Tonight marks a big episode for NBC’s freshman medical drama Mercy, as TV veteran James Van Der Beek joins the ranks of Mercy Hospital as the newest doctor. Van Der Beek will be a regular after tonight, which means he’ll be there to mix things up and throw a wrench into the relationships we’ve already come to know and love.

We recently got a chance to talk with the former Dawson, and his intentions on the show.

What I heard about the character’s intentions, I actually learned from the press release: he may be a womanizer, he could have dark secrets, maybe a gambling addiction, we don’t know just yet. What I know about him right now is that he’s somebody who is completely result oriented, and he’s not at all precious with anyone else’s feelings.

If he has a goal, he goes for it, gets to it, and doesn’t really care who he steps on to get there. We’ve got some really sensitive, well-rounded characters developed around him, and he doesn’t care.

Check out more of our interview after the jump, and catch an all-new preview of James Van Der Beek on the Mercy there as well. Catch “Can We Talk About The Big Elephant In The Ambulance” tonight on NBC, at 8pm/7pm Central.

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While attending the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour to promote The Vampire Diaries, writer Kevin Williamson gave us some updates and the current status of Scream 4:

“I’m almost done with the first draft of Scream 4. I’m trying to get that together for Wes Craven. We’ve got to get going on that, during the hiatus. We have Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Dave Arquette. I was always holding out hope because the pitch was about those three characters. I didn’t want to have to re-route the whole story. We don’t have to do that. I can do it exactly the way I want wanted. The story is going to be told the way I originally conceived it.”

The immediate good news for fans of Scream are that all the principals are back, hopefully this will mean Wes Craven will return to direct. Films like this do best when you can bring back that core creative element. Of course, few of the other characters survived the first three films to return anyway.

Some may wonder if jumping back into the world of Scream is a good or bad idea. The horror genre has changed considerably since the first Scream movie came out in 1996. Scream 3 alone is ten years old. The big money makers these days are franchise films like Saw and unexpected indie hits like Paranormal Activity. The closest films to what Scream was would be the recent Halloween reboots, and even that’s a stretch.

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