Sofia Vergara: We Ain't Sayin' She's a "Coal Digger"

On the surface, Sofia Vergara is the insanely beautiful and incredibly funny actress who plays Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on ABC’s hit sitcom “Modern Family.” But there are many layers to the Columbian bombshell.

We’ve all seen that Vergara is great at comedy – not only in her “MF” role as Ed O’Neill’s sexy and spirited wife, but in 2007’s the far-too-short-lived show “The Knights of Prosperity.” She also has musical talents, playing Mama Morton in “Chicago” on Broadway (the role that would earn Queen Latifah her Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2002). She was the Executive Producer of the Spanish version of “Desperate Housewives.” And, she went to school to study dentistry.

We’re glad she gave up the “spit, rinse, repeat” business to play everyone’s favorite “coal digger.”

The cast and creative team behind ABC's "Modern Family" gathered for a panel discussion and screening at the Television Academy on March 3. Emmy magazine's Editor-in-Chief Juan Morales asked Sofia about taking the role of Gloria in this video that was shot and edited by the Pop Culture Passionistas for the Archive of American Television.

Jeff Eastin Looks Ahead at "White Collar" Season 2

Tonight marks the season finale of our favorite crime drama “White Collar” and the series’ creator, Jeff Eastin has promised a “major cliffhanger.” Luckily, the show has already been picked up for a second season and Eastin and his team of brilliant writers have been working diligently to ensure that the show stays consistently good and doesn’t disappoint the dedicated fan base. We interviewed Eastin about the series and his future plans for Neil and Peter

Don’t miss the season finale of “White Collar” tonight at 10:00 pm on USA Network. And if you need a series hiatus fix, check in with Jeff Eastin on Twitter.

Q: How did you come up with the concept for “White Collar?”

JEFF: Well, the short version was I had an idea that was called Redemption, which was a much darker idea… I really love “The Shield.” It was one of my favorite shows. And knowing it was heading off the air, I’d come up with an idea for a Vick Mackey type character, who gets put in prison for allegedly killing his partner and he has to be released. The DA’s daughter gets kidnapped and the only person that can sort of solve the crime is this Vick Mackey guy. So they let him out of prison and put an ankle bracelet on him and track him while he sort of tracks down this kidnapper.

And a friend of mine called and said, “Hey, you might want to take a look at this show called ‘Life.’” And when I saw it I went, “Oh.” Which it was exactly pretty much word for word that idea. So I kind of shelved that idea.

And then USA had contacted me and said, “Hey, would you be interested in doing something for us?” And so I was looking for different ideas. One of the things I’d wanted to do, always do, was sort of a buddy comedy in the vein of “48 Hours” or “Lethal Weapon.” And I dusted off the “Redemption” idea and said what if I run… this dark story… through USA’s blue sky filter? That was really the genesis of the show.

I’ve said before I was also going through a fairly painful divorce at the time, which I think, probably it was a good thing that it happened at the time because that became the Kate story for Neal. What I was really worried about going in was that I was going to have this very charming con man and I wanted to make sure that there was something that grounded him. Something that gave him a soul. And so what I was going through personally really became his search for Kate. That was about it. And I’m very, very glad people are actually watching it.

Q: Please tell us the story of casting Matt Bomer on this show.

JEFF: Yes. I can’t say enough how happy and lucky I am to have Matt on this thing. I give most of the credit to Gayle Pillsbury who was my casting director on the pilot…  We’d been casting lots and lots of really good looking guys. It’s L.A. A lot of good looking people. And I remember walking in that particular day and Matt… was looking through his iPod in the corner, had jeans on, and his glasses.

Gayle pulled me aside and said, “Keep an eye on that guy. He’s a star.” He came in and read and we liked him right away. We took him to the studio and he went up. He went to the network and they really liked him. We brought him back, I think, two or three times.

I remember it was the scene from the pilot where he’s explaining to Peter that he’s got the photo and… the deduction he wants to go look for Kate. And that was the audition scene. And I remember, about halfway through that scene, I looked at a couple of the executives at USA and we kind of nodded at each other because we knew at that moment that we had the right guy.

Q: When you’re writing a show that has so many characters, how hard is it to maintain a level of excellence writing for that kind of a cast?

JEFF: It can be difficult. What we’ve done is we’ve really broken it down to each person has their own sort of specialty. Peter’s specialty is usually sort of the puzzle solving, the putting the pieces together that an FBI agent would be good at. And I always look at Neal as somebody who can sort of look at the problem from outside the box and approach it in a way that most people wouldn’t think to. Mozzie adds his own expertise, which usually that sort of that street level guy who knows the way that criminals do it. And Elizabeth has a certain amount of emotional intelligence that we try to play off of. She’s going to see things from a human perspective that a lot of times Peter won’t see or Neal won’t see.

So it can definitely be difficult, but I have to say that at times, we put all four of them in a room has been some of my favorite scenes. In “Bad Judgment,” for example, when Elizabeth finally meets Mozzie. Mozzie walking in and debugging their house is one of my favorite sequences so far, I think, in the series.

Q: In a recent episode, Peter started to traverse the gray areas with Neal. He’s not completely opposed to doing something that maybe a couple of episodes ago he would have thought was completely wrong. How much is that going to happen in the future?

JEFF: Yes. Yes to all the above. I’m not going to give too much away for our season finale, but that actually, that particular aspect, Peter’s up to now, sort of unwavering belief in the system and in the Bureau gets shaken pretty good. And it allows Peter, or sort of pushes Peter, to the other side a little bit. Again, we’re not doing a radical re-shifting of the show. Peter’s not suddenly going to become a master criminal. But like you said in this [recent] episode, his willingness to sort of bend the rules more to achieve what he considers a good end, that will increase in season two. Actually, that factors in very heavily.

Q: Since Fowler is somehow connected to the whole case scenario. Clearly, he’s not the guy pulling the strings. So when are we going to learn more about the mastermind behind that and how is that going to play into future episodes?

JEFF: Yes. The big bad, as we call him, who ultimately will be the guy that Fowler reports to. We’ll learn a lot more about him in season two. Our Season 2, and knock wood, our Season 3 mythology really deals with that and really we spend some time exploring Fowler’s back story, which is actually kind of interesting stuff… Fowler will return and we’ll find out a little bit more about who’s pulling his strings and why, which I think is actually a pretty interesting story.

Q: Your show has such a great structure. Not only do we have a really compelling case, but you also manage to develop moments about the characters. How do you pull that all together?

JEFF: That’s probably the toughest thing. I don’t know. My background, I started as a feature writer. Probably one of my proudest moments was Jim Cameron hired me to do “True Lies II,” which ended up bumping into 911 and sort of folding up. But I spent almost a year and a half working with Cameron and he was a real stickler for structure. And I think where I got my just desire to really push the structure.

I’m somebody that approaches the story from two things really. Structure and motivation, which is as long as the character motivation is true then usually things hold together pretty good.

We have the mythology elements. We have the character moments and we have the story elements. And all those things are always vying for time. It’s all about page count. Usually, it’s a 60 page script. If there’s going to be a story with Elizabeth and Mozzie in this episode, you know it’s maybe 15 pages, which means suddenly you’ve got 45 pages to do everything else. So there’s always that balancing act. It’s a little tough.

Q: We heard the good news that Season 2 got picked up. Could you talk a little bit about planning for that, what you might do differently, and are we going to get a major cliffhanger leading into that?

JEFF: Yes. We have a pretty major cliffhanger coming up here in two weeks… The writers’ group has been going about two weeks now and most of that time; we’ve been just working on the mythology moving forward into Season 2. What I did, really, was looked and say what we thought we really did right in season 1 and just try to duplicate that.

Luckily, I was sort of surprised, but most new shows, there’s usually a few shows you’re sort of not happy with… I can’t really think of any show in Season 1 that I wasn’t happy with. I’ve got my favorites.  But even the ones that are my least favorite, I still think came out pretty good. So I’m pretty happy about that. 

But for the most part, the way I’m looking at the show right now is it ain’t broke and we’re not going to try to change anything majorly in Season 2 in terms of dynamic. For me, the show is really about Peter and Neal and that’s where the focus is going to stay, supported by Elizabeth and Mozzie, and that’s really where we want to keep it going into Season 2.

Q: But as the creator of the show, did you go in knowing how the show is going to end or do you let the characters drive the storyline?

JEFF: A little bit of both. I knew the big points. Like I’d always known that Peter was going to confront Kate in that hotel room at the end of “Free Fall.” I knew that. I’d known some of the big mythology beats. There were a lot of scenes that I’d wanted to use throughout the season. For example, the hotel scene with the girl in the portrait, with the French girl, that scene was actually originally going to be in the pilot, but as I was breaking the pilot down [the script] just got too long and so I dropped that scene out. And I knew I wanted to use it somewhere so I kept it in my back pocket.

In terms of the large mythology arcs through Season 1 and a great deal into Season 2, I’ve known what’s going to happen in the big moments. I knew Peter was going to confront Kate in that hotel room. I knew the ring. I knew Fowler existed. I knew what his story was going to be.

The finale coming up… I’ve always known the ending to that. And planning into Season 2, I’d had a fairly good idea going into that.

Outside of that, that’s the stuff we’re working on now. I wish I’d had the foresight to say that I’d planned all out five seasons of the show, but I wasn’t quite that optimistic going in.

Our Ten Favorite Oscar Things

Last night's Oscars had its shares of ups and downs, as these things usually go. We love Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, and moments like their Snuggie bit and opening banter, did not disappoint. The stage was absolutely stunning, and while we're big fans of choreographer Adam Shankman, Neil Patrick Harris, and the Ziegfeld Follies, the opening number did fall short a bit for us. Roger Ebert tweeted, "I guess the best opening in Oscarcast history is still ahead for us." Still, there was more than enough spectacle, beauty, fun, and teary eyes to make for a completely enjoyable Oscar evening. So here are our ten favorite things about last night's Academy Awards.

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We Finally Got to See What Brian Boitano Would Make

One quality you always hear that Olympic champs possess is consistency. Shawn Johnson always sticks her landings. Shaun White gets more air than his competitors every time. And Brian Boitano has never let us down in the kitchen.

Yes, that’s right, the Olympic gold medalist was finally back on the Food Network yesterday with a brand new episode of “What Would Brian Boitano Make?” And, just as we had expected, he was funny, charming, and he cooked some delicious food. We’ve been waiting months for his return and he did not disappoint.

But now that our foodie-TV appetite has finally been satiated, we want a little something more (we are, after all, give us an inch and we’ll take a mile type girls). Since Evan Lysacek has knocked Brian off his throne as the reigning U.S. Olympic gold medalist after 22 years, we want to see Boitano back on the ice. He can wait until the “WWBBM?” season is over, but then put down the Chef’s knife and slip the blades back on your feet and show Evan how it’s really done. Please!?

In the meantime, we’ll be tuning in each week for those delicious recipes and a couple of laughs.

Or, take a look back at our full list of Brian Boitano countdown trivia.

An Interview with "Chuck's" Zachary Levi & Joshua Gomez

The NBC TV series "Chuck" is back after a few weeks off during the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The break gave the rabid fans of the geek chic action-comedy a chance to recover from the 3-D season premiere in January. Season 3 of the show is in full swing, with no word yet on the fate of the series. But fans and cast members are optimistic that with the support garnered during the last "Save Chuck" letter writing campaign, and five new slots recently opened up on the NBC programming slate, "Chuck" should be safe from cancellation.

Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez, stars of the series, sat down for a conference call interview and talked about their characters, their cast mates, and what's in store for the future.

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