TV Notes: Showtime devoted to ‘Tudors’

Showtime’s “The Tudors” and star Jonathan Rhys Meyers will return for a third season, with production set to begin in June in Ireland.

The show, with Rhys Myers portraying an especially fit and handsome King Henry VIII, is midway through its second year. The next season will air in 2009.

” ‘The Tudors’ is now a fixture for us at Showtime and we’re on our way to completing the entire saga of all six wives of Henry VIII,” says Robert Greenblatt, the premium channel’s president of entertainment.

The drama tracks the king’s romantic ups and downs with women including Queen Katherine (Maria Doyle Kennedy), Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer) and Jane Seymour (Anita Briem), as well as his clashes with the church.

Woodruff goes green

ABC News’ Bob Woodruff will anchor a weekly environment-oriented series for Planet Green, a network being launched by Discovery Communications.

Scheduled to premiere in July, Woodruff’s new series is billed as an eco-newscast.

It will offer “in-depth news for half an hour every week,” he says, “arguments and controversies, scientific analysis and breaking international news.”

It will be produced by ABC News, where Woodruff, 46, has been a correspondent since 1996.

After serving as a chief anchor at ABC for less than a month, Woodruff in January 2006 suffered a serious brain injury from a roadside blast in Iraq.

He returned to the job 13 months later, and recently won a Peabody Award for his series “Wounds of War – The Long Road Home of Our Nation’s Veterans.”