Currently ranked fourth among major television networks, NBC is hoping to find ratings gold in a new batch of pilots they recently ordered. Among them are the comedy Downwardly Mobile, which will mark the return of Roseanne Barr to a television series and additional comedies from writer Scott Silveri (Friends) and writer Scot Armstrong (The Hangover 2). Barr’s project with Eric Gilliland (Roseanne), which she will also write and executive produce, stars the comedienne as an owner of a mobile home park who becomes a surrogate mother to her hard-luck tenants. So far, the network has also ordered the drama County by writer/producer Jason Katims (Friday Night Lights) and the Dick Wolf (Law & Order) action drama, Chicago Fire. Hit the jump for more on each project.

Unless you’re a die hard Scott Pilgrim vs. the World fan, the name Mark Webber may not sound familiar — but it soon will. The indie actor wrote, directed, and stars in an untitled film about a struggling single father who is trying to raise his two year old son in the wake of the child’s mother’s death. The movie mirrors Webber’s own life, and he cast his own two-year-old as his son in the movie.

Michael Cera, Jason Ritter, Shannyon Sossamon and Amanda Seyfried either co-star or cameo as “heightened versions of themselves.”  The movie is being shot for well under a million dollars and has virtually no crew — just a director of photography and a sound person. Webber is producing the film through his company Poor Rich Kids.  Read what Webber had to say about the project after the jump.

Fresh off his sure to be Academy Award-nominated role in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg has chosen the indie comedy Free Samples as his next project. TheWrap reports Eisenberg will star alongside Jess Weixler (Teeth), Jason Ritter (The Event), Tippi Hedren (The Birds), Halley Feiffer (The Messenger), Keir O’Donnell (When in Rome), Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil), and Matt Walsh (The Hangover). Hit the jump for more on the project.

When a network touts a series calling itself The Event and launches a marketing campaign intent on capitalizing on the fact that nobody knows what the series and the event lying therein is about, it better deliver in 45 minutes or less. While there’s enough mystery and intrigue amongst a non-linear and somewhat confusing storyline, people looking for an immediately satisfying and equally compelling replacement for the recently retired Lost may not be so pleased. Hit the jump to find out why The Event has potential, but may not be the event for which viewers have been waiting.

The new NBC television series The Event, one of the most highly anticipated fall premieres, is a conspiracy theory thriller that follows Sean Walker (Jason Ritter), an everyman who investigates the mysterious disappearance of his would-be fiancée Leila Buchanan (Sarah Roemer), and unwittingly begins to expose the biggest cover-up in U.S. history.

During a recent interview to promote the premiere of the new dramatic serial, actor Jason Ritter talked about playing the unlikely hero who gets entangled in an immense government conspiracy, becoming an action guy and how scary the comparisons to Lost and 24 are, since they’re a lot to live up to. Check out what he had to say after the jump:

There was talk that the early pickups wouldn’t end with Undercovers over at NBC and the network responded in a big way today.  NBC ordered Outsourced, The Event, and Love Bites for the fall lineup.

Single-camera comedy Outsourced centers on “a customer service manager in Kansas city who’s sent to India to train his replacement when his department is outsourced.”  The high-octane conspiracy thriller The Event explores multiple points of view with a cast includes star Jason Ritter (Parenthood) and Emmy-winner Željko Ivanek (Damages).  Cindy Chupack (Sex and the City) developed the romantic anthology series Love Bites, which stars Becki Newton (Ugly Betty) and Jordana Spiro (My Boys) as single women among a sea of married friends.

Hit the jump for the official press release.

The History Channel’s WWII in HD is an epic ten-part documentary that comprehensively details America’s participation in the Second World War. It originally aired from November 15 to November 19, 2009 before being released on Blu-ray and DVD. It features ten hours’ worth of rare and never-before-seen color footage shot across the globe throughout WWII, all of which has been converted for presentation in glorious HD. And you NEED to watch it on Blu-ray. Hit the jump for more.

Around this time every year, all the networks start to cast their pilots.  While you may think every show that gets developed ends up on the air, you’d be mistaken.  The odds of creating a show that actually makes it is very small, and to become a hit show, it’s like winning the lottery.  To try and raise the odds of a successful crop of new shows, the networks develop many pilots.  In fact, the number is often two or three times what they actually need.  That way they can pick the best of the bunch, and the rest are usually never seen or heard from again.  Again, even if you hear about a pilot, it doesn’t mean you’ll ever see it.

Saying that, a number of actors (Daniel Dae Kim Cast, Michael Chiklis, Jason Ritter, Zach Gilford, Aisha Hinds, Todd Williams) have recently been cast in pilots that are about to shoot.  Hit the jump for details on what shows they landed on: