Jason

As an East Coast "experimental" playwright, I'm often faced with disbelief when I tell my peers that I landed a staff job on NBC's new series "Smash. " Partially it's the strange-bedfellows notion of an allegedly avant-garde writer paired with a big, glitzy TV show about Broadway produced by Steven Spielberg. Even more prevalent, however, is the perception among theater folk that writing TV is slumming, or torturous, or at the very least a cynical sellout. It's a cliché, but it doesn't come from nowhere.

From Phoenix They stay for a while, sharing the common trait of taking themselves very seriously, before they just disappear. Go right down the list of head cases, and I won't even mention the name of Gary Matthews Jr . But how about Kevin Brown , Chad Kreuter , F .P. Santangelo , Kenny Lofton , Esteban Loaiza , Brian Jordan , George Sherrill , Jason Phillips , Odalis Perez , Andruw Jones and now Marcus Thames...

Actor Rick Jason, who played the hard-boiled leader Lt. Gil Hanley on the 1960s television drama "Combat!," was found dead Monday in his house. He was 74. Jason died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head and was found by his wife about 5 a.m., said Ventura County Deputy Coroner Craig Stevens. He left no note, and authorities only said that he was despondent over personal matters. Funeral arrangements were pending.

The Postal Service will play its reunion set Saturday at 8:50 p.m. on the Coachella stage, Earl Sweatshirt will hit the Gobi tent Friday just after midnight, Wu Tang Clan is set to take over the Outdoor Theatre at 9:15 p.m. Sunday and Dead Can Dance will deliver the closing set for the first weekend of the 2013 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio at 11 p.m. Sunday on the Mojave Stage. Those are among the highlights of the set times for this year's festival that just went up on Coachella's official website . FULL COVERAGE: Coachella 2013 Nearly 200 acts will play across six stages over each of the two three-day weekends of this year's event commencing Friday.

Brit­ish roots mu­sic band Mum­ford & Sons took the top hon­or for its album "Ba­bel" at the 55th Grammy Awards ce­re­mony Sunday. The night mostly dis­trib­uted hon­ors broadly to an ar­ray of young­er gen­er­a­tion acts in­clud­ing New York in­die trio Fun., Aus­trali­an elec­tron­ic pop artist Gotye, rap­per-R&B sing­er Frank Ocean and Ak­ron, Ohio, rock group the Black Keys. See the complete list of 2013 Grammy winners and nominees below. #story-body-text h2 { font-weight: bold !

Pingpong tables, employees in sandals, software code scrawled on the walls, a bounce house in the lobby. No, it's not a Silicon Valley tech company. Rather, it's a scene from one of several new tech-focused office buildings in Southern California where dozens of start-ups are setting up shop and sharing the work space. In a unique feature of the region's Silicon Beach, walls in more buildings are being knocked down to create open spaces where start-ups cohabit and employees mingle with one another, attend seminars and occasionally party.

"Bachelor" Jason Mesnick's wife, Molly Malaney Mesnick, has given birth to a baby girl named Riley Anne Mesnick.  "We welcomed the most beautiful healthy baby girl to our family today Riley Anne Mesnick. Thank you all for all your well wishes!" Mesnick, 36, tweeted Thursday. Riley was born in Seattle on Thursday and weighed in at 6 pounds, 8 ounces. She was 18¾ inches long, People magazine reported . PHOTOS: The Hollywood baby boom She "has a full head of hair -- probably more than I'll have in the next few years," Mesnick told the magazine.

Just weeks before the national political conventions get underway, a crucial figure has yet to commit to the presidential race. Jason Sudeikis, who plays "Saturday Night Live's" Mitt Romney as a cheerfully button-down, out-of-touch, Ward Cleaver-like figure, said he has not yet decided whether to return to the sketch show when it resumes this fall. After nine years at "SNL" - the last few as the show's most valuable straight man - Sudeikis has been spending recent months focusing on his movie career.

At a cinema in San Francisco, about 100 people recently showed up for a free screening of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and a presentation of a kind of Netflix for movie theaters. The service, called MoviePass, would allow consumers to watch all the movies they want for a $50 monthly fee, using their smartphones to download codes that could be redeemed for tickets at theaters. With the backing of AOL Ventures, the New York start-up had planned a national rollout of the service this fall with online ticket firm MovieTickets.com.

Robert Linderman wants you to know he isn't a scammer. Oh sure, he may be general counsel for Freedom Debt Relief, California's largest debt-settlement company, and he may be vice president of the Assn. of Settlement Companies, an industry group. And he readily acknowledges that there are some bad apples in the debt-settlement business, taking people's money without doing much if anything to get them out of a financial hole. But Linderman says most debt-settlement companies are honorable enterprises that only want to help people return to fiscal health.