Beck/Smith Hollywood

With so much focus on the loss of Larry Hagman – and the death and funeral of his dastardly TV alter ego, J.R. Ewing – as the second season of TNT’s “Dallas” gets underway this week, one can’t help but wonder whether the show can go on once they’re finished saying goodbye.

Jesse Metcalfe is convinced it can.  Asked if he thinks there will be a Season 3, the handsome 34-year-old actor now known to “Dallas” fans as Christopher Ewing answers flatly, “I know it will happen.

“Obviously, I don’t have that information yet from the powers that be,” he adds.  “But I feel strongly that this is a hit show and that the ensemble of actors we have is incredibly talented.  We all have great chemistry, and the writing is very strong.”

He acknowledges, “Yes, it was Larry Hagman’s show.  He was the heart and soul of the show — by far the most popular character on the show.  Most people identify the show with J.R. Ewing.  I thought we would have more time with Larry, and that time was definitely cut short.  But the writers and the producers and of course the actors are doing everything they can to honor Larry and honor J.R. and do everything in the best way that they can.  And that’s why they’ve succeeded in producing some of the most entertaining episodes.  Out of a very tragic event comes some very exciting television — and I don’t think Larry would have wanted it any other way.”

Indeed.  With show re-creator Cynthia Cidre having revealed that J.R.’s death will not be from natural causes,  Hagman will posthumously rack up what will, in all probability, be the distinction of playing the only TV character to have not one, but two major murder mysteries surrounding him.  Of course you’ll recall the ratings record-breaking “Who Shot J.R.?” of 1980.

The storylines involving the younger generation of Ewings are rolling on as well.  Christopher, the ecology-minded, adopted son of nice guy Bobby (Patrick Duffy), has won back the lovely Elena (Jordana Brewster) from J.R.’s ever-more-craven oilman son John Ross (Josh Henderson) — and the cousins are fighting for control of their Ewing Energies company.

“Elena and Christopher are still in the honeymoon stage of their rekindled romance, and certainly John Ross is not very happy about that.  He gets his digs in wherever he can,” Metcalfe relates.  “But for at least the first half of the second season Elena and Christopher are pretty solid.  I’d say the first season was more raw emotions, the second season is more of a chess match.  And obviously, we’re always in each other’s faces — we’re all living in the same place, Southfork, and working in the same place, Ewing Energies.”

The “Dallas” team certainly doesn’t have THAT degree of closeness, but the cast members do stay in Dallas condos while shooting is underway, they do hang out together, they do sound fond of each other.  Metcalfe says, “If anything, we’ve all grown closer in the wake of Larry’s death.“

The Carmel Valley, California-born actor, who gained public attention as sexy teenage gardener John Rowland on “Desperate Housewives” — and went on to big screen success with “John Tucker Must Die” — makes it clear he cares very much about the “Dallas” fans.  In fact, he sounds downright affectionate toward those who “stuck with the original show through all 13 seasons and now are staying with our show.  You feel a responsibility toward them.”  He says he hasn’t found any downside to his newfound “Dallas” fame – here or overseas.  The show is a huge hit in the U.K. and elsewhere.

But fame does have its, um, distractions.  For instance, it’s been widely reported Metcalfe is engaged to the beautiful Cara Santana.  But he says, “No, I’m not getting married.  I have a very serious girlfriend but that’s just a piece of misinformation that keeps reappearing.”  He laughs, “As if there wasn’t enough pressure already.”

This season’s shooting will wrap in April, and Metcalfe would like to find a juicy new assignment, he says.  In fact, “All of us are looking for hiatus projects.  I’d just like a piece of material that feels right for me, a story I want to tell.  That’s a great thing about being on a cable show.  It’s not that rigorous a schedule.  It’s intense while you’re shooting it, but it’s only 15 episodes.  The first season was 10, now we’re lucky enough to get 15.  But it’s still only six months of the year – very different from a 22-episode season.”

So, he wouldn’t mind continuing to play Christopher on and on?

“I think the viewers are going to be very pleased with Season 2,” he says.  “So I don’t see any reason why there won’t be a third, a fourth, and probably a fifth season.”

Time will tell.

Luke Perry laughs at a recent magazine article in which his former “Beverly Hills, 90210” cast mate, Jennie Garth, is quoted saying that they’re working up a project to do together.  “You listen to a thing she says?  I have no idea what she’s talking about!” the actor claims in a jocular tone.

“You know what I love about working with Jennie?” he adds.

What’s that?

“I don’t know.  I was hoping you’d know, ‘cause I don’t.”

But seriously – Perry acknowledges that “Jen’s a very good friend.  It’s hard to schedule anything with her, though, because she has a lot going on.  She’s one of these people conquering every medium.  She’s in a movie right now, and I think when she comes back she has some kind of reality thing going.”

Perry is certainly a man on the move himself – with the third installment of his “Goodnight for Justice” Western movies for television coming up Saturday (1/26) on the Hallmark Movie Channel.  “Goodnight for Justice: Queen of Hearts” pits his rough-hewn circuit judge character, John Goodnight, against a female con artist played by “Endgame’s” Katharine Isabelle.  Ricky Schroder also stars in this, the second follow-up to his original “Goodnight for Justice” – the channel’s highest-rated movie ever.

“In the era of this movie, a lot of times women were exploited for the virtues they had to possess.  To have a woman who took full possession of her own virtues and said, ‘No, I’ll be in charge’ – I thought it would be great to play off a character like that,” says Perry, who has retained his heartthrob looks into his forties.

He created the character and has much to do with the story planning and scripts, in addition to serving as executive producer and, apparently, taking on other responsibilities as needed.  Sometimes, he acknowledges, inspiration comes in the form of what’s available to shoot.

“When you make these movies as quickly and inexpensively as we do, you have to sort of reverse-engineer them,” is how he puts it.  “Queen of Hearts” has sequences of classic Old West riverboat gambling, for example.  Says Perry, “We were scouting another location and we saw the boats.  While scouting the boats, we saw this other piece of geography I thought would work really well, and it did.  You see what’s in the fridge and what you can make out of it.”

What he’s made with “Queen of Hearts” is another solid, enjoyable Western with plenty of moments fans will love.

As for whether there will be more “Goodnight For Justice” movies?

“I don’t know,” he says.  “This was our final one of the ones we did back-to-back.  I’ve got ideas for more of them.  I found some really cool stuff up there [in Canada] that we could use.  I’m feeling a lot of love from the channel, but they’re pretty fiscally conservative over there.  They always want to see how something performs before committing to the next thing.”

It sounds as if Perry himself feels fairly committed, however.  A few minutes later, he acknowledges, “I’ve still got all that wardrobe from all those movies here in a box.  I’ve never done that before – never actually kept all the character wardrobe.  Hallmark wasn’t sure they were going to make more, and I said, ‘Well, I’m sure, so I’m keeping the stuff.’ That way, I’ll figure it out.’”

Perry, divorced since 2003, also has other characters, other scripts he’s nurturing along.  “There are different periods of history I’m interested in,” he says.  But he doesn’t even want to get specific about those times and places.  “Then somebody will read it and get to them first.  I’ve had a couple of not-so-good experiences with that.”

He also wouldn’t mind returning to the series world. “If the character works and it’s a good fit, I love to play a character over the course of years,” he says.  But he has no interest in a reality skein of his own. “A camera crew following me around?  No.”

“Goodnight for Justice: Queen of Hearts,” meanwhile, is “the best one of the three,” he wants to stress.  “I think it’s the one where we really hit our stride and we have a lot of movie in there.”  With John Goodnight confounded by a beautiful schemer?

“Listen, let me tell you one of the great truths of my life – I just don’t understand women,” he insists with his familiar twinkle.  “This is a dynamic in my life I just can’t get away from.  I don’t understand, though I’ve had mother sister daughter, wife — every relationship you can have with a woman and I don’t understand them. They make you do crazy things.”

So far, it’s been working out pretty well for him.

Talk about raising interest in your Oscar hosting gig! Seth MacFarlane certainly did just that with his nominations announcement performance last week, didn’t he? In case anyone missed it, MacFarlane issued such gems as a Hitler joke tied in to the Austria-Germany collaboration, “Amour” and a comment that directors sit and watch other people make movies. And he earned a fierce collection of responses. For instance, an Entertainment Weekly headline asked “Seth MacFarlane, Oscar nomination presenter: Smug and condescending?” while Slate observed that he “managed to botch his Oscar-hosting gig in record time.”

Even as that was happening, ABC chieftain Paul Lee was explaining to press as the Television Critics Association conclave in Pasadena why he is “really bullish”about MacFarlane’s upcoming Oscar emcee stint.

“I am a huge Seth fan. I think what Seth brings — first of all, is a sense of joy,” he declared. MacFarlane, who is himself nominated for Best Song honors for“Everybody Needs a Best Friend” from “Ted,”really “wants to be there,” he went on. One would hope!

“And he also has this fantastic combination of — he’s one of the funniest writers in the world, but if you watch ‘Family Guy,’ I mean, who would have expected, you know, ‘Family Guy’ would be the heart of show and dance and variety? He loves the show, and I think he’s going to bring a lot of that energy to it. He’s coming to the Oscars, you know, with a great sense of respect, but I think he’s going to bring us a really contemporary feel.

“Look, you don’t know. You don’t know until he comes out there, but I’m sensing he’s going to have a lot of fun out there, and I think, with the movies that are there, I think — I’m sensing that we are going to have a good Oscars. I may be proven wrong, but I’m feeling good about it and particularly good about him.”

That remains to be seen, but Oscar winners (“Chicago”) and musical producers extraordinaire Neil Meron and Craig Zadan are certainly a dream team, particularly in a year when “Les Miserables” is in the mix. As Lee acknowledged, “They love show and tell. They love variety. And so I think you are going to see a very entertaining Oscars. I think Seth is going to be right at the heart of that.”

ALSO: Lee talked about the future of “Dancing With the Stars” and the fact that the recent all-stars season was a ratings disappointment. “It turns out people want to see bad dancing as much as good dancing,” he said, adding that the show will be cast in its regular way next time around. He does still expect to air “DWTS” twice a year. It’s still a big, broad crowd pleaser, he noted. “Sixteen million viewers. That’s still a lot of viewers.” He believes that with the right casting, younger viewers can be enticed back to the show. Seth MacFarlane, maybe?

SORRY TO SAY GOODBYE: The death of beloved California TV personality Huell Howser at age 67 last week has truly saddened a lot of folks around these parts, who’ll miss the perpetual unbridled enthusiasm he brought to his California travelogue shows. Among them, no doubt: Barbra Streisand and James Brolin. Brolin admitted to us a few years ago that he and his wife just loved to settle down and watch Huell doing his thing, taking viewers on excursions from Death Valley to Eureka, meeting assorted colorful sorts along the way. And Brolin had developed a spot-on perfect impression of the Tennessee-born Huell, which he demonstrated for us: “You have a tree here, and another tree there! Why, you’ve almost got a forest!!” Howser is being memorialized today (1/15) at L.A.’s Griffith Park Observatory.

Tanna Frederick delighted audiences for more than a year in A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia comedy, playing the dog who has such a bond with her owner that it starts driving his wife crazy. Indeed, audiences came to see the show, at Santa Monica’s Edgemar Center for the Arts, because of Tanna’s bouncy, uninhibited antics as the title pooch. Now it appears the show is going to open on Broadway, with….someone else. “I’m like, oh God, who’s going to play the part? Miley Cyrus? I’ll just die,” admits Tanna with a groan and a laugh. “That role!”

The red-haired indie film fave, who’s also known as Henry Jaglom’s main muse (“Hollywood Dreams,” “Irene in Time,” etc.) certainly has found a silver lining in the fact that doing Sylvia led to her new role at the Edgemar – Lizzie in The Rainmaker. And yes, she’s aware that the repressed spinster, played memorably by Katharine Hepburn on film, is quite different for her. “I had to mix it up, you know, and I can’t say that it wasn’t a very intimidating decision to do this piece — no pressure or anything,” says Frederick, who has been drawing positive response from preview crowds. “People are shocked…My mother says this is her favorite of all my performances, and she’s been seeing me perform since I was eight, so that means a lot,” she dead pans.

Meanwhile, Tanna has two films expected to arrive in theaters sometime in Spring. One is the menopause comedy “The M Word,” in which “Frances Fisher is hilarious,” Frederick lets us know. Also, there is “The Farm,” a story partially inspired by the true-life saga of Tanna’s own grandparents’ struggle to stay on their family farm in Iowa. The film was made on the actual Frederick family farm, part of the actress’ Project Cornlight initiative to revitalize the film industry in her home state. She expects to begin production on her next Iowa-based movie production, “Just Beautiful,” in June.

“Downton Abbey’s” Lesley Nicol tells us she missed out on the big public clamor over the Season 3 finale in the U.K..  She was here in the States when she learned from her agent about fans being so upset over a character’s being killed off the show, there were complaints on the internet that the Christmas Day episode had ruined people’s holiday.

“This is a sticky one.  I value their passion but a part of me can’t help saying, ‘It’s a show.  It’s an actor,’” admits Nicol, known world-wide as blustery cook Mrs. Patmore.  “And an actor has to be allowed to move on if he wants to.’”

Nicol has no such desire, we’re glad to report.  “It’s lovely to work on this show.  It’s a privilege to be on it.  It’s a very good cast, a wonderful crew…We just want to make it better and better if we can.”  She was, however, here taking meetings with Hollywood executives about work outside of “Downton Abbey” — and tooling around town in a borrowed gold Jaguar.

“I was a nervous wreck because it’s a lovely car and the roads are quite scary in L.A., but I got used to it,” she says.

One result of her time here is that Nicol will be heading to Vancouver shortly to film an episode of ABC’s “Once Upon a Time.” After that, she flies to Chicago for a concert appearance.  And after that, it’s back to the U.K. to begin filming the fourth season of “Downton.”

Season 3 begins airing here Sunday (1/6) and there is much to relish, including the fun of Dame Maggie Smith crossing verbal swords with Shirley MacLaine, who has come aboard as the mother of American Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern).  For Nicol, Season 3 opens up even more aspects of Mrs. Patmore’s personality.  She will be seen at the side of rival Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan), the head housekeeper, as Mrs. Hughes faces cancer.  And later in the season, it appears a bit of romance will be entering Mrs. Patmore’s life.

Nicol credits show creator Julian Fellowes for giving “everybody a proper journey.  He never leaves characters in one kind of groove.  He shows their different sides, just as we all have different sides to our characters.  To begin with, I was just this red-faced, angry bully.  But no one is just that.  The reason she behaved like that was, at that time, in that house, there would be no room for mistakes.  You couldn’t have people saying dinner at Downton Abbey wasn’t very good; it had to be the best show in town.”