Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
Bill Murray: Finally ready for primetime
Nearly forty years ago, Bill Murray replaced Chevy Chase as one of the Not Ready for Primetime Players on season two of Saturday Night Live. In the decades since, he's become the rare TV comedian to make the transition to serious film actor; he earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 2003's Lost in Translation and is generating awards buzz again this year for St Vincent. And he should've been nominated for Rushmore and Hyde Park on Hudson, too.
Aside from late-night talk-show appearances (he was David Letterman's first guest on CBS' Late Show and is widely expected to be his final guest when Dave signs off later this season) and the occasional celebrity golf tournament, Murray has mostly avoided television. True, he guest-starred as a substitute teacher in one episode of Sarah Jessica Parker's proto-Freaks and Geeks sitcom Square Pegs in 1983, but that was probably just a favor to the show's creator, original SNL scribe Anne Beatts.
But like so many big-screen talents, Murray has loosened up his attitude towards TV, or at least the streaming/cable universe, in recent years. He stole the first and last season one episodes of Garry Trudeau's DC spoof Alpha House as corrupt congressman Vernon Smits, and he's back in the first scene of season two (which starts streaming on Amazon today), decked out in a do-rag for a prison interview with Jane Pauley, Trudeau's real-life wife.
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Murray dips his toes even deeper back into the TV waters with his meaty supporting role in HBO's Olive Kitteridge, a two-part, four-hour movie adaptation of Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel. Directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), Olive casts Murray as Jack Kennison, a rural Maine neighbor of Frances McDormand's titular crotchety school teacher.
Murray doesn't turn up until the third hour and gets most of his screen time in the final part, but he's worth the wait. At first, he seems like he's just playing a version of himself - a disheveled eccentric. But Jack reveals surprising sides of himself (he listens to, and agrees with, right-wing radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, for example), and his relationship with Olive takes a touching turn.
Rumor had it that Murray would be returning to guest-host SNL this season, perhaps as part of his St Vincent Academy Awards campaign. So far, that hasn't come to pass, although fellow SNL alums and Oscar hopefuls Bill Hader (The Skeleton Twins) and Chris Rock (Top Five) have re-upped for hosting duties.
One can only hope if Murray does rematerialize on SNL, Nick the Lounge Singer will reprise his Star Wars theme in honor of the upcoming sequels: "Star Wars/Nothing but Star Wars/Gimme those Star Wars/Don't let them end!"
