She had her bright spots, her brief infidelities and her nagging wife moments, but through it all Rita never gave up the guy she loved. That’s why Dexter will be a lot darker for her passing.

In his relationship with Rita, Dexter learned to love, to become a parent, and to form the human bonds that he claimed only to mimic when the series began. Her death gives new license for him to unleash his Dark Passenger. Watch out!

Today, we pause and remember Rita Morgan in her last season on the show. Thanks, Julie Benz, for making Rita a character who displayed a fragility beneath her beauty and balanced the show’s violence with a calming, enduring faith in humanity. You will be missed.

Images: Randy Tepper/Showtime

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Edie Falco won two SAG awards for the Sopranos in 2008. Will she score again with Nurse Jackie in 2010?

Image: Zuma Press

Showtime stars Michael C. Hall, Edie Falco and Toni Collette continued to rack up awards nominations this week, with each scoring one today from the Screen Actors Guild.

SAG gave Hall a nod for best actor in a TV drama for his performance as Dexter Morgan on Dexter. Falco and Collette are both up for best actress in a TV comedy for their work: Falco as Jackie Peyton on Nurse Jackie and Collette as Tara Gregson on United States of Tara.

The cast of Dexter also earned recognition from the guild, with a nom for best ensemble in a TV drama and a nod for best stunt work.

Check out the full list of SAG nominees here. The awards ceremony airs live on TBS and TNT on Jan. 23, 2010.

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Love her or hate her (and we know some of you out there hated her by Season 4), the late Rita Morgan will no longer grace the set of Dexter. After Sunday’s whopper of a finale, which pulverized ratings records for Showtime, Julie Benz is sharing her reaction to the killing off of the character she made her own for four years. Here’s some of the best from her recent interview with E!’s Kristin Dos Santos.

Will Rita come back as a ghost, the way Harry does?
“There has been no talk of me coming back to the series in any way. A lot of people have been begging me to tell them that I’m going to come back, and I’m like, ‘Rita’s dead!’ Rita is dead and Trinity killed her. There’s all these theories that Dexter did it, or Deb snuck in and did it, but I don’t think it could get any more obvious that Trinity killed Rita. Rita is dead. And there has been no talk of Rita being a ghost. No one’s approached me about coming back.”

Why Rita? And why did her death have to be so horrifying?
It is tough, and my first reaction was, ‘You’re killing the mother of the show! You’re killing the woman who’s suffered more violence than anybody!’ She suffered more violence than Dexter ever suffered. Dexter witnessed the death of his mother, but he didn’t suffer any physical violence. Rita was beaten and raped by an ex-husband on a regular basis, and yet she still has this innocence and sweetness about her.

… When they first told me I was dying, they didn’t tell me how I was dying, and I thought I was going to be the jumper off the building, which for some reason isn’t as graphic. I did feel anger about them taking this innocent, sweet woman in such a violent and terrifying way—which we know from the woman in the bathtub in the first episode.

How did the cast react?
There were a lot of tears the whole last week. When I found out, I called Jennifer (Carpenter, who plays Debra Morgan) right as I was leaving the offices, and she thought I was playing a joke. She couldn’t believe it. She was shocked. And then the producers told the rest of the cast because after telling Jennifer I just said I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I get really emotional thinking about it. It was my family and my favorite place to go every day.

How do you feel about Rita’s death now?
When you make a bold move to kill off a main character, and a bold move to kill off the mother of a newborn, it’s a fifty-fifty shot, and kudos to them for taking that risk. So many other shows, so many other networks would have shied away from it. I really hope that it pays off, because I would really hate to see Rita’s death be in vain and to lose viewers. I hope it catapults the show to a whole other level. I hope it opens the story up to so much more drama. I hope it opens Dexter up to finally releasing the Dark Passenger within him—let’s see the monster that he really is.

Final thoughts? And what will happen to Harrison?
I assume Astor and Cody will go with their grandparents, but what about Harrison? I know that one option is to have them jump ahead in time. They have the option of taking the story creatively wherever they want. But of course I worry about Harrison. The first thing I said when they told me about Rita’s death was, ‘What about the children?!’ I felt like a real mother, and I will be tuning in to make sure that Harrison is taken care of.

Stay tuned, Dexter fans. We’ll have a photo gallery of Rita from Season 4 and an update on Benz’ plans for the future.

Photo: Randy Tepper/Showtime

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You know they’re great. We know they’re great. Now, the Hollywood Foreign Press agrees they’re great. Some of our favorite Showtime starts got the nod for acting excellence with nominations for the 2010 Golden Globe awards.

Bravo to United States of Tara’s Toni Collette, Dexter’s Michael C. Hall, Nurse Jackie’s Edie Falco, Californication’s David Duchovny and Dexter’s John Lithgow for their noms!

Our two cents: Collette, who already scored an Emmy for her performance as Tara Gregson,  Falco, who somehow breathed new life to the stale medical drama genre, and Lithgow, who gave us chills as big baddie Arthur Mitchell, deserve to win this year, especially after a Showtime shutout last time.

What do you think? Post in the comments.

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For all their hush hush behavior leading up to tonight’s Season 4 finale of Dexter, the folks at Showtime sure don’t mind sharing one spoiler.

Look’s like Deb’s detective work finally pays off with the truth about Dex’s origins. Check out the shocking scene here and tune in tonight for lots more drama. As producer Clyde Phillips says, it’s gonna “blow the top of your head off.” We can’t wait!

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Why yes, sharp-eyed Showtime fans – that is Weeds‘ own Hunter Parrish who you spied in a few frames of the TV trailer for It’s Complicated, the Meryl Streep/Alec Baldwin rom-com due in theaters later this month.

Parrish takes a break from his scruffy surfer dude persona on the Showtime series to play Luke, one of the couple’s grown children who is left to grapple with the messiness that results after Streep and Baldwin’s characters relapse on their divorce.

The film, directed by Nancy Meyers, has raised critical buzz already, but Parrish said for him the joy of It’s Complicated was in working with such an awesome ensemble.

Streep was “incredibly maternal” and open to letting the young actor watch her technique, Parrish said, while Baldwin took some risks in the film that paid off. “It’s a great chance to see him in a place that’s a little bit more vulnerable,” Parrish said. “… He gets to become the one looking for something … and he totally does it with charm and with class.”

For more, check out this video interview with Parrish. It’s Complicated arrives in theaters on Dec. 25.

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Peter Facinelli turned 36 recently, a milestone that wife Jennie Garth celebrated with a surprise party for the Nurse Jackie and Twilight star.

“I wasn’t even thinking about my birthday, so it was a nice surprise,” Facinelli told OK! magazine this week at the Tribeca Film Institute’s screening of Everybody’s Fine.

Facinelli’s birthday wasn’t the only one in the household, with daughter Lola turning 7 on Sunday.

Facinelli is a great dad to Lola and sisters Luca, 12, and Fiona, 3, Garth told the magazine.

“He’s very hands-on,” she said. “He doesn’t watch football or sports, he doesn’t drink beer. He’s not a guy’s guy in that respect. Not that he’s not a guy’s guy … that sounds bad. But I’m lucky, I’m so lucky that he doesn’t drink or sm … well, heh … he’s just a rare find, so I’m really, really lucky.”

Facinelli, shown here with Garth at the Twilight: New Moon premiere in LA last month, added that “patience” is the most important thing he’s learned from his wife.

Still, Garth said even the best dads need alone time. “Sometimes I’ll hear the Harley thing rev up, and I’ll know he’s had enough estrogen for one day and he’s gotta get out of the house.”

She wouldn’t mind evening the scales a little. “I want a boy every day,” Garth said. “Yes I do. I love them. We’re so fortunate, and I don’t ever want to push that envelope. You think, ‘I have three healthy, great kids, and I’m so lucky’ that I would be scared to have more. But I would be willing to take the risk.”

Image: Fame Pictures

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In Season 3 of The Tudors, we saw  star Jonathan Rhys Meyers seem to become a more portly King Henry VIII by donning heavier robes, furs and ruffs.

Still, Jonny Boy couldn’t entirely hide that svelte, animal attitude we remember from Seasons 1 and 2.

For the series’ final season, Rhys Meyers consented to “some aging,” Liz Smith notes in her Variety column, but we’re guessing he’ll still bring plenty of sexy to Season 4, which debuts April 11.

Till then, you can re-live all the action from previous episodes on Sunday nights. Showtime will start airing all three seasons, two back-to-back episodes at a time, starting on Jan. 3. The episodes air at 8 and 9 p.m. Eastern.

Photo: Jonathan Hession/Showtime

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It was past my bedtime last night when Showtime aired this video chat with Dexter executive producer Clyde Phillips, so it was with much relief that I discovered Showtime has made the chat available to the rest of us. If you caught it live on Ustream, you are stronger men and women than I.

The hourlong chat contains some dynamite info, but not the spoilers some of you may have hoped for. Phillips and the rest of the show’s creators, crew and cast were sworn to secrecy on the Season 4 finale, which Phillips promised will “blow the top of your head off.” He went on to say that the episode, which airs Sunday, is the most exciting the writers have ever produced.

Here are a few of the highlights he did reveal, in answer to fan questions:

• Adversaries to Dexter such as Jimmy Smits’ Miguel Prado and John Lithgow’s Trinity Killer are called “Big Bads” because they’re so much more evil than your average villain.
• It’s tempting to compare Dexter and Trinity since they both kill in a ritualized fashion. But Dexter is driven by Harry’s moral code. Trinity has no code; he only has mythology.
• Jennifer Carpenter is less foul-mouthed than her character, Debra Morgan, but she enjoys delivering the colorful lines the writers give her. Phillips said she’s an actress at the top of her game and she should win an Emmy for this season.
• The writers don’t know yet where LaGuerta and Batista’s marriage will take them, but they’ll explore the relationship next season.
• Quinn, who’s becoming more and more suspicious of Dexter’s behavior, is there to recreate some of the tension that was lost after Doakes was killed.

There’s lots more in the full chat, my friends. Take a look for yourself, on your own schedule:

Dexter’s Season 4 finale is next Sunday, Dec. 13.

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Clearly, Alanis Morissette fit in on the set of Weeds. The Canadian singer reveals  in the new issue of High Times that she smokes up to help stoke her creative fires.

“I’ve often felt telepathic and receptive to inexplicable messages my whole life,” she said in an interview in the January issue.

“I can stave those off when I’m not high. When I’m high — well, they come in and there’s less of a veil, so to speak.”

Her comfort level with smoking pot has risen because of her boyfriend, an advocate of medical marijuana, and thanks to cannabis-loving friends of his including Woody Harrelson and Alicia Silverstone, Morissette said.

And with her role as Dr. Audra Kitson likely to recur in Season 6, we’re guessing the high times will continue at work.

Via New York Daily News

Image: Fame Pictures

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