Mike Hughes on TV

This is a huge weekend for TV. If you scan the recent blogs here, you'll see stories on Tony Bennett (Friday), a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" movie (Sunday) and Jennifer Granholm's new talk show (Monday).

There's one more story, however: Dr. Sanjay Gupta has a terrific report (Sunday, then rerunning the following Saturday) on football concussions. I'll put the story here in a moment, but first two recollections from my childhood in Clintonville, Wis.:

1) Freshman football: Mike Harris, the New London fullback, has the ball; I'm the middle linebacker, ready to tackle him. Mike, alas, was short and stocky; I was neither, making it difficult to get his waist. As we each ran full-speed, we collided head-on. The lights went out for a moment; I heard Gib Johnson, a math teacher, on the sidelines, saying "Do it again, Mike."

1a) I didn't do it again. They promptly ran the same play; I jumped on Mike's back and gradually wrestled him down.

1b) Gib Johnson, a former military man, later became Clintonville's mayor and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the state's "superprison" to our town. I'm quite sure there were other times when I didn't follow his instructions.

2) In 4th grade, we were playing run-through. I collided head-on with my friend Mickey Nelson. Then the bell rang and we all ran inside. After a while, the teacher inquired: "Where's Mickey?" He was just out there playing with us a minute ago, we said. She went out to look and found him still lying on the ground.

In both cases, everyone survived and went on to productive lives. (Well, semi-productive; I write about television.) What we didn't realize was that either of those hits could have led to permanent damage, even death. It's only been in recent years that people havetake concussions seriously. Here's the story I sent to papers:

 By MIKE HUGHES

Dr. Sanjay Gupta grew up in a football
world of “The Big House,” the big games, the big hits.

People found elegance in young men
colliding head-on. “You'd hear phrases like 'getting his bell
rung,'” Gupta said. “Now people talk about concussions or what
they are – brain injuries.”

That's emphasized in his CNN special,
“Big Hits, Broken Dreams.”

Certainly, people have realized
concussions can be fierce. There have been more specifics lately,
however, partly because of a research “brain bank” with the
remains of pro football players and others.

“I look at a lot of brains in my
work, but I had never seen anything like this,” said Gupta, a
neuro-surgeon who visited the bank. “You would see a 17-year-old
with damage we associate with old age.”

So he focused on early concussions, in
high school football. That brought him to Greenville, N.C., which
Sports Illustrated once dubbed “Sports Town, USA.”

That's a setting Gupta can understand.
He's a first-generation American native who's from an academic family
– both parents were engineers for Ford – but he's always been
near football fervor.

He grew up in cities – Dearborn,
Livonia and Novi – within a half-hour of the University of
Michigan, where the stadium (nicknamed “The Big House”) has had
football attendance topping 114,000. He went to college and medical
school at U-M and has flown back for games.

“I'm still a big football fan,”
Gupta said. “I still love it.”

That's similar to the mood in
Greenville, where players' instincts are to shake it off and resume
action. “These kids want to play …. They want to get back in.”

In the past, they weren't aware of
secondary concussions: The brain works at healing itself from a blow;
a second blow, during that time, can have a harsher effect.

Jaquan Waller, a star running back,
took a head-on hit during practice in 2008. He was taken off the
field, but was back the next day, seeming upbeat.

“Everybody just thought he just got
his bell rung,” Zach Rogers, a friend and teammate, says in the
special. “Nothing out of normal. That's just how you play; you play
hurt.”

Two days after that blow, he was in a
game. After what seemed like an ordinary hit, he was carried off the
field. He was essentially dead by the time he got to the hospital,
officially dead the next morning.

Another North Carolina teen died from a
football injury that year and Gupta met Greenville players who have
had persistent headaches. He also found the flip side: Since Waller's
death, Greenville has intensely fought against concussions; steps
include talks to players, plus:

– Having an athletic trainer at
practices and a doctor on sidelines for games. The majority of
schools still don't have trainers at practice, Gupta said, but 35
states now have some sort of requirement,

– Testing players before the season.
To return after a concussion, they have to match that result.

– Paying attention to the cumulative
effects. A pro player, Gupta said, might absorb 650,000 blows before
retirement. Some of that can be changed by reducing full-contact
practices.

– “Big Hits, Broken Dreams,” on
CNN under the “Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports” banner

– 8 p.m. Sunday (Jan. 29), repeating
at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.

– Repeats at the same times the next
Saturday, Feb. 4

At times, the big networks forget about TV movies and ignore "Hallmark Hall of Fame," which does those movies beautifully. Still, those films persist; on Sunday, ABC airs this season's second "Hall of Fame," a feel-good film  called "A Smile as Big as the Moon." Here's the story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

For a moment, John Corbett wasn't sure
about this role.

In ABC's “A Smile as Big as the
Moon,” he was supposed to play Mike Kersjes, a special-ed teacher
who was also a football coach. That's where the problem came.

“I didn't really like my high school
football coach,” Corbett said. “I thought of coaches as goons.”

All of that dissolved when he met
Kersjes. “He's gregarious,” said Corbett, who shares that trait.
“He likes a cocktail; he likes to laugh. He kind of looks like Dr.
Phil.”

And he has audacity, pushing for the
elite U.S. Space Camp to accept his class. “This was in 1988,”
Corbett said. “The camp was only six years old then and didn't have
any special-ed programs.”

Taking the role in this “Hallmark
Hall of Fame”film was be a huge challenge for Corbett, who:

– Had never seen Space Camp. He does
remember watching the moon landing when he was 8; much later, he met
Buzz Aldrin, who described the last-minute crisis of being unable to
find a landing site.

– Knew nothing about special-ed. “I'd
never even met a kid with Down syndrome.”

Now “Smile” put him with several
Down-syndrome actors, including Peter ten Brink, who plays Ben.

“Some of the best conversations in my
life were with Peter …. He tells great jokes, he loves every
country singer,” Corbett said. “He's learning the guitar; he
calls Taylor Swift on the phone sometimes.”

For Corbett, who is working on his
second country album, these are admirable traits. He and ten Brink
worked together, doing large chunks of the film at the real Space
Camp in Huntsville, Ala.

The story – taking a class from
Forest Hills Northern High (in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Mich.) to
Alabama – seems like a stretch. Then again, many parts of Corbett's
own life are just as unlikely.

Flash back, for instance, to when he
was a teen-ager, in an apartment with his mother in Wheeling, W.Va.
He was a good athlete – a basketball center (6-foot-5, 200 pounds),
a high-jumper and, despite disliking the coach, a football tight end.
He was also a poor student (attention deficit problems) with no
long-range plans. And at 18, he remembers staring in awe at the
movie“10” and Bo Derek.

“I'd never seen anyone like that
before,” Corbett recalled. “I remember thinking, 'I wish I had a
girlfriend as pretty as that.”

Now he does. Corbett, 50, and Derek,
55, have been together for 10 years. They live amid Northern
California beauty, while he races off to acting jobs.

There were a lot of things in between,
of course. There was Corbett traveling to California on a beanbag
chair in the back of his friend's pick-up truck …. Showing up there
on the doorstep of his father, whom he'd only met a few times ….
Getting a factory job until he hurt his back, and then going to
community college, where he found an acting class … And getting a
huge break.

“I got lucky when I got 'Northern
Exposure,'” Corbett said. It was then a low-budget summer show and
he was an unknown, but it lasted five seasons, with Corbett as Chris
the disc jockey.

Other series kept piling up –
“Lucky,” “The Visitor,” “United States of Tara,”
boyfriend duty in “Sex and the City” and in the movie “My Big
Fat Greek Wedding.”

Corbett even has a sharp change-up in
“Parenthood,” playing an ex-husband who's an alcoholic
rock-and-roller. “I can do the nice guy roles,” he said, “but
it's nice to do something different.”

Still, the nice-guy stuff beckons,
including two “Hall of Fame” films. In “November Christmas,”
he was an earnest dad; now he's a coach who isn't even remotely a
goon.

– “A Smile as Big as the Moon,”
9-11 p.m. Sunday (Jan. 29), ABC

– Then on the Hallmark Channel – 8
and 10 p.m. Feb. 4, 2 p.m. Feb. 5

After scrambling for six-and-a-half years, the Current cable channel is finally getting some attention.

That started last June when Keith Olbermann moved his talk show there; now Jennifer Granholm -- who had two terms as Michigan's governor -- gets the spot after him, beginning Monday (Jan. 30). Here's the story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

Jennifer Granholm couldn't be blamed
for fidgeting, a few hours before the State of the Union address.

“I wish I was on the air now,” she
said.

She just missed that. “The War Room
With Jennifer Granholm” starts Monday (Jan. 30), a key step in the
makeover of the Current TV cable channel.

“When we launched 'Countdown with
Keith Olberman,' we saw the opportunity to really speak in a
politically direct manner,” said Al Gore, the channel's co-founder.

So now he has the full line-up – Cenk
Uygur at 7 p.m. ET, Olbermann at 8, Granholm, Michigan's former
two-term governor, at 9, with all three then repeating. Its debut
comes as the election year heats up; still, Granholm would have liked
to be on the air six days earlier, for the State of the Union.

For one thing, she knew President Obama
would point to Bryan Ritterby, a laid-off factory worker who landed a
new job (working on wind-turbine parts) after re-training at Grand
Rapids (Mich.) Community College. “That was our program, part of
'No Worker Left Behind,'” Granholm said.

For another, there's the comparison to
her own State of the State address in 2006. Like Obama this year, she
was up for re-election; both:

– Had low approval ratings. His was
46 percent, hers was 40.

– Faced competition from a wealthy
businessman – Mitt Romney and Dick DeVoss.

– Were stymied by a stagnant economy.
“We had a higher unemployment rate,” Granholm said.

The result? She drew 56 per cent of the
votes. “There are such enormous parallels,” she said, a fact that
she mentioned to Obama and his people. “I was saying they should
get a copy of my book.”

Or they could watch her show. “We're
going to do a studio that is a mock-up of a campaign-office war room,
without the pizza boxes,” Granholm said.

The first half or so of each hour will
deal with politics and elections; the rest with policy. Granholm sees
Michigan – wracked first by the recession – as key; “we're like
a lab for the rest of the country.”

Current started six years ago, as a
patchwork of pieces from viewers. It drew praise and awards for its
Vanguard documentary unit, but was unnoticed by most viewers,
including Granholm.

Then Olbermann moved there from MSNBC
last June. “I thought, 'That's an interesting thing? Why Current?
What's going on there?'” Granholm recalls.

Gore phoned, suggesting she do a show
to follow Olbermann. “That was completely out of the blue.”

Granholm and her husband, Dan Mulhern,
had already settled into the faculty at the University of California,
Berkeley. “He was very positive that I should take this,” she
said. “He said, 'Those are the shows you watch anyway. You're
always hogging the TV.'”

So “War Room” was set up, with a
studio in San Francisco. Contributors will include Gavin Newsom, Van
Jones, Laura Tyson, Maria Echeveste and Celinda Lake.

Those names are familiar on the left;
Current doesn't hide its leanings. “When Keith (Olbermann) turned
'Countdown' into a progressive show, there was a great thirst in the
country,” Uygur said.

This brings Granholm full-circle, back
into show business. Born in Canada and raised in the San Francisco
area, she moved to Los Angeles at 19 to be an actress; the closest
she came was being a Universal Studios tour guide, warning tram
riders of pseudo-dangers; “it was 'Jaws' back then.”

Then she took an alternate route –
Berkeley (majoring in French and political science) … Harvard Law
School (where she met Mulhern) … moving to his home state, where
she eventually became Michigan's attorney general and then its
governor.

Now, 33 years later, she's back in show
business – warning about political sharks instead of “Jaws.”

– “War Room With Jennifer
Granholm,” begins Monday (Jan. 30)

– 9 p.m. ET weekdays at Current TV,
rerunning at midnight

– Other reruns during the day; on
Jan. 31 and Feb. 2, those will be at 5 a.m., 8 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4
p.m.

– Guests on the opener will be Robert
Gibbs, former presidential press secretary, now an advisor to the
Obama campaign, and Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.), a U.S. Senate
candidate and former chairman of the congressional committee on the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

There are some veteran singers, I'm sure, whose voices are just a fraction of their prime.

Not Tony Bennett. When he sang to the Television Critics Association recently, everything -- his voice, his phrasing, his back-up quartet -- was precise. At 85, this guy remains a strong talent.

Many people can sample that on Friday, when Bennett has a "Duets" special on PBS' "Great Performances." Here's the story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

Back when he was 10, Tony Bennett says,
his path seemed clear.

“I remember very clearly saying,
'This is who I am. My family is telling me that I sing and I paint.'”

What he didn't know was how long he
would keep doing it.

Bennett was 80 when his “Duets”
album came out, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard chart. He was 85 when
“Duets II” reached No. 1; now a PBS special catches its recording
sessions.

“The most interesting thing for me is
to watch him perform with a Lady Gaga or an Amy Winehouse,” said
Danny Bennett, Tony's son and the producer of the album and the
special. They were 24 and 27 at the time, but, he said, “you don't
get a sense there's someone who is 85 working with a (24)-year-old.
It's an absolute respect that he has for other great artists.”

Indeed, Tony Bennett talks passionately
about:

– Winehouse. “She was a big fan of
mine and I was very surprised, because she was so young.”

– Gaga. “All of a sudden, you meet
someone who has a touch of genius. She's highly intelligent, highly
creative. She knows so much about performing. She sings
magnificently.”

She also had something in common with
many of the younger stars, he said. They “came out of art schools,
you know – Berklee … Juilliard, and Lady Gaga is from NYU (New
York University), so they all had teachers who really told them what
to expect and what to do and how to do it right.”

He did, too, although it didn't come
easily.

Like Gaga, Bennett grew up as an
Italian kid in New York City. The difference was that his family was
scraping by on a seamstress' pay.

“My father died when I was 10,” he
said. “My brother and sister and I would entertain my family. (All
the) relatives would come over on a Sunday and make a circle around
us. (We) were trying to make my mom feel good, because she had to
work for a penny a dress to raise three children.”

Bennett dropped out of school at 16 to
make money and was drafted at 18. He sang in the Army, then used the
GI Bill to enter what'snow the Actors Studio.

“They had wonderful teachers,” he
said. “And one thing they taught us is never compromise. Only sing
quality. Stay away from something that's a quick gimmick.”

One teacher taught him how to preserve
his voice. Another spoke of the great jazz singers and
instrumentalists. “She said, 'Don't imitate another singer. Imitate
musicians and find out how they phrase.' (And) she said, 'If you
imitate another singer, you're going to just be one of the chorus.”

That has persisted, said David Horn,
producer of PBS' “Great Performances” series. “He sings just
like a horn player. It's just a beautiful thing to behold.”

The rewards have followed, Horn said –
15 Grammys, the Kennedy Center Honors, three paintings in the
Smithsonian Institution. Bennett did civil rights protests and
founded arts-oriented public schools.

For the PBS special, Horn's crew filmed
the recording sessions for the duets album. Yes, those are the real
sessions, Danny Bennett said; “Tony records live.” And he dresses
up for the occasion.

“My mom … always said to me and my
brother, 'Always have a very clean white shirt and black pants and
you'll be very dressed,” Tony Bennett said.

Back then, he had one suit, which he
wore to church, under the careful eye of his uncle, a tailor. “He
was a wonderful man; he used to say, 'Boy, that's a beautiful suit
you have there.'”

Three-quarters of a century later, he
still shows up with clean shirt, pressed suit and strong voice.

– “Duets II” special, 9 p.m.
Friday on PBS (check local listings), under “Great Performances”

– Also an album on Columbia. It has
Gaga, the late Winehouse, John Mayer, Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill,
Willie Nelson, Aretha Franklin, Sheryl Crow, Queen Latifah, Andrea
Bocelli, Josh Groban, more.

This has become a TV habit: The regular shows debut in the fall; the special ones -- fresh, odd, distinctive -- arrive in mid-season, when people are paying more attention.

We'll see signs of that this  week, from Fox. The second "Alcatraz" is tonight (Monday, Jan. 23), a "Touch" sneak preview is Wednesday; in between, the season's second "Justified" is on cable's FX.

And yes,there'smuch more coming -- NBC's "Smash," "Bent" and "Awake" ;ABC's "Scanndal," "GCB" and "Don't Trust the B in Apt. 23; cable gems ranging from next month's "Life's Too Short" to this summer's "Perception" and "Dallas" and "Longmire" and more.

It all starts now. Here's the "Touch" story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

For nine stoic seasons, Kiefer
Sutherland kept his emotions semi-hidden.

He was Jack Bauer on “24,” always
with limited time (24 hours, to be exact) and a world to save. He
wasted none of that time getting in touch with his feelings.

Now Sutherland is back on Fox in
“Touch,” which gets a sneak preview Wednesday. “The tone of the
piece is so vastly different, that was part of its appeal,” he
said.

This time, he's no world-savior; he's
Martin Bohm, on ordinary guy whose life crumbled with the Sept. 11
attacks. Now he's a widower whose son Jake doesn't talk, but keeps
scribbling numbers.

Is Jake autistic? Or is he – as one
man (Danny Glover) claims – tied into a worldwide consciousness,
predicting things that standard minds can't detect?

You can bet on the latter, because Tim
Kring created the show. “We are more connected to one another than
we ever thought,” Kring said.

That was one theme of his “Heroes”
series. Now “Touch” – less serialized, not quite as much of a
fantasy – has one boy grasp all this.

The idea was basic, Kring said:
“Wouldn't it be interesting if that character who has this very
profound gift was ... the most disenfranchised person on the planet?
He's small? He's unable to communicate.”

He's played by David Mazouz, a relative
unknown who survived six auditions. A likable lad with Greek, French
and Tunisian roots, he's given to serious acting. “I don't want to
do Disney (Channel comedies),” he said. “They're way over-acted”

That makes him a kindred spirit of
Sutherland, who has always avoided overacting. “The opportunity
that I had in '24' – to have to repress all of this stuff and carry
that with me – informed the character beautifully for me,”
Sutherland said.

Now that era is over. Jack Bauer is
gone … except that Sutherland still wants to do a “24” movie.
Martin Bohm – sort of a real guy, with real emotions – is here.

– “Touch,” Fox

– Sneak preview at 9 p.m. Wednesday,
(Jan. 25), after “American Idol”

– Then scheduled to wait until March
19, airing at 9 p.m. Mondays – the old “24” slot