Frank Langella and Christopher Plummer have signed on to play Supreme Court justices in “Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight,” an original telepic HBO is developing.

Langella will play Chief Justice Warren Berger in the Stephen Frears-directed project, while Plummer will play Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II.

Shawn Slovo penned the script, which depicts the machinations of the Supreme Court as Ali pursued conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. Ali was convicted by a Houston court in 1967 and spent three years exiled from the ring as his case journeyed to the Supreme Court.

Frank Doelger, Tracey Scoffield, Jonathan Cameron and Frears are exec producing, with Scott Ferguson producing.

CBS has ordered a comedy pilot from Warner Bros. Television that counts “Mike & Molly” star Melissa McCarthy as one of its executive producers.

Ben Falcone, husband of the Oscar-nominated actress (“Bridesmaids”), is attached to star in the untitled half-hour as a 37-year-old man who loses everything he has in the real-estate collapse and finds himself back home in the house he grew up in with his parents. Falcone is also attached as an executive producer along with Larry Dorf (“Mad TV”).

Pilot was based on a spec script. McCarthy and Falcone have a second pilot in consideration at the Eye as well.

NBC is taking a hourlong pilot order based on “The Munsters” franchise out of the running for the fall 2012-13 schedule in order to give it extra attention, according to sources.

Now called “Mockingbird Lane,” the pilot was ordered last November from Universal Television and creator Bryan Fuller (“Pushing Daisies”). Shooting has been pushed to the summer, which means “Lane” will be considered for next midseason.

Sources say the network felt the series needed more time to get the elements just right for what NBC envisions being a key project for them.

A Peacock spokesman declined comment.

HBO released 12 season two photos of "Game of Thrones" Thursday.

If you've been restlessly waiting for something new from the show, here's something to help you stem the tide until the series returns with 10 new episodes beginning April 1.

Encore has postponed the premiere of four-part miniseries ''The Crimson Petal and the White' from March to September.

Starring Romola Garai (''The Hour''), Chris O'Dowd, Gillian Anderson, Shirley Henderson and Richard E. Grant, the adaptation of Michel Faber's novel is set in a Victorian-era London brothel.

Lucinda Coxon wrote the adaptation, directed by Marc Munden. David M. Thompson is producing. It aired last year in the U.K. on BBC Two.

Sugar Ray Leonard, Angie Everhart, Adam Levine and Mario Batali will be featured guests on the fourth season of Golf Channel's "The Haney Project," beginning Feb. 27 in a new 9 p.m. Mondays timeslot.

In contrast to previous years, which focused on a single guest over the course of a season such as Ray Romano, Charles Barkley and Rush Limbaugh, golf coach Hank Haney will work with the four different celebrities.

At the end of the season, the four will compete against each other for the chance to win $100,000 for the charity of their choice.

Who can forget the way the fate of Tony Soprano was left up in the air when "The Sopranos" finale abruptly faded to black. But what fans may not recall was the uncertain end to another "Sopranos" character, Silvio Dante, who was last seen in a coma in an intensive care unit after being shot. Whether he lived or died, we'll never know.

Maybe it's our hazy collective recollection of what happened to Steven Van Zandt's character that figured into Netflix's decision to cast him as the star of "Lilyhammer," which premiered Monday on the streaming service. Van Zandt's new role is so close to his old one, it's almost as if Dante woke from his coma, turned government informant and decamped for Lillehammer to escape from the Mafia he betrayed.

That's the basic storyline to "Lilyhammer," only now the Mafioso played by Van Zandt (seen above with former "Sopranos" cast mate Tony Sirico) is Frank "The Fixer" Stagliano, who heads for Scandinavia after ratting out the mob.

It doesn’t feel coincidental that Netflix chose Van Zandt to anchor its first original series. Company founder Reed Hastings has been very public about his desire to position Netflix as the next HBO, with original programming at the heart of its brand proposition rather than the catalog content that dominated its first decade.

What better way to recast consumer perception of Netflix than in the mold of both an actor and a role unearthed from HBO. It's a strangely paradoxical notion, beating the "Sopranos" channel to the future by seizing a piece of its past.

That said, it's not really a new strategy. Robert Greenblatt essentially did the same thing in his remarkable turnaround of Showtime, where as programming chief he launched several of the service's most successful series on the backs of HBO-bred talent including "Dexter's" Michael C. Hall ( "Six Feet Under") and "Nurse Jackie's" Edie Falco ("Sopranos").

Granted, Van Zandt is nowhere near their echelon; think of him as a low-budget version for a company that isn't spending more than 5% of its billion-plus programming budget on originals. It would even be a stretch to call Van Zant a character actor; he's more a caricature actor, sticking to such a stereotypical rendering of a Mafioso that he'll probably never get the chance to play anything else.

Sure, Van Zandt isn't depicting exactly the same character he played on "Sopranos"; HBO isn’t about to license a spinoff to an aspiring rival. But "Lilyhammer" is something of a crypto-spinoff in that the actor's character is so similar to his "Sopranos" incarnation that it might as well be the same part. Hell, Kelsey Grammer displayed more of a character evolution moving from "Cheers" to "Frasier" than Van Zandt does from "Sopranos" to "Lilyhammer."

Shamelessly derivative? Sure. But “Lilyhammer” is also a shrewd bridge strategy for getting viewers to shift their sense of Netflix as a pay-TV service that just happens not to be on TV in the strictest definition of the medium.

Which isn’t to say there’s anything inherently innovative about "Lilyhammer." The witness protection agency is among the hoariest plot devices in comedy, and the series doesn't do anything to put a particularly new spin on it. We watch Frank build a new life in his frozen city with the same bluster and verve he negotiated life as a gangster despite the fact Lillehamer feels like Mars to him--and vice versa.

But the newly rechristened Giovanni Henrisken has barely been in town more than 24 hours before he attempts to bribe a Norwegian official. The series thrusts its protagonist into his new environment so fast you would have assumed Netflix feared “Lilyhammer” would be canceled midway through the first episode.

In an interesting departure from TV standard operating procedure, Netflix puts all eight episodes of "Lilyhammer's" season on the service at once. It's not the kind of series you'll want to plow through in one sitting, though chances are you won't push it too far down in your Netflix queue, either.

"Lilyhammer" is no "Sopranos" in either the artistic or commercial sense but that doesn’t remotely mean Netflix failed here. The real takeaway is that the series isn’t bad. That might sound like the faintest of praises, but it's actually a compliment the TV industry should take heed of because there's a new programming alternative in town making the kind of sensible choices that could lead to future success.

Given Netflix's recent track record, competence wasn't necessarily a safe presumption. The calamitous pricing decisions the company made in late 2011 indicated it was capable of wild miscalculation on any front. And on paper, "Lilyhammer" could be interpreted as another missed swing: Financing a heavily subtitled series about a mobster in the witness relocation program produced in that hotbed of TV creativity we call Norway? Really??

If this sounds like a broad comedy, "Lilyhammer" actually plays with a little more subtlety than you might expect. The local yokels aren't the usual assortment of oddballs that populate these fish-out-of water tales; no one in Lillehammer seems stranger than Fra--sorry, Giovanni--and there's no laugh track to underscore the biggest yuks. My favorite moment was a small joke when a gruff old man puts down an injured sheep but not before telling Giovanni to avert his gaze. "You better turn away, you being a city boy," he says, oblivious to Giovanni's mob past.

It’s a joke that underscores a pretty big difference between Van Zandt’s new character and his old one, who was the polar opposite of a turncoat: Silvio Dante was the guy Tony Soprano often ordered to whack the snitches in their own midst, from Adriana La Cerva to James Altieri.

Now if Netflix can use him to kill old notions of its company brand, he’ll have truly made his bones.  

Inside of three weeks comes the Super Bowl of entertainment: the Oscars. Sometimes bashed, somewhat broken, the Oscars still command by far the most attention of any award show. Last year's Oscar broadcast drew 37.6 million, compared with 12.4 million for their smallscreen counterpart, the Emmys.

But if you mixed film and television in the same awards competition, you might find that TV is more deserving of accolades. Call me biased over here at Variety On the Air, but if I were putting together a personal film-TV top 20 from the past year in under 10 minutes, it might look something like this. (TV shows in italics.)

The Oscaremmys
1) "Breaking Bad"
2) "Friday Night Lights"
3) "Beginners"
4) "Parks and Recreation"
5) "Downton Abbey"
6) "The Artist"
7) "Moneyball"
8) "Justified"
9) "Louie"
10) "The Hour"
11) "50/50"
12) "Martha Marcy May Marlene"
 13) "Hugo"
14) "A Separation"
15) "Treme"
16) "Homeland"
17) "The Big Bang Theory"
 18) "The Descendants"
19) "Boardwalk Empire"
20) "Community"

Don't get too caught up in the line-by-line rankings. Like I said, this was a quick-and-dirty list, and I already want to start tinkering. In any case, we all have our idiosyncracies, so no one's picks would be the same as these.

The point is: TV more than holds its own, taking 12 spots in the top 20, seven in the top 10 and four in the top five. Overall, I'd think many connisseurs of both film and TV would have similar balance, whichever projects they picked. I have trouble seeing the case that film had a better 2011 than TV.

Am I comparing apples and orangutans? Perhaps. TV gets hours and hours to tell its stories, film gets two, three at most. But what we're talking about with these award shows, really, is appreciation. And so when you think about it, it's more than a little weird, or at least unfortunate, that TV is so much less appreciated than film by awards viewers.

Fox has posted an interactive, extended version of the theme song from Zooey Deschanel starrer "New Girl" that lets you choose the scenes of the video accompanying the tune. Check it out here.

Through its subject matter and NBC's all-in promotional effort for its premiere tonight, "Smash" (reviewed by Brian Lowry of Variety here) is going to inspire a lot of passionate love-it-or-hate-it reaction. So let me be the one to stake out the territory of mixed feelings.

That ambivalence isn't out of lack of interest in the show. This is a show that I very much want to like, set in a world that I'd be very happy to spend years being a part of. That being said, based on the first two episodes of the show, "Smash" is a program filled with winning moments one minute and clunkers the next.

The performances are strong across the board. As was clear based on the preview clips screened at last year's network upfronts, "Smash" gives Katharine McPhee her Jennifer Hudson moment. This is the last time anyone's going to call her "former 'American Idol' finalist" as opposed to "'Smash' star." (Hopefully, as far as NBC's concerned, "former 'Smash' star" doesn't come for a while.) But it's not just McPhee — in the large ensemble, there isn't anyone who isn't convincing in his or her role.

The storytelling, overall, succeeds in that each episode ends leaving you eager to see the next. But within in each episode, there are groaners. 

Category 1: Cliche. There are some characterizations and plot devices that you can see coming a mile away. They aren't fatal to the show, but they're disappointing. Some of them are too familiar, but at least ring true. Others are not only familiar but seem completely phony — that's when you risk fans tuning out. 

Category 2: The music. The way that song is integrated into the show is first-rate. The songs themselves ... I'm not so sure.

There are showpiece numbers in each of the first two episodes that I could see Mel Brooks parodying in the 1970s — in other words, they would have seemed dated 40 years ago. The show's premise of a Broadway show on Marilyn Monroe makes total sense, but right now, the musical itself looks like it would be pretty bleah. (This is a milder form of the "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" problem that NBC had in 2006, when the characters kept insisting how brilliant their latenight show was, yet could provide no evidence of that.)

It's particuarly important, even as it celebrates traditional Broadway, for "Smash" to feel original and inventive. It's in those moments that millions of viewers won't be able to turn away, and NBC's major investment in the welfare of this series will be justified. The first two episodes offer enough of this to keep viewers intrigued — at this point, "Smash" is a welcome complement or alternative (depending on your point of view) to "The Voice," "American Idol" and "Glee." And frankly, even if the show isn't worthy of blind love, its qualified creative success should be enough to launch the show for a multiyear run, even on a network that has had as much trouble launching scripted hours as NBC.

More samplings of "Downton Abbey" fever, from "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross" ...

Between Facebook filing for IPO and the hacker activities of Anonymous, it's a good time to be Charles Koppelman. The filmmaker has had a documentary crew stationed at Facebook headquarters on and off since May 2011 filming the company's security team as it protects the social network from cyber-attacks and other invasions for his upcoming docu "Zero Day."

"The people in the trenches there are very dynamic, there's some very interesting personal stories," said Koppelman.

Timely as the documentary could be--no distribution deal yet--it's kept Koppelman plenty busy. His crew has to race to the company's Palo Alto digs every time Facebook security team has to contend with a major threat, as it did last month when the notorious Koobface malware wreaked havoc on the social network. And if there's a hero in the doc, it may be Facebook chief security officer Joe Sullivan, who was previously the first federal prosecutor in a U.S. Attorneys' office working on high-tech crime cases.

Sorry, you won't see much of founder Mark Zuckerberg in the doc though; he literally ducked into a mini-kitchen when the camera came his way during filming one day.

A Facebook spokesman confirmed Koppelman's crew has been granted inside access to the company's operations. But a documentary on cyber-crime has also taken his cameras all over the globe, and the action they've seen has even inspired them to adapt the material into a primetime TV series that they've already begun pitching.

"When these stories go outside of Facebook,  and you see what's basically old-fashioned detective work, you see the possibilities," said Koppelman. "That’s why it translates to a series as well."

Over a career that has spanned six decades, Al Michaels has been on the air thousands of times and has always come across to millions of viewers with the coolest of demeanors intact.

Yet, he recalls a moment being on national television where he was a bundle of frayed nerves — an absolute wreck that left him a completely frazzled state.

The irony, however, is that there was no microphone in sight.

Michaels was playing golf with buddy and CBS chieftan Leslie Moonves at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, telecast by the Eye. The camera’s red light was directly on Michaels, who was simultaneously thinking about his shot while hoping not be utterly embarrassed if he happened to whiff at it. Michaels was so nervous, he could barely grip the club, having to eventually step away from ball and asking the crowd, “Anyone have a Valium”?

Nobody did, but the remark calmed Michaels’ nerves enough that he hit a beautiful shot.

Michaels, a member of Bel Air Country Club, is a passionate golfer and can be often be found on the course when he’s not in the NBC booth with Cris Collinsworth. There’s little doubt either of them will have time for a round this weekend as they will be calling the action for Sunday’s super-hyped Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and New York Giants.

The Brooklyn-born sports legend is associated with the NFL as much as Tom Brady, Buddy Ryan or the Lambeau Leap. He’s someone who has not only made a nice living from the game, but clearly loves the sport and gladly calls himself a rabid fan.

On the coaching front, he’s a big supporter of Bill Belichick, calls Tom Coughlin one of the best fourth quarter game strategists around and isn’t quite sure why Norv Turner is still with the Chargers.

As for this Sunday, by all accounts the Patriots-Giants revenge matchup looks to have the makings for a close affair. However, history tells us that might not necessarily be the case. Let the game begin.

“Just don’t let it be 21-0 in the second quarter,” Michaels said at a recent lunch.

He recalled announcing Super Bowl XXII, where the Doug Williams-led Washington Redskins went on an offensive blitzkrieg in the second quarter to ultimately defeat the Denver Broncos, 42-10. A compelling game, in a matter of minutes, became a bloodbath where viewers began tuning out in droves.

“What just happened?” a dazed Michaels remembers saying when the Redskins couldn’t be stopped by a porous Broncos defense.

Once this Super Bowl game ends — and clearly Michaels is hoping it goes down to the last second — he’ll flly back home to his home in Southern California, head to Staples Center to see his beloved L.A. Kings (he’s a longtime season ticket holder), get back on the golf course, find some good restaurants to enjoy with his wife, Linda, and cherish his four grandchildren.

It’s a nice life. He’s earned it.

How hot is "Downton Abbey" right now for PBS? It has made the cover of mainstream magazine TV Guide.

How rare is a PBS program on the cover of TV Guide? Very.

According to former Variety reporter Michael Schneider, whom I believe left to become the magazine's Los Angeles bureau chief just so he could help me with this blog post, the "Downton Abbey" cover (headed to newstands and dated Feb. 6) is the first of a PBS primetime show since this "Cosmos" cover in 1980. 

Though programs such as "Sesame Street" and "Barney" have gotten cover attention, Schneider believes that "Downton" is only the third primetime PBS cover on the magazine ever.