Dynamic Duo Will Make TV Appearance Next Year

Mon., June 16, 1997

From Wire Reports

Hold onto your capes and cowls, kids: “Batman and Robin,” a lock to be boffo at the box office later this month, is coming to the tube next year on CBS - after a quick stop on cable.

Hard on the heels of Fox’s shelling out $80 million for Steven Spielberg’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” CBS this week coughed up $60 million for the Dynamic Duo’s latest adventure, along with Jodie Foster’s “Contact” and Mel Gibson’s “Conspiracy Theory” and 12 other Warner Bros. titles. Not surprisingly, the deal gives Time Warner’s TBS or TNT basic-cable outlets first crack at the three big-ticket films.

Six months after the cable run, CBS will have a 15-month window to air the three films.

CBS gets first telecast rights to the other titles in the package, including “Murder at 1600” and “Addicted to Love,” for single telecasts in a 12-month window. Then those movies revert to basic cable.

Experts say the deal makes sense for CBS because, unlike ABC and Fox, it lacks a studio connection.

Trekkie update

She’s young, she’s sexy and she’s … part machine! She’s … a Borg! She’s also the newest crew member on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Actress Jeri Ryan, a regular on NBC’s canceled “Dark Skies,” will play the young Borg “Seven of Nine,” who joins the crew in this fall’s fourth-season premiere.

Series creator/executive producer Rick Berman says “Seven of Nine” is “something of a ‘wild child’ - she was a human assimilated by Borg as a young girl.”

Once Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) severs Seven of Nine’s connection to the Borg’s hive-like collective intelligence, she’s a permanent exile in human society.

In “Dark Skies,” Ryan played Juliet, a mysterious government agent with foreign ties who helped in the secret war against E.T.’s.

Delivering the assists

Comedian-actor Barry Sobel will be Magic Johnson’s sidekick on the former basketball great’s new late-night talk variety program, set to arrive in early 1998. Sobel starred in and produced “The Barry Sobel Show” for Comedy Central and was a regular on the sitcom “227.” He also co-wrote much of the standup material in the Tom Hanks film “Punchline.”

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