“Perception: The Complete First Season” DVD Giveaway [ENDED]

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To celebrate the recent release of “Perception: The Complete First Season”, Media Mikes is happy to be giving away a DVD for the season. If you would like to enter for your chance to win one of these great prizes, please leave us a comment below or send us an email with your why Perception is your favorite procedural drama television series. This is giveaway will remain open until June 17th at Noon, Eastern Time. This is open to our readers in US and Canada only. One entry per person, per household. All other entries will be considered invalid. Media Mikes will randomly select winners. Winners will be alerted via email.

Synopsis: Enter the brilliant mind of Dr. Daniel Pierce and relive every thrilling case of Perception: The Complete First Season. Experience an original twist on the classic crime drama as Emmy Award® winner Eric McCormack (Best Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, 2001, Will & Grace), stars as an eccentric neuroscience professor whose revealing visions help him uncover what lies beneath conscious emotion.

Though recruited by the FBI for his masterful understanding of the human mind, Daniel’s odd and offbeat view makes it difficult for him to get close to anyone. His former student, Agent Kate Moretti (Rachael Leigh Cook), is one of the few people willing to accept Daniel’s peculiarities in exchange for his imaginative solutions. Two very different personalities join forces as they try to tackle the Bureau’s most complex cases.

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Filed Under: Giveaways Tagged With: complete, dvd, giveaway, perception, season

Eric McCormack talks about new series TNT’s “Perception”

Eric McCormack is known best for his role on “Will & Grace”. He is starring a new show on TNT called “Perception”, which premiers Monday, July 9 at 10 o’clock pm Eastern on TNT. Media Mikes had a chance to chat with Eric on his new show and what we can expect.

Mike Gencarelli: What drew you to the part? Was it immediately you read the script and went I got to do it or how did it all happen for you?
Eric McCormack: Yes, I was a bit of that on first page where I’m lecturing was a big one for me because I was a big Paper Chase fan from the 70s with John Housman. And the idea of playing not just a neuroscientist not just somebody brilliant, but the fact that he is a teacher, that he has that thing that audience in the palm of his hand and that he’s funny and passionate and finds an interesting way to approach what could be a very dry topic. He finds a very humorous approach and I just love this guy. Then to find out outside of the classroom he is often crippled by symptoms of schizophrenia, I thought that’s a wild combination of the arrogant what becomes with an intellectual and the absolutely let us say crippling conditions that the disease contributes.

MG: What kind of research did you do?
EMC: I did as much as I could. I think it’s crucial that we represent all aspects of this, the neuroscience and also the academia but most importantly the schizophrenia, not to mention the FBI reality which is somebody else job, but with incredible accuracy. We started with Dr. Michael Green at UCLA who is a neuroscience professor with schizophrenia as his expertise. And then I sat down with Elyn Saks, a fascinating woman who wrote a book called The Center Cannot Hold. She is a law professor at USC but she wrote a book about her own schizophrenia, which she completely blew her mind out in the 70s. She was like writing brilliant papers one day and in the hospital strapped down to a bed the next and has such tremendous memory of it that she was able to describe it and some of the passages in her book about what it feels like to break psychotically were absolutely crucial to what I do in the show.

What aspects of your personality or idiosyncrasies did you bring to the role of Daniel?
EMC: What I love about him like I say is that combination of so much confidence and so much crippling fear. And I think if there is anything that I can understand as an actor is, I think it’s that. It’s that idea that sometimes the only way we see is by walking into a room and believing that no one can do that better than us. And yet it’s really just a mask we put on disguising the fact that we’re terrified that we suck and we’reterrified that we’ll never work again. I think understanding that dichotomy is understanding what it must be like to have the drive that says I need to be in front of a classroom or I need to solve this puzzle even though I’m on a crime scene that is absolutely shutting me down. And to have that disguising someone that ultimately would rather be in a laboratory then out to dinner with people is to understand the world that he lives in mixed emotional.

MG: What challenges have you found on taking on the hat of producer as well on this series?
EMC: I am a producer on the show I’m certainly not the producer. I couldn’t produce the whole thing and be in every scene. The guys that created the show Ken Biller and Mike Sussman do a fine job at producing it creatively and there are some great guys producing it physically. My contribution as a producer mainly I wanted to make sure that we all conceived the look and feel of the character and we’re on the same page. I wanted to have a say in the casting and I was certainly in the room for the casting of Rachael, Kelly, and Arjay and I’m really excited how that worked out. Then to say hey, it’s important the tone of the show, whether it be dealing with how do we shoot a hallucination and accurately reflect what schizophrenia can look like or feel like. How do we have a scene where he’s angry but there’s also a comic element? How do we do that and accurately represent how a professional behaves? How would a schizophrenic behave? It’s important that I always have the ability to speak up and to take ownership of that. That’s the main way I produce.

MG: So you’ve work for a while in comedy with “Will & Grace”; what do you enjoy more, the drama or the comedy?
EMC: I love doing both. When I was on “Will & Grace” nothing made me happier than having a big dramatic scene with Debra in the mists of the crazy comedy. Nothing gives me a bigger better thrill than dramatic crime scene in this show where he gets to suddenly say something inappropriate that clearly is going to be funny. I love the mix. I think the magic is in the combination and I’m never happy with just one.

MG: What do find challenging from playing Pierce in this from an acting aspect?
EMC: Like I say it’s a combination of being accurate enough to plot out. Okay in the course of an episode – and we were often shooting two episodes at the same time just for cost reasons, so it was really a lot of work on my part to go, I have to make sure that there is accuracy here in how he behaves situation to situation. But you also want unpredictability, that the fun of the character is that he surprises the people around him and he surprises himself sometimes. And I like sometimes to discover he surprises me. That somehow my reactions might be something I hadn’t thought of. And yet still remain within the realm of being accurate and being sympathetic and being responsible to the mental illness community.

MG: What do you think it is about “Perception” that’s really going to connect with theviewers? And now that you’re on Twitter how is that going to help with the promotion of the show?
EMC: Well, I’m not a natural tweeter. It’s work to make myself tweet everyday. But having work that I’m excited about like the play that last few months when we first got started it was fun to tweet about that. As we’re getting closer now in the next few weeks I’m going to start tweeting a lot about it because I want people to see the show. I’m excited to share that. I never do work just for the sake of doing it. I do it because I want as many people as possible to enjoy it. I think this will be – this is particularly for summer, I think this will be a breath of fresh air. So much of summer programming is sort of fun and silly and reality shows and competition shows. I think this is people love a good mystery solving show, but I love the point of view of this. I think we’ve gotten to the point now where we can’t just see regular cops following regular things because a lot of those shows we now – it’s nice to see coming from the angle of someone with a very extreme point of view on life. And a guy that is a neuroscience professor with schizophrenia is coming at a crime scene from a very, very different perspective, sometimes humorous, sometimes extremely intellectual. Some of the cases that we’re going to tackle are things that wouldn’t necessarily come up on a lot of other shows because there wouldn’t be anybody. They’d have to go to an expert, someone like a Daniel Pierce, to solve it. So, our guy David Eagleman who wrote a book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, to have him as our resident expert allowed us to come up with some plot lines that are really fun, and for anyone that likes the twists and turns in an hour long mystery there’s going to be some really surprising episodes.

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Filed Under: Interviews, TV Interviews Tagged With: eric, mccormack, perception, series, talks, tnts, ...

LeVar Burton talks about TNT’s “Perception”, “Reading Rainbow” iPad app and 25th Anniversary of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

LeVar Burton is a well-known actor who has appeared in shows like “Reading Rainbow”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and the mini-series “Roots”. LeVar is currently guest starring in TNT’s new show “Perception”, which premiers Monday July 9th at 10:00 PM Eastern. LeVar took out some time to chat with Media Mikes about TNT’s “Perception”, his new “Reading Rainbow” iPad app and also the 25th Anniversary of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.

Mike Gencarelli: How did you get attached to TNT’s “Perception”?
LeVar Burton: Ken Biller and Mike Sussman are Star Trek alums and I read the pilot and forced my way in. I love Ken’s writing and I loved his pilot and I called Ken and said, “Is there any way I can be in this?” And he said, “Well, the one character that you’re right for it’s like in a scene in this pilot.” And I said, “Yes, but, you know, I see room there for this guy to grow.” And Ken worked it out. You know, he was thrilled at the prospects. We had a great relationship on Star Trek and I directed a lot of episodes that he wrote and as a fan I just wanted to be in this.

MG: This show is a crime procedural but it also has additional elements to it as well. Can you reflect?
LB: Well, I would say it has a real psychological element to it. I think that Ken’s point of view on the treatment — and I’m going to put this in quotes, “mental illness,” and brain chemistry and how our perceptions literally determine our reality. I think this is a fascinating conversation to have especially in the popular culture medium like television.

MG: How was it been working with Eric McCormack on the show?
LB: I’m a huge Eric McCormack fan, was before meeting him and working with him and even more so now. He totally kills this role, definitely, and I really appreciate the difficulty of what he is so deftly doing in every episode. And he’s just a joy to watch and a marvel to behold. I’m so happy to be working with Eric McCormack. And then on top of being as good as he is, he’s also a real professional. There are a lot of kids who want to be famous these days who come to Los Angeles and say that, you know, they want to be an actor or an actress but really what they want is to be famous. Eric is a real pro, right. He takes what he does seriously, yet he doesn’t take himself as a celebrity seriously, so he’s one of those people who knows, understands what it means to be the number one on the call-sheet. You know what I mean when I say that? Number one on the call-sheet. Eric knows, he knows what it represents. He knows how to do that. People like Scott Bakula, Mark Harmon, they’re guys who know how to be number one on the call-sheet, right. They care about the work and saying good night to everybody when they leave just that their humanity is a part of how they move in the world and it shows up in their inter-personal relationships with cast and crew and it just wonderful when you see that in action.

MG: Your career has been marked by such really important and really iconic roles and a whole slew of awards for “Reading Rainbow”. What do you still want to accomplish at this point in your career as an actor and director? What still keeps you working on every day?
LB: Aside from “Perception”, I’ve really taken a bit of a side-step and as much as the last two years of my life have dedicated and wholly devoted to the “Reading Rainbow” app. We launched it just last week and in 36 hours shot to number one in education. It’s still the number one grossing education app. This really feeds my passion. My mother was an English teacher. My older sister is a teacher. My son is in education. I have cousins, nieces, this is the family business, you know what I’m saying? I did “Reading Rainbow” the television show for 25 years and Rick Berman, the executive producer of “Star Trek”, having produced a children’s television series “The Big Blue Marble”, knew how important the show was to me and knew how important the show was to television. And so, he made it possible for me to do both “Trek” and ‘Reading Rainbow” at the same time. Ken knows it fully well how important “Reading Rainbow” is to me and this is what I feel like I’m really, really supposed to be doing. And the reason why we brought Reading Rainbow back is there is such a need right now. We have fallen so far behind our own expectations as a nation in terms of how we educate our kids and what the outcome of a public school education is these days. And we can’t rely on government to get it done anymore. It has to be a public-private partnership. Our government is brokaye, right? We’ve spent the last decade plus engaged in funding the machineries of war and our kids have been left behind. And, you know, from my point of view that’s just not OKAY.

MG: So with the app out, this is maybe a nice break for you being in a recurring role on television?
LB: It brings a balance to my life because I stepped away from acting after Next Generation and became a full-time director. And then my business partner, (Mark Wolfe) and I decided to re-launch the Reading Rainbow brand. And so that’s been a two-year journey. And now through Perception, I haven’t been on television in, I don’t know what, 10 or 12 years in a series. So I get to return to my first love here. And Ken, as the writer-producer, is committed to giving me notes to play that he knows the public hasn’t seen from me before. So I get to go to work and act and love every minute of that and love the people that I’m working with, Eric and Rachel and just really tremendously talented, quality human beings. My day job right now is continuing that mission of inspiring children who are making decisions as to whether they’re going to be readers or not, to choose the light.

MG: Do you think there’ll be any controversy when a show airs considering it’s like a fully-functioning schizophrenic with a job but doesn’t take any medication?
LB: Well, it’ll be interesting to see if there is, isn’t there? I think the whole idea of mental illness and the stigma that we have associated with it in this country is up for discussion. We are ripe to reevaluate that stigma. And to be able to, as I say, have that conversation begin with a television show, I know the value of that. I watched this nation become transformed in eight nights of television around an issue that goes to the heart of almost everything that happens in this country, in this culture. And that’s the subject of slavery and its legacy on subsequent generations. So I know and appreciate fully what the value of the medium to be an alive part of the evolution of culture. And I just think that we really need to have this conversation in America about how we feel about out-of-balance brain chemistry, just like we needed to have the conversation about racism in America, its roots and its legacy.

MG: You always seem to star in series that thrive on intelligence. How important is intellect and programming to you as an actor?
LB: Oh, my gosh. It’s everything. Unless the story-telling is smart, it’s hard to have impact. I’m really drawn to intelligence and to intelligent story telling. And, you know it when you see it. Even if you can’t define it, you know it when it smacks you in the face, right? And I’ve been really lucky. I’ve been very, very blessed throughout the course of my career. I just am grateful. I’m enormously grateful.

MG: You’ve been on a lot of shows with a lot of big fan bases like “TNG” and Reading Rainbow, obviously. You’re quite interactive with your fans via Twitter, so what are you enjoying most about interacting with them?
LB: Twitter I love because it’s an opportunity for me to have a conversation with people who are from different parts of my life and my career, “Roots” fans and “Star Trek” fans and “Reading Rainbow” fans. I can converse with them absent gatekeepers. I get to say what I want, when I want in a manner that I want 140 characters at a time. And there’s no studio or network or publicist between me and my voice. That’s what I love about it.

MG: Are you going to be going to San Diego Comic-Con and also sort of what’s your take like the fan experience at a Comic-Con versus sort of the insider experience at the Comic-Con?
LB: Definitely, I mean, I will at Comic-Con this year. This is the 25th anniversary of “Star Trek: Next Generation” coming on here, so we are actually doing, not in San Diego but we are doing a sort of a reunion tour where all of the cast is getting back together. We did the first one in Calgary back in April. We have dates coming up in Orlando and Austin and Toronto, I think. So from the inside when two or three and in these cases all of us are together, it’s just a glorious experience because we all remain incredibly close even though we don’t see each other every day like we used to when we were shooting the show. Patrick lives in England, Jonathan is always off working, we’re all doing other stuff with our lives. However, when we’re together there’s just nothing better.

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Filed Under: Interviews, TV Interviews Tagged With: 25th, anniversary, app, burton, generation, ipad, ...
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