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TCA Dispatch: Evan Rachel Wood and Kate Winslet on their relationship in “Mildred Pierce,” Carrie Brownstein talks “Portlandia”

Lesley Goldberg is at TCA today, covering the latest in TV scoop. Keep it here for updates throughout the afternoon, including details on Portlandia, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena and Mildred Pierce, among others. Keep up with Lesley on Twitter, too!

3:30 p.m. HBO’s Mildred Pierce

Kate Winslet is coming to TV – and the Oscar-winning actress couldn’t be more thrilled for her first small-screen gig in HBO’s five-hour miniseries Mildred Pierce, in which she plays an overbearing mother to Evan Rachel Wood in 1930s California.

“It never occurred to me — beyond receiving five scripts – that wow, this is television,” the actress said via satellite from Paris. “Sure we have more to shoot and have to work faster, but the determination and level of focus we all had to have was so much more intense than any film I’ve ever been a part of. Film, schmilm. Television is so much harder. It didn’t affect the work ethic in any obvious ways other than we had more story to tell, which is a luxury, and less time to work toward that goal. We were hyper focused every single day.”

Winslet noted that she was fascinated by the intense relationship between Mildred and her daughter, Veda (Wood) when she read the scripts.

“The intense relationship between Mildred and Veda is based on pure love and her adoration for this child does teeter on the brink of obsession,” said Winslet, who intentionally only watched the first five minutes of the 1945 film starring Joan Crawford. “Every mother-daughter relationship is complicated for its own set of reasons but this one was something else. Mildred was in this position where she didn’t know whether to love her or kill her. And the amount that she did love her was suffocating.

“Mildred’s need for approval is something every mother does feel for their child, whether it’s a daughter or a son. With Veda being this determined, defiant creature that was so out of Mildred’s grasp and the adoration she has for her and the desire that Mildred has this [feeling] that she maybe could have been this person,” Winslet added. “In Veda, Mildred saw her own disappointments – little pieces of her kept dying every time she saw how brilliant, wonderful and rich Veda was and how much more extraordinary her life could have become. Al she could do was love it, encourage it and support it and want to be a part of it so, so desperately. It’s just crushing. On many levels, they’re extremely normal paternal responses to any child, but they do get very twisted and disturbing as the story goes along. It was utterly compelling to me because I can see how that can happen to any parent.”

Wood, who trained for two months to portray Veda – learning classical opera in three different languages as well as mastering the 1930s dialect of the Great Depression – said the character “almost killed me.”

“She’s warped at such an early age,” Wood noted from the panel. “It would have been easy to play her as a bratty daughter but she’s so complex. She’s too smart for her own good and she sees things about her mother – flaws and weaknesses – and she knows how to prey on them. If [Mildred] loves her too much … that’s when [Veda] turns and decides she’s going to have her own way. She’s in love with what she actually is.”

Writer-director-exec producer Todd Haynes noted that in his adaptation of the 1941 novel by James M. Cain, Wood’s Veda is turned into a tawdry singer and that the frankness with which he deals with Mildred’s sexuality was much more nuanced. “This felt modern and contemporary,” he said.

Co-star Guy Pearce, who plays Mildred’s love interest Monty, says his character’s influence over Veda was pivotal to the friction between mother and daughter.

“The strange twist in [Monty’s relationship with Mildred] is that she has this daughter who is far more like somebody from Monty’s world,” he said. “So it’s easy for Monty to relate to Veda from very early on, even when she’s very young – she’s 11 when Monty comes into Mildred’s life. We see the charmed life of quality that Monty brought to the surface very quickly because he’s a bit of a kid himself that this kid wishes that she was from. On some level, it’s like she’s from another world and she was born into the wrong family. It’s a very strange, twisted little trio that’s going on.”

Mildred Pierce premieres its first two hours on Sunday, March 27 on HBO.

11:30 a.m. “The Amanda Knox Story” (Lifetime)

Starring Hayden Panettiere in the title role and Marcia Gay Harden as her mother, the telefilm examines, from multiple perspectives, the true story of how a Seattle honor student allegedly killed her college roommate in 2007. News reports painted Knox as a remorseless, oversexed killer during her two-year trial that led to her conviction and sentencing to 26 years in jail.

Panettiere noted that after researching Knox’s story and reading the case notes, she hasn’t formed an opinion on whether Knox actually committed the crime for which she was convicted.

“It’s one of those really riveting stories where you just don’t know,” the former Heroes cheerleader said. “We spent five weeks every day talking about it and reading about it and looking at new evidence trying to form some sort of opinion about it. I can’t say that I have an opinion, and that’s why the story is so interesting.

“I don’t know that we’ll ever really know. I spoke a lot to director Robert Dornhelm with what approach to take. Everyone has their role to play within it and how they come together,” she added.

Panettiere said instead of forming an opinion on Knox, she played Knox as who she appeared to be on the surface.

“My job was to play a girl, regardless of what happened, who was innocent in who she was; she’s not a malicious girl,” she noted. She didn’t have intent to do this; she’s not an angry or dark girl. It was my job to stay true to form with who she is as a person with who she is in court and otherwise.”

Added Harden: “You try to be true to the emotional life of the character. It doesn’t all hinge on this one simple fact, which no one knows. I found an opportunity playing her mom to find reasons as her mother to question that she wasn’t guilty, to believe fiercely in her while I was shooting the film. In the report, I thought there was conjecture … I became my own detective.”

As for the differences between filming a heavy Lifetime telefilm and NBC’s Heroes, Panettiere said it was “exciting to spread my wings and play a different character.”

“You don’t get many opportunities like this,” she noted, adding later that she found out she got the role while filming Scream 4.

Panettiere later told AfterEllen.com that she’s asked regularly if there will be a Heroes movie and that if there is a shot at one, she hasn’t heard about it. “If there is one, I haven’t heard about it yet. But maybe one day. Never say never,” and that she’d be in to reprising her role as Claire.

When asked if she thought her character identified as a lesbian at the end of the series, Panettiere told AfterEllen.com, “You have to chose, do you?”

Amanda Knox premieres Monday, Feb. 21 at 9 p.m.

10:30 a.m. A&E’s Breakout Kings

Prison Break writers Matt Olmstead and Nick Santora take things a step further with A&E’s Breakout Kings, an action-packed drama about an unconventional partnership between the U.S. Marshals Office and a group of convicts as they pursue fugitives on the run.

The basic cable home allows the series to push the envelope and go darker than their short-lived Fox series as each episode will feature a “big bad” type that pairs a marshal with a con.

“You have to have a really bad bad guy or there’s no stakes at the beginning of the episode,” exec producer Santora noted. “But each week you can’t have the Son of Sam breaking out of prison or it gets repetitive.”

The ensemble cast features Serinda Swan (Supernatural, Psych and Reaper) as Erica Reed as an expert at finding people with a dark side. Swan noted that the characters aren’t one-dimensional and that more of their “amazing back stories” will be revealed as the series progresses. “We’re real people in difficult situations and sometimes it’s those difficult situations that put us in jail,” she said, adding that she once spent eight hours in jail for unpaid parking tickets that were sent to her parents’ home without her knowledge. “You really get to see the duality between the real person and their crime.”

Co-star Brooke Nevin noted that the cons and marshals will share in playing the bad guy. “There are two groups on each side of the law but it’s not clearly define which hare the good people and which are the bad people,” she said. “Sometimes a lot of drama comes out of it, sometimes a lot of comedy because you have a lot of different people who have to work together.”

Add this to your roster of shows featuring women who kick ass.

“Breakout Kings” premieres Sunday, March 13 at 10 p.m. on A&E.

9 a.m. IFC’s Portlandia

The sketch comedy starring bisexual musician/actress Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney and Saturday Night Live‘s Fred Armisen stems from the duo’s online series ThunderAnt. And while music isn’t a big part of the six-episode series, it’s how Portlandia was born.

“Fred was a drummer in Chicago for many years and when Carrie was taking about ThunderAnt in our first meeting, everyone thought [the show] was going to be about music and instead it morphed into this comedy thing,” co-creator/co-writer/director Jonathan Krisel said during the panel. “A lot of the pieces are this musical back and forth and a repetition of sounds and stuff.”

Brownstein, who laughed when a critic in the room asked how rival city Seattle compared to Portland, noted that the series’ musical roots can be seen it its “raw power” and that the city is really proud of show.

“We shot in Portland and I’ve lived in Portland for 10 years; I still live there,” Brownstein noted. “We used 98 percent local crew, 60 different Portland locations. We felt like we were running a marathon and being cheered on by the people of Portland.”

Armisen, who “appeared” via an audio-only satellite, said his Saturday Night Live colleagues were supportive of the show and were understanding of his bringing new characters – including one sketch in which he and Brownstein play owners of a womyn’s feminist bookstore – to Portlandia instead of bringing them to the SNL table.

“They recognize that the characters could work in either place,” he said. “It’s a timing thing that was very specific to this show. Half that sketch is Carrie and it needs her to work as a duo.”

Brownstein, meanwhile, noted that she’s quite content to remain in Portland and not interested in heading to Portlandia exec producer Lorne Michaels‘ other show.

“I like performing when it’s live music; when you make a mistake you can turn up your am really loud,” she joked. “We think of Portlandia as different than sketch; it’s a series of short films. We could put out eight little indie movies for the amount of filming we did.”

Asked about the series’ short six-episode run, Krisel noted that it was a timing thing. “It was partially based on Fred’s schedule,” he said. “Six is the number for a British series. We’re not trying to do 1,000 seasons. This is a very curated, small, little perfect universe. The whole thing is like an art project. Carrie has music, Fred has SNL. This is a special art piece. I see it as a first series.”

To which Brownstein quickly – and optimistically – added: “We, of course, hope to do a second season. And beyond.”

Let’s hope so.

Portlandia premieres Jan. 21 at 10:30 p.m. on IFC.

8 a.m. WE TV

WE TV’s newest reality series, Joan Knows Best? kicks off Friday’s Television Critics Assn. winter press tour, with gay icon Joan Rivers and her daughter, Melissa, both in the house discussing their newest reality series, set to premiere Tuesday, Jan. 25 at 9 p.m.

The series which follows the mother-daughter when Joan moves to California and in with her daughter tracks the family through counseling sessions and features endless amounts of drama -a preview featured Joan replacing all of Melissa’s furniture without telling her. “She’s not the gay son I longed for,” Joan quipped during the panel.

Both Joan and Melissa acknowledged Thursday’s marathon OWN panel – which featured Oprah Winfrey holding court and a nearly 20-minute response to one single question.

“I wish we’d have started half-hour earlier so I could have seen Oprah,” Joan joked of the much maligned session with Winfrey.

Melissa noted that the duo had been repeatedly approached and was born when Joan came to stay with her two years ago while she was in Los Angeles for a play at the Geffen.

“I always had bandages and this is the first time you could get me without them,” Joan joked.

The duo noted that the reality series won’t impact their weekly Fashion Police show on E! as Joan is now splitting time between New York and L.A., which Melissa noted will run as long as the network will have them. A highlight included the mother-daughter discussing their disdain for covering the red carpet as both took pleasure in dissing the nature of dealing with celebrities and their handlers.

“I like doing a coward’s show,” Joan noted.

As for what else she’s working on, Joan mentioned that she wants to rewrite Sally Marr – and her Escorts about Lenny Bruce‘s mother. She’s hoping to perform it at the Geffen next season.

As for her documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Me, not being shortlisted for the Oscar, Joan noted: “I think it’s abominable.”

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