator Tim Kring was one of the writers on the show! Of course, since he was a writer on the show, maybe it's not a controversy at all.

After the jump, video from the show, which includes the tag line.

Note: the B-Side Blog seems to be down right now, so here's the story on Defamer.

Cool news for fans of NBC's Heroes: it looks like the show is going to start filming a lot earlier than it usually does.

Shows usually start filming in July/August for the fall season, but according to Heroes star James Kyson Lee (Ando), the writers strike means that the show will start filming in June, and maybe as early as May. He says that NBC plans to really push the show this year, using the Olympics to hype the show.

That's the good news. The (possible) bad news is that TV Guide's Michael Ausiello is reporting that Kristen Bell isn't signed for the new season yet.

The Saturn Award nominations are in, and many popular sci-fi and fantasy shows made the cut. Returning favorites like Lost, Heroes, and Dexter were recognized by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films, as were newcomers Pushing Daisies and Journeyman.

With seven nominations, Lost is ahead of Dexter and Heroes, which received five and four nominations, respectively. Heroes was the big winner last year, taking home awards for Best Network Series as well as acting awards for Masi Oka and Hayden Panettiere. Both actors received nominations this year, along with co-star Greg Grunberg.

We all know that how people watch TV has been changing dramatically in the last few years, but now comes this news from TorrentFreak.com: 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time are downloading a TV series. More than anything else, it's TV content they want.

What this means is that TV fans aren't just watching TV shows live or using DVRs and TiVos alone. They're just as apt to download a show to view on a laptop, desktop or iPod. According to the article, "over a billion TV shows are downloaded every year and this number continues to rise."

When I posted about CBS's post strike announcement, I said it would be great if the other networks followed the Eye's lead. Well, almost as soon as I hit "Publish" on that post, NBC came out with two press releases discussing some of their post-strike plans.

The first release confirms what we had been guessing at since we got the news of the settlement: Chuck, Life and Heroes have all been picked up for 2008-09, but none of the shows will return until the fall. The second release discusses the return dates of several shows (list after the jump). It's not as helpful as CBS's release because it doesn't tell us how many episodes are left (so, for all we know, we'll see the Scrubs conclusion on DVD, as Bill Lawrence told Mike Ausiello). But at least we know when all of these shows are coming back -- April 10 seems to be the big day for fans of 30 Rock and The Office, for example.

Now we have FOX, CW, and ABC left. Think they're going to step up to the plate soon?

According to various sources such as Kristin Dos Santos from E!, Ain't It Cool News and Michael Ausiello, it is more than likely that we will get no new episodes of NBC's Heroes this spring. Even if most series will return this spring with a few new episodes, it looks like NBC decided to have the cast and crew start shooting Season 3 instead of offering fans a few more episodes for the second season.

Sometimes I think celebrities should just keep some comments to themselves when they leave a TV show.

Thomas Dekker, who played Zach during the first season of Heroes and now plays John Connor on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, tells Life & Style that he thinks the relationship between 30 year-old Heroes star Milo Ventimiglia and 18 year-old Hayden Panettiere is "creepy." He says that the two dating would be like him dating a 12 year-old.

This is Spoilers Anonymous, a weekly column here at TV Squad where we'll supply you with the dirt on some of the more popular shows on the air. We'll never put spoilers up here on the main page in order to help the reformed stay unspoiled. If you have anything to add to the group, feel free to step up and let yourself be heard, either with our tips form or by emailing us at tvsquad at gmail dot com or call and leave a message at (775) 640-8479 - your anonymity is guaranteed, if you wish to remain as such.

This week we have: Brothers & Sisters, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, House, Lost, One Tree Hill and Supernatural. (SPOILERS FOLLOW!)

And here I thought it was According to Jim. Who knew? Maybe this year.

Until then, NBC's Heroes is the number one most pirated TV show of 2007, according to a list compiled on TorrentFreak. Nearly 2.5 million illegal downloads were made of the super-hero program, with the BBC program Top Gear coming in second at about 1.2 million. Others on the list are Battlestar Galactica (706,000), 24 (524,000) and Scrubs (tenth on the list at 427,000 downloads).

Here's my question concerning all of this...why is this still illegal?

Heroes didn't have time to complete more than 11 episodes, all of which have aired, before production was shut down due to writers' strike. However, it was confirmed the cast and crew had time to shoot some scenes for episodes 12 and 13 (other sources say they had time to shoot part, if not all, of episodes 12 to 16!). TV Guide's Michael Ausiello reports that Tim Kring presented a new trailer at the Jules Verne Adventure Film Festival of Los Angeles, which includes some of those yet-to-air scenes.