Secretary: articles


Davies back to acting

KIMBERLEY Davies is planning to spend more time in Melbourne having nabbed one of the key roles in Channel 10's proposed new drama series Secretary.

The pilot will be shot in part at the Docklands studios and filming is expected to start this month.

Davies has one of the major roles, with Vince Colosimo and Pia Miranda understood to be playing other significant characters.

Secretary is set around the lives, loves and dramas of five secretaries and five lawyers working at a hot-shot city legal firm.

Davies is understood to be relishing the chance to throw herself into a quality acting role. Her most recent TV forays have been in the reality market.

She took part in Celebrity Circus for Channel 9 and I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here for UK TV.

It was during the filming of I'm A Celebrity that news emerged of the turmoil in Davies' marriage.

It was revealed that she and husband Jason Harvey were trying to save their relationship after Harvey had a prolonged affair with a US radiologist at the American hospital where he worked until the couple returned to Australia last year.

Davies and Harvey have two children, Isabella and Joshua.

If Secretary is given the green light by Ten, it is expected to be commissioned for a 22-episode series.

Insiders who have seen the storyline for the pilot episode say the project has great potential.

By Fiona Byrne
June 04, 2006



Snubbed pilot pops up online

THE pilot of Secretary, the Southern Star drama scuttled by the Ten network, has been illegally uploaded for viewing to a US website.

The drama series, produced by The Secret Life Of Us co-creator Amanda Higgs, is available for viewing on dailymotion.com, at least until Ten removes it.

The drama, starring Pia Miranda, Vince Colosimo, Kimberley Davies, Peter O'Brien and Susie Porter, was not commissioned for a series by Ten in September. Network programmer David Mott said at the time the show had not "come up to a standard we were comfortable with", a notion production company Southern Star quietly disputed.

Insiders suggest Ten's thoughts on the series about five young women in a Melbourne law firm, or at least the quality of the casting, were brutally frank. Media believes copies of the pilot were distributed to some cast and crew members who had no chance of otherwise seeing the series. It is presumed a cast member, and not a Ten employee, has uploaded the episode to the site.

By yesterday the pilot had been viewed 400 times since it appeared on the site on Monday. Its appearance is a minor embarrassment for Ten, given the overall quality of the production and cast, although some will argue about the pilot's pacing, production design and the odd performance.

Its cast and crew can only hope it follows the example of US sitcom Nobody's Watching, whose pilot was leaked on to YouTube in June and created an audience and media stir.

Although the WB network passed on a series, NBC later committed to produce webisodes of the show created by Scrubs' Bill Lawrence. Its fate as a television series is still to be decided.

A number of networks, including the US Comedy Channel, are cracking down on postings on sites such as YouTube, although CBS is using the service as a promotional tool.

CBS also recently seized the initiative with one pilot it didn't put to air. The Papdits, produced by Crash's Cathy Schulman, is now available for viewing on CBS's Innertube broadband download service (clips also feature on YouTube for Australian audiences).

Written by Borat's Ant Hines, The Papdits is a docu-comedy that follows a Kashmiri family as it interacts with real US citizens during a road trip.

CBS has aired it online and hasn't ruled out the idea of producing further episodes for the internet.

By Michael Bodey
December 07, 2006
The Australian