Hollywood Exclusive by Marilyn Beck & Stacy Jenel Smith

There's no question that Tom Selleck's new starring role in NBC's "Las Vegas" is going to mean some schedule juggling for the one-time "Magnum, P.I." star. With his fourth Jesse Stone movie, "Sea Change," coming up Tuesday (5/22) on CBS, the fifth is already being written — and there are tentative plans to shoot his next telefilm as Robert B. Parker's world-weary police chief in August.

Meanwhile, they've already started production on next season's "Las Vegas" three months ahead of the norm in hopes of getting plenty of episodes in the can before the potential Hollywood writers' strike this fall.

Selleck is no stranger to seemingly impossible workloads. Speaking of "Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise" and "Jesse Stone: Night Passage," both of which are being released on DVD June 12, he notes, "We did them back-to-back, shooting one while preparing the other. We thought we'd save money and do both at the same time, but the script wasn't ready. My partner and I sat in a hotel room every weekend working on it, while I was acting."

He adds, "I'm not a polished writer, I'm more of a fixer. I work with the writers and try to walk in Jesse's shoes. I'm good at what I call Jesse's voice."

And he knows the character's weaknesses. Stone "makes a lot of mistakes, breaks a lot of rules ... and he makes bad decisions about drinking. We don't lecture people about drinking, but Jesse is always struggling." Which is, he surmises, more meaningful than lecturing.

In "Sea Change," Stone "realizes, after a very bad night of fighting with his ex-wife and getting plastered, that he has to make something happen. He goes after a homicide case — but there've only been three unresolved homicides in the last 100 years in Paradise, and it quite honestly seems to everybody like a bit of a wild goose chase."

Eventually, the chase proves to have involved drugs, pornography, rape and underage sex.

"I'm happy to say I think it may be the best one," says Tom.

THROUGH A GLASS, LIGHTLY: No rest for "This American Life" producer and host Ira Glass, who'll soon be rolling into second season production of the Showtime version of his long-running NPR show. The wryly witty "hipster nerd," as Entertainment Weekly dubbed him, reports he and his team are in the throes of figuring out how to piggyback production of the television series and its radio counterpart without scrimping on either one.

"The first season, the way we did it was with a lot more reruns of the radio show, but our feeling in the radio show is that we don't want to do that again.

So we're working out those logistics, scheduling two weeks of this, a week of that," he says.

"All the radio staff works on the TV show," adds Glass, so no one will get much in the way of time off. "While we were waiting to find out when we were going to be renewed, I realized it was the very best and very worst thing that could possibly happen," he acknowledges.

He tells us that shooting might get underway next month, "because in a certain way, it would be easier just to start up again, a slow start in the summer, and then really kick in in the fall. The network has been incredibly accommodating. They've been fine with whatever way we want to do it ... We've had to invent every part of the production process as we've gone along."

As for the Emmy buzz that's accumulated around the show, he says, "It's not on my mind, but only because we're so busy. The Emmys would be exciting, because then we'd feel like a real TV show."

GETTING OUT OF HER OWN WAY: "Yo Momma's" new co-host, Destiny Lightsy, reports things went from zero to 60 once she aced the audition for Wilmer Valderrama's no-holds-barred, smack-talking competition for cash prizes, which returns to MTV June 4.

"An hour after the audition, I got the phone call I got it," says the actress/dancer featured in "You Got Served" and "Fat Albert: The Movie." "Then they jumped me right into the game. We shot 21 episodes spread throughout a two-and-a-half-month period. We'd shoot between two and four a day, into the wee hours of the morning. That was intense."

Lightsy says she doesn't have to fly by the seat of her pants like the contestants trying to come up with humiliating putdowns on the spur of the moment, but she had to learn to "freestyle" between the scripted lines. "Once I stopped overthinking everything, it just started flowing. I was able to let me be myself."

FAMILY MATTERS: Former "Malcolm in the Middle" star Justin Berfield, who has been branching out into producing as of late, tells us he misses working with his TV family since the cancellation of their show, but hopes they'll have other opportunities to collaborate in the future. "If we're ever working on a project and one of them could be perfect for a role, I'd definitely want to bring them on," says Berfield. "Everyone there was a like a second family."

(With reports by Stephanie DuBois and Emily Feimster)

To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 MARILYN BECK AND STACY JENEL SMITH

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