Now that we're only a few months away from the kick off of the fall season, numerous television shows are recruiting new actors.  Premiering programs are adding main cast members, returning series are booking recurring roles, and familiar faces from other shows are landing new, exciting jobs.  It feels like nearly every actor in Hollywood is signing up for something.  Let's just cross our fingers and hope that the rumored Screen Actors Guild strike, which could happen in July, doesn't derail things.

Today we have casting news for Knight Rider, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and a few other shows.  Read on for all the details.

Let's start by talking about the most irrelevant show of them all: ER.  The immortal medical drama is heading into its 15th and final season this year, and as always it'll be adding new cast members to jazz things up.  Roswell's Shiri Appleby, who I thought dropped off the face of the planet, will be playing the sister of a new character played by Julian Morris.  She's the smart one, while he skates by on his looks.  Emily Rose (Brothers & Sisters) is also heading to County General, playing a controlling type who rubs folks the wrong way, and Victor Rasuk will join the ensemble as a native New Yorker who is henpecked by his wife.

Unless they cast Dame Judi Dench as the voice of K.I.T.T., I plan to avoid NBC's new version of Knight Rider at all costs.  Even the addition of actor Paul Campbell, who played Billy on Battlestar Galactica, isn't enough to make me tune in.  Campbell will play the head research tech at Knight Industries.

With Diane Farr departing CBS' Numb3rs, the producers have been searching for someone to fill a similar role on the series.  They've settled on actress Sophina Brown, who was last seen on Shark.  Brown will play the recurring role of Nikki Donat, a former LAPD officer and adrenaline junkie who joins Don's FBI team as a junior agent.  On a side note, the fact that the final episode of Shark was entitled "Wayne's World 3: Killer Shark" almost makes me wish I watched the series.

Crash may have been a horrible, overpraised movie that somehow hoodwinked the Oscar voters, but perhaps the new TV adaptation on the Starz channel will fare better.  Dennis Hopper is heading up the cast, and it was recently announced that D.B. Sweeney (Jericho), Nick Tarabay (The Sopranos) and Michael Fairman are joining the ensemble.  Sweeney will play Peter Emory, a successful pre-bust real estate developer, Tarabay a police lieutenant having an affair with a fellow officer, and Fairman an overbearing father.

Finally, actress Leven Rambin is in talks to join the cumbersomely titled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles as a potential love interest for the whiny John Connor (Thomas Dekker).  Rambin is well-known for playing Ava Benton on All My Children, though she recently starred in the CW pilot Austin Golden Hour, which the network decided not to pick up as a series.

There's bound to be a lot more casting news as we move closer to the fall TV season, so keep checking BuddyTV for all the latest announcements.


- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
(Image courtesy of the Sci Fi Channel)