News Round-up: Hunt, Snow, GL, DS, Whittlesey, DVR

GUIDING LIGHT "means a lot" to Crystal Hunt (ex-Lizzie, now Stacy, OLTL)
"It meant a lot to all those people who followed it. The show means a lot to me personally because I was a high school teenager when I got the role and grew up on the show," she says. "I learned a lot from the actors. Some of them had been with the show for years."

GUIDING LIGHT was a "wonderful learning experiene" for Brittany Snow (ex-Daisy)
"I can't believe that it is going to be over, but I guess all good things come to an end," she says. "It was a wonderful learning experience for me because I got to play this bratty devil of a child that was so unlike what I was in real life. I learned so much from the adult actors on the show who had been there for years, like Kim Zimmer, who played my grandmother."

GUIDING LIGHT fades to black Friday
"At age 72, GUIDING LIGHT is the longest-running soap out there. Yet, its demise hasn’t gotten the kind of mainstream press that a nighttime show would get if it was being axed after all that time. But that’s the way it is with soaps — they don’t get much respect."

Des Moines fan Emily Bahnsen: How can GUIDING LIGHT end?
"Guilty pleasure though it may be, GUIDING LIGHT has been a constant for its fans. What will Bahnsen do with her newly freed hour? 'I'll probably watch Oprah.'"

Fine Living Network will air current season of THE BIGGEST LOSER on Fridays and Saturdays
Fine Living Network (FLN) announced plans on Teusday to debut the current season of The Biggest Loser beginning Friday, September 18 at 8:00 p.m. ET (with an encore performance on Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET). The cable home to one of television’s most popular franchises, FLN has been airing THE BIGGEST LOSER (hosted by DAYS star Alison Sweeney) since it formed a distribution pact with NBC Universal Domestic Television Distribution last year.

Hermes reprints "Dark Shadows" comics
Hermes Press will reprint the complete 35-issue run of Gold Key’s "Dark Shadows" comic. The comic was based on the television series of the same name - a Gothic soap opera considered to be the forerunner of modern supernatural-themed TV shows and movies. It was originally published between 1968 and 1976. "Dark Shadows" featured the brooding vampire Barnabas Collins among a cast of werewolves, ghosts, zombies and witches. The first of five hardback volumes will be released in March 2010.

Whittlesey man becomes first disabled actor to take regular role in EASTENDERS
Disabled actor David Proud from Whittlesey made TV history, as he joined the cast of EASTENDERS. David 26, who suffers from spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, is the first disabled actor to take a regular role on the popular BBC soap. He appeared on the hit show for the first time last week, as self-obsessed and snobbish Adam Best, an Oxford University student who comes to stay with his mother Manda, played by Josie Lawrence. The show's executive producer Diederick Santer said David would be "an interesting but possible irritating character."

DVRs dominate talk at confab
Jeff Zucker was telling an investor conference on Tuesday that Leno's new 10 p.m. show is in part an answer to TiVo and its imitators and that he does not intend to bury his head in the sand when it comes to threats posed by DVRs.

Ironically, Zucker's remarks came at almost the same moment that TiVo CEO Tom Rogers was suggesting -- at the same conference, no less -- that some TV execs still underestimate how dramatically the game has changed since DVRs were introduced a decade ago.

"Commercial avoidance -- the issue that the media industry wants to avoid," Rogers said.