6 Things to Know About Revolution's Return

That was the party line Sunday at Revolution's panel during NBC's winter TV previews, as executive producer Eric Kripke promised reporters that the second half of the series' freshman season will actually begin to deliver on the promise of the title.

When last we left Miles (Billy Burke), Charlie (Tracy Spiridakos), Rachel (Elizabeth Mitchell) and the rest of the gang, they had escaped Monroe's (David Lyons) clutches only to come face-to-face with his fleet of helicopters — all thanks to Rachel's pendant amplifier, which provided power to his new army.

Impending battle aside — and there will be many on several fronts — Kripke says that at its core, Revolution is a family show and in the second half of the season, the Matheson family will be tested. "The story becomes about can this family — some of them are related by blood, some of them are just related by loyalty. Can they stick together in the face of these overwhelming odds and this overwhelming danger?" Kripke says. "And can you maintain your soul when you're a warrior?"

"This is The Waltons with swords," he adds. "We really want to make sure it always has an incredible amount of heart."

Check out what else is in store for Miles & Co. when the series returns this March:

1. Taking a break: The series has been off the air since the end of November, but the producers actually see the long hiatus as a good thing. "When the idea came up, I was enormously relieved," executive producer J.J. Abrams says, recalling all the repeats during the run of Lost. "A lot of the shows I'm watching on cable run this model, and I like to voraciously watch episodes running continuously and I'm really excited that Revolution has the opportunity to do that," Kripke adds. In fact, this break gave them the ability to tweak the story moving forward and speed up the pace of the stunning revelations. "We wanted to have a second half that was bigger and better and more exciting."

2. Danger ahead: The series will pick up exactly where it left off, with Miles & Co. starring down the barrel of Monroe's chopper guns. "We don't take away that card that we gave as a cliff-hanger," Kripke says. "Monroe does have choppers and does have a limited form of power. Giving him power was more about making him an unstoppable force that your heroes are totally outmanned and overwhelmed as they're trying to battle against him." However, the promo below shows the gang may find some power of their own to retaliate.

3. Expanding the world: "The focus which we've seen so far has actually been very limited within the Monroe Republic. In the second half, we start to slowly, but surely expand the world," Kripke says. Before the end of the season, they will cross into Georgia, a place that has some commodities that the Monroe Republic doesn't have for good reason. Kripke also noted they'll eventually head out west.

4. The future: The producers already know where Miles, Charlie and the gang will find themselves by the season finale, but remained mum on what that would look like. "We definitely have the season's end mapped out, we're working towards it right now," Kripke says. "As much as I had on my previous show, I have a multiple year [plan]... but they're only cocktail napkin sketches... There's really no end of the stories we can tell."

5. Injuries: There's a chance some of our favorites may not come back whole, but that might not actually be written into the script. The cast has started to take on more horseback riding and swashbuckling sword fights, but that doesn't mean they're total pros yet. "Almost got my rib broken and almost broke Billy's nose," says Giancarlo Esposito, who plays the nefarious Capt. Neville.

6. Too much power? Now that power is possible, Abrams and Kripke recognize that it goes against the initial premise of the series, which is why the former says Revolution doesn't plan to flaunt it. "The genie is put-back-in-the-bottle-able," Abrams says. "They are able to tell stories that will give us these moments and peaks that you know this power exists, and this power is out there, and it's a part of what this incredible struggle is and the conflict that you'll see. You'll be able to see that really what the goal is, is that the power is possible. Will it remain on constantly all the time way too early? Based on what Eric has brilliantly pitched to us, the answer is no."

Do No Harm Offers a Modern Twist on Jekyll and Hyde

Steven Pasquale will be pulling double duty this winter on NBC's Do No Harm.

Pasquale plays Dr. Jason Cole, a highly respected neurosurgeon tormented by his dark side. In this case, his dark side is his alternate personality Ian Price, a devious and wild sociopath hell-bent on destroying the lives of others. Yes, it's the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but with its modern-day setting, it's more like "House meets Dexter," executive producer David Schulner told reporters Sunday at NBC's winter TV previews.

"It's a high-concept premise in a very grounded world, and that's what we're going for," he continued, noting that why Jason has two personalities isn't as important as the journey of Jason finding a way to rid Ian for good. "Get to know our characters, fall in love with our world. Then, as the season gets to a climax, and Jason gets closer and closer to finding that drug that will kill Ian, then we're going to peel that onion more."

Of course, Jason isn't the only one who wants to be the personality in control. Schulner says Jason and Ian will be locked in a cat-and-mouse game throughout the season. "Ian is a little bit like a cat," he says. "If the cat wants to play with that mouse, he doesn't want to kill it because what fun would that be? So Ian is going to do a lot of stuff to Jason... There's a true danger to him and he's truly menacing and that's why Jason's character needs to get rid of him. [But] Jason is just as smart as Ian and is sometimes two steps ahead of Ian."

By the season's end, their battle of wits will come to a head as viewers will discover how Jason may be able to separate himself in a way Schulner says is both "medically grounded and will completely blow your mind." "By the end of the season, you're going to learn almost everything and then next season we'll start with a completely different dynamic."

Is Jennifer Esposito Leaving Blue Bloods For Good?

Don't expect to see Det. Jackie Curatola walking around the precinct on Blue Bloods anytime soon.

TVLine reports that former series regular Jennifer Esposito — who abruptly departed earlier this season -- has now exited the show permanently.

Esposito first took a leave of absence in October after CBS TV Studios said in a statement that she was only available to work "a very limited part-time schedule" and was therefore "unable to perform the demands of her role." The studio added that they hoped that her character would return "at some point in the future."

However, Esposito quickly fired back at the studio's claim in a series of tweets, saying that her doctor said she needed a reduced work schedule because of her ongoing struggle with Celiac disease, a condition that damages the lining of the small intestine. The actress went on to claim that she collapsed on set because of her medical condition and that CBS kept her from working on the show or anywhere else. "Absolutely shameful behavior," she said at the time.

Esposito's last episode aired on Nov. 2 and she has subsequently been replaced by actresses Megan Ketch and Megan Boone.

XFactor winner James Arthur sells millionth copy of 'Impossible'

X Factor 2012 winner James Arthur is set to sell his millionth copy of ‘Impossible’ this week after enjoying yet another week at number one.

James’ winner’s song Impossible sold a further 70,000 copies this week to keep Britney Spears and Will.i.am off the top spot, having previously missed out on last week’s Christmas number one.

The song has now shifted an impressive 971,000 copies in its four weeks of release and spent three weeks at number one.

James tweeted this week: “I’m number 1 again? Sweet!! Thanks must go to you sick individuals who bought it! And I mean sick in a good way! #LOVE #Whatayear xxx”

The Official Charts Company reported last week that the song has already eclipsed the total sales of Leona Lewis’ A Moment Like This, Joe McElderry’s The Climb, One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful, JLS’ Beat Again, Little Mix’s Cannonball and Olly Murs’ Please Don’t Let Me Go.

The song is now quickly catching up with the remaining winner’s singles and will almost certainly overtake them in due curse.

Currently Alexandra Burke’s Hallelujah (1.2 million), Shayne Ward’s That’s My Goal (1.1 million) and Matt Cardle’s When We Collide (1 million) remain in James’ way of having the biggest selling X Factor debut yet.

The growing nastiness of period crime drama

Time was when period detective drama meant spending fifty minutes or so in the company of a shrewd OAP solving aristocratic murders in picturesque country houses by drinking Earl Grey from china cups and gently probing the scullery maid. It was sanitised, sexless, and more doilies than Deadwood.

Of late however, period crime TV has evolved into something nastier. Twinsets, dastardly heirs and moustachioed Belgians are out, muckiness, dismemberment and gratuitous nudity are in. Looking ahead to new commissions from ITV and the BBC, the trend set to give Scandi-noir a run for its cosily attired money is for knobbing-and-knifing period crime drama. Forget Call The Midwife, we're talking Kill The Midwife, and leave her brutalised corpse out for the local cats.

Forming the vanguard of the assault is of course Ripper Street, the BBC’s police drama set in the months after Saucy Jack (who, on reflection, was less saucy and more utter bastard) filled the streets of 1890s Whitechapel with his evil deeds. Ripper Street arrives on our screens just as BBC America’s Copper, the channel’s first original series following a nineteenth century cop in the child prostitute and violent mob-ridden slums of New York, bows out.

Featuring only slightly less violence to the private parts of female Eastenders than channel-fellow Call The Midwife, Ripper Street’s first episode opened on the mutilated corpse of young Maude, and closed with another woman, drugged, raped, and almost being choked to death on camera. In-between was the now-obligatory nude slab sequence (admittedly, it would be tricky to carry out an internal examination with her corset still laced) and, correct me if I’m wrong, a particularly cheeky shot of the pathologist’s head hovering over dead Maude’s special area, just moments after he’d been seen with his face up the skirts of another woman. The message was clear: sex, death, and smut are what Ripper Street is selling.

Moving to the other side, ITV has not one but three historical crime dramas on the way, from WWII-set Murder on the Home Front telling the story of a pathologist on the trail of a serial killer during the Blitz, to a sequel to 2011’s  nineteenth century homicide adaptation The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and Life of Crime, a twentieth century trek through three decades of a police officer’s career which chooses the brutal murder of a fifteen year old girl as its kicking-off point.

Across the pond, US channel Starz has just announced their pithily named new commission Crime, set in sixties Britain and written by The Departed’s William Monahan, while The Walking Dead’s Frank Darabont (no stranger to corpses and gore) is seeking a slice of the Boardwalk Empire-period pie with his LA Noir adaptation, about the gangster-battling forties LAPD.

With Downton Abbey and Call The Midwife running away with the ratings most weeks, it follows that a TV audience with a thirst for period drama would drink their fill of it in another genre. Happy to relax into the chintzy, comfortable world of Earls and nuns doing the right thing, perhaps watching nefarious types and guttersnipes do very much the wrong thing is yet more escapism, another way to avoid the quotidian and drift off into bowler-hats and bustles reverie.

We’ve seen just two episodes of Ripper Street so far, but in each the divisions between good and bad are comfortingly drawn. The sadistic toff in the first episode and Joseph Gilgun’s scouse Fagin in the second were wrong’uns and no mistake, brought to fatal justice by the right-thinking men in blue. The plots may not revolve around whether the Dowager Countess wins the village flower show, but underneath all the grot, the programme is still a reminder that good will out, and whatever the viewers’ situation, we’re better off than toothless tarts and filthy urchins living in the vale of tears that is 1890s Whitechapel.

Yet, it’s difficult to deny that both kinds of period drama scratch very different itches. Part of the reason we’re attracted to on-screen and on-page atrocity is because it thrills yet reassures. Watching a fictional victim meet their grisly end and then being able to close the book, walk out of the cinema, or switch off the TV unharmed, heartbeat leaping with the metronomic message of ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine’ is life-affirming and stimulating. The likes of Cranford, Downton Abbey and Lark Rise to Candleford function more as sedative than amphetamine, the TV equivalent of a mug of Horlicks, not the slightly suspect Red Bull high of Ripper Street or Copper.

Death and the darker sides of life aren’t the sole reserve of the new historical crime dramas of course. Vagrants, extreme poverty, disfigured war vets, prostitution and homelessness regularly occur in the fluffier ‘bonnets and breeches’ dramas, the difference being that their victims are like as not cleaned-up, rehabilitated, and sent gratefully on their way to a new life, rather than winding up as mutilated cadavers on a pathologist’s slab.

If the economic landscape can be tracked by the rise and fall of hemlines, then our taste in crime TV must also fluctuate according to the events of the age. Between the World Wars, readers with no desire to add fictional guts and gore to their first-hand experience of it wrapped themselves up in Agatha Christie “cosies” like a warm blanket, reassuring themselves with tales that excised the dark side of death and focused on always-resolved genteel mysteries.

What explains then, the current taste for telly that reopens the history books to scribble strangled women and violent disembowelling all over the margins?

Is it a simple case of copycat productions? There’s no better proof that replication sells judging by the flurry of cheap-looking identikit bondage fantasies pumped out by publishers this summer in the smutty wake of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Make one gory period detective show, and a legion follow behind.

Perhaps the answer lies in the conventions of contemporary crime TV, so perfectly skewered by Charlie Brooker and Daniel Maier’s spoof series, A Touch of Cloth. Gratuitous corpse photography, lingering nude slab shots, and a parade of women sliced, diced and served up for our horrible viewing pleasure are commonplace in CSI-type drama, so finding those tropes transported to centuries past is the next logical step.

The explanation doesn’t only lie at the feet of crime drama, but pans genres. Nudity, blood and swordplay in the likes of Game of Thrones and Spartacus have upped the ante in post-watershed TV, so in order to shock or – and there are so many problems with this next word it necessitates a much longer discussion – titillate these days, shows have to escalate the nastiness. All of which begs the question of what comes next? Whatever it is, it’s unlikely to be more prudish.

Here’s one so-bad-it’s-probably-already in-development scenario: Marple and Poirot rebooted Nolan-style; grittier, darker, and sexier. She’s an ex-escort girl off her tits on laudanum tracking an aristocratic slicer-up of ha’penny tarts, he’s a compulsive gambler who can only rid his little grey cells of the painful memories of his dead wife and daughter by having seven shades of shit (and his curly moustache) kicked out of him in illegal street fights. Commissions anyone?

Celebrity Big Brother 2013: Heidi Montag warned for 'racist' language

Paula Hamilton and Heidi Montag have been given warnings by Celebrity Big Brother bosses.

Model Paula was reprimanded in the Diary Room in the early hours yesterday over a comment she made in the house.

The 51-year-old compared living in the Big Brother basement to life in Nazi Germany’s Auschwitz concentration camp.

US star Heidi Montag, in the house with her husband Spencer Pratt, also found herself getting a telling off from show bosses.

The Daily Star reports that producers warned Heidi for using “unacceptable and potentially offensive| language after she told Sam Robertson he “looked like a Rasta and not to look so dirty”.

A show insider told the newspaper: “They were both reminded how things they say could be potentially offensive to others in the house or those watching at home.

“People often forget the cameras are on them recording everything they say, so it was a gentle reminder to behave.”

The insider added: “Paula was OK about it but Heidi got a little bit upset. I don’t think she’s used to getting told off.”

Paula didn’t seem too bothered, even boasting to her fellow housemates: “I said a word and I was told off for it. But I called my school that!”

Celebrity Big Brother 2013 continues nighty on Channel 5.

Smash's Second Season: A Tale of Two Musicals and Less Scarves

Bad news, Smash fans. You may not have seen the last of Broadway's most annoying assistant just yet.

"Ellis is still alive," executive producer Neil Meron told reporters with a laugh at NBC's winter TV previews Sunday. "How could we forget Ellis?"

Much to the contrary, the much-maligned character is just one part of the NBC musical comedy that executive producers are hoping fans will forgive and very quickly forget. After receiving a much-hyped launch last February, the show became the unintended poster child for "hate-watching" because of divisive characters like Ellis and less-than-believable lines such as "I'm in tech!"

"I read everything and... there were certain things that were written that I thought made a lot of sense," Meron says of the criticism during Season 1. "When Josh [Safran] came in for the second season and addressed all of those issues, it felt like the right move to make."

Now going into its second season, which premieres on Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 9/8c, Smash will return a very different show. Gone are cast members Will Chase, Raza Jaffrey, Brian D'Arcy James and Jaime Cepero, as well as showrunner and creator Theresa Rebeck, who has been replaced with former Gossip Girl showrunner Safran. "Theresa is a really great artist and she was very involved in the theater, and her focus was very much taken up by her other loves," Meron said of Rebeck's departure. "It was [about] availability and where her passions really lay."

Also absent from Season 2 are Julia's many scarves. "The first one that comes to my mind is the scarves," Meron said when asked about which Season 1 criticisms he agreed with. "There were certain story lines that were kind of pinpointed that you would say, 'Right. They could be a little more impactful.'"

Executive producer Craig Zadan went a step further  and said the vitriol directed towards the show last season helped the show's creative team confirm their own thoughts of what was working and what was not. "When we felt certain things were going off-kilter we would read about them in the press or on blogs," Zadan said. "We said if we are lucky enough to get a second season, 'Wouldn't it be great to fix things or adjust things or move those things around?' ... A lot of that reinforced our own instincts about the show."

Although Smash's Season 2 adjustments have been no secret, Safran says he doesn't believe the show has changed too much from the show people loved — and loved to hate — last year. "It's maybe bigger and there's more music and it's a little bit younger in regards to some of our new cast members but it's still the show that people love," he said. "We do have more original music, more musical sequences, more diverse music styles."

The more diverse music styles come courtesy of an entirely new musical, Hit List, that will go into development on the show this season. Hit List, which comes from new cast members Jeremy Jordan and Andy Mientus' characters, is described as a much more rock-pop production than Bombshell and stems from an idea first expressed by executive producer Steven Spielberg early in the show's development. "One of the things Steven said is, 'Wouldn't it be great is, if the show were successful, if we added another musical?'" Zadan said. "What we're really proud of and really excited about is that Bombshell is ongoing, but Josh found a way to start a new musical."

Going into the second season, viewers will see more of the nitty-gritty development of both Hit List and Bombshell, something both Meron and Zadan felt worked in Season 1. "Especially a show like Smash, which has so many moving parts, to figure out the mechanism is hard," Meron said. "When those moments worked in Season 1, I dare anyone to say what could be better entertainment."