TV Cover
Selleck has a soft spot for Stone
Despite the title of his latest “Jesse Stone” TV movie, Tom Selleck hardly is on “Thin Ice” with the series.
It’s been almost two years since the Emmy-winning actor’s last turn as novelist Robert
B. Parker’s small-town Massachusetts police chief, but the crime dramas have earned solid ratings for CBS—a big reason there’s now a fifth one, with a sixth coming—and they’ve also rented and sold well for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment as DVD re-leases.
Airing at 9 tonight, “Jesse Stone: Thin Ice” quickly re-establishes the title character and his personal demons, including a drinking problem and an ex-wife he can’t get over (even when she hangs up the phone on him). It also gives born rebel Stone fresh mysteries to solve: a brutal attack on him and a colleague, then a particularly heinous case revolving around missing children.
Kathy Baker, William Devane, Stephen McHattie and Kohl Sudduth return from earlier “Stone” tales. New cast members include Camryn Manheim (“The Practice,” “Ghost Whisperer”) and Leslie Hope, alias Jack Bauer’s wife during the maiden season of “24.”
Also one of its writers and executive producers, Selleck made “Jesse Stone: Thin Ice” around the same time he was starting his role on what became the final season of the NBC series “Las Vegas.” He says CBS’ reasons for delaying the movie’s airing were “all positive. May sweeps, when it was originally slated last year, kind of fell apart because of the writers’ strike. Then they said they’d start the next season with it, but there was the election and the World Series.”
The “Jesse Stone” movies are character studies as much as, if not more than, crime procedurals.
“The mystery often is Jesse himself until the specific plot’s mystery takes over,” explains Selleck. “We’re now in an area of not working from the books, and Robert Parker is completely on board with that. He’s selling a lot of books, and he’s nice enough to attribute some of that to us. We didn’t think some of the books fit the universe we’ve created in these movies, so ‘Thin Ice’ is an original story.
“ ‘Jesse Stone: Sea Change’ [the preceding film] was greatly changed, as opposed to slightly changed, from the book. That led us into this kind of parallel world, which is a bonus; if you read the books, you find out where that Jesse is going. He’s the same guy, except that he’s 34 in the books. I’m not.”
Selleck and producing partner Michael Brandman are putting finishing touches on the forthcoming “Jesse Stone: No Remorse,” which CBS hasn’t scheduled yet. The star says “Thin Ice” sets up that story— in the sense that Daniel Craig’s 2006 debut as James Bond in “Casino Royale” led into the recent “Quantum of Solace”— but Selleck hesitates to call “No Remorse” a literal sequel.
“It takes place about two weeks after this one ends, but each of these movies has to stand on its own for a new audience. You don’t have to have seen the others, but those who have get a little bonus. It’s mainly a continuation of character, not plot,” Selleck says.
“If I knew I was doing two ‘Jesse Stone’ movies a year, I’d be happy not doing anything else—at least in the near future. I think we have that many arrows left in our quiver.”
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