Fox has canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the expensive TV series spun off from the now 24-year-old movie franchise, after two seasons and a mere 31 episodes. The series was "created" by Josh Friedman, a screenwriter and blogger who, strangely enough, is best known for his association with movies that he didn't work on. (Friedman was co-credited, with David Koepp, with the script for Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, based on a script he'd written based on the H. G. Wells novel before Spielberg and Koepp got involved, and he got the ball rolling on Snakes on a Plane as an Internet punch line.) The series, which got off to a fast start when it premiered mid-season in January 2008, starred Lena Headley of 300 in the role made famous by Linda Hamilton and Thomas Dekker as John Connor, the role created by Edward Furling in Terminator 2, picked up by Nick Stahl in Terminator 3, and about to become, as of this coming Friday, the now-exclusive property of Christian Bale. The cast also included the dancer-actress Summer Glau, whose picture now belongs in the dictionary next to the term "hot poker-faced killer robot babe." It is an unwieldy term, but clearly it or something with the same meaning belongs in the language.

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Garret Dillahunt plays weirdos and monstrous sons of bitches, with the occasional son of God thrown in. He's best known for his work on TV: on the HBO series Deadwood, he killed Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) and then, after he had been brought to justice for that terrible act, the show's creator, David Milch, ordered that he be shaved, have his wardrobe upgraded, and be brought back as a new character, one "Mr. W", who used his time off from his job fronting for a cutthroat capitalist villain to carve up the staff of a whorehouse. Dillahunt also played Jesus on the short-lived The Book of Daniel and currently plays a killer robot on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In movies, he was in No Country for Old Men (as Tommy Lee Jones's deputy) and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, where his character paid the price for Robert Ford's taking so goddamn long to get the assassination carried out. Now he's the chief sadistic rapist-murderer in the remake of Wes Craven's gutbucket classic The Last House on the Left. Under the citcumstances, it seems reasonable that interviewer Choire Sicha would want some reassurances that he isn't the kind of guy who takes his work home with him. "You know," Dillahunt says, "I don't think I am! There wouldn't be much craft in it if you actually become those people. I like feeling like I have some skill."

Then again...

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We’ve always had a “truth is stranger than fiction” motto here at the Morning Deal Report. The most ridiculous projects in development are generally going to get top billing here, because we never tire of shining a spotlight on just how stupid people in Hollywood can be. Of course, some of these projects need to be taken with a bigger grain of salt than others, and such is the case with the hotly rumored Blade Runner 2. Slashfilm ran an exclusive report yesterday based on an email from a reader who was in attendance at a Q &A by the screenwriters of Eagle Eye. That email read, in part, “During the Q&A, the writer said that he and whomever it was that helped him co-write the Eagle Eye screenplay were in the process of writing a sequel to Blade Runner, and had already contacted the producers of the original, etc., etc.” So some guy is spending his free time down in the basement figuring out whatever happened to Deckard? Hey, that’s good enough for us! I’ll let you all know when I’ve finished my script for Deliverance 2: Still Squealin’.

On the other hand, we apparently have to take the dubious notion of a Fame remake seriously.

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