Mike Hughes on TV

Last year's Grammy telecast offered sensational television -- from Adele to the Beach Boys to moving Whitney Houston tributes.

And this year We won't know for sure until it happens, Sunday on CBS. This is a telecast that goes through constant changes, right up to showtime. Here's the story I sent to papers; a separate one will list details:

By MIKE HUGHES

The Grammy awards are coming Sunday,
with the usual stockpile of big-time, big-voice types.

Divas? The show starts with Taylor
Swift and later has Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Alicia Keys,
Miranda Lambert and Rihanna. One tribute will include 24-year-old
Brittany Howard (of Alabama Shakes) and 73-year-old Mavis Staples.

Guys range from newcomers – Frank
Ocean, Bruno Mars, Miguel – to Elton John. Producer Ken Ehrlich
recalled telling Nate Ruess (lead-singer of Fun) the list. “It was
just amazing to watch his eyes get wider with each name that I
mentioned.”

Yes, Fun will perform. So will the
other best-album nominees – Ocean, Jack White, The Black Keys and
Mumford & Sons. That's part of the show's policy of much music,
interrupted briefly by awards. “We have three hours of
entertainment, just one song after another,” Ehrlich said.

But don't take any plans too seriously.
Things change, acts are added, links are made. Last year's show –
which will be recalled in a CBS documentary, the night before the
Grammys – brought examples:

– Two days before that show, Paul
McCartney changed his mind about the closing number. Instead of
“1985,” he wanted to do the finale from the Beatles' “Abbey
Road” album. He promptly rounded up new bandmates – Dave Grohl of
Foo Fighters, Joe Walsh of The Eagles and Bruce Springsteen.

– And one day before the show,
Whitney Houston was found dead at 48.

“The first thing that came to mind
was I felt for Whitney and her family,” said Grammys host LL Cool
J. “And after that, I immediately called Ken and just started
asking questions.”

Ehrlich had already phoned Jennifer
Hudson. “I called her within a half-hour,” he said.

He wanted her to sing “I Will Always
Love You” in a style he calls “very empty,” with sparse
backing. “She broke down in rehearsal and couldn't get through it,”
he said, but triumphed during the show.

There would also be a Houston clip, but
LL Cool J wanted one thing more: “I thought, 'I don't have the
personal wisdom or creativity to tell millions of people what to feel
right now,” so he suggested a prayer. “I'm grateful that we did
it.”

In some previous years, there was no
one in his position. “We did not have a host for the Grammys for a
number of years (and) we were fine,” said Neil Portnow, head of the
academy that runs the awards.

But for the 2012 show, CBS had wanted
LL Cool J to host. “The fact that (he) became available was really
a gift to us,” Portnow said.

Here was someone who had won two
Grammys (best rap solo performance) long before he became a star of
CBS' “NCIS: Los Angeles.” People believe him when he talka about
music and about Houston; they believed him when he prayed.

In a show stuffed with music, even the
memorial section is involved . “We kind of invented the idea of a
musical salute,” Ehrlich said. This year, the music of the late
Levon Helm will be performed by Staples, Hamilton, Zac Brown and
Mumford & Sons.

Another key death in the past year was
Dick Clark, at 82. Ironically, he was a perpetual Grammy rival.

ABC had the first two Grammy telecasts,
then lost interest in 1973, when the show was moving to Nashville.
CBS grabbed it and has had decades of ratings hits. ABC's solution
was to have Clark create the American Music Awards; bitterness –
and at least one lawsuit – followed.

Ehrlich says he always got along with
Clark. “I rented office space from him, when I first moved” to
Los Angeles in 1976. Four years later, he became the Grammys producer
and they kept in contact. “After our shows, we would send each
other letters – favorable, usually.”

In 1990, the Emmys gave a Trustees
Award to its nemesis. On Sunday, it will add a memorial nod.

OK, the Super Bowl is over now. It was a good one, despite the black-out. (Beyonce has a spectacular light-and-sound extravaganza and then the electricity goes out. I'm not saying there's a connection, but next year's halftime show will have James Taylor with a flashlight and bongo drums.)

Anyway, now we get back to the rest of the TV world. The previous blogs dealt with two key shows Monday; now let's turn to the return (Tuesday) and makeover of "Smash." Here's the story I sent to papers:

(TV feature on “Smash,” one of TV's
most interesting shows, for good and bad. It returns Tuesday; story
works any time, print or Web.)

By MIKE HUGHES

“Smash” is back, promising to be
half what it used to be.

That's the good half, with stunning
musical numbers, passionate characters and the joy of watching a
Broadway musical in the making. Many critics loved that half … and
loathed the rest.

“I read everything,” producer Neil
Meron said of the negative reviews. “There were certain things that
I actually thought made a lot of sense.”

So the makeover began. The show's
creator (playwright Theresa Rebeck) was out; Joshua Safran (“Gossip
Girl”) was in. He says the second season will be “bigger, (with)
more original music, more musical sequences per hour.” It will also
be younger, with two key pop-rock additions:

– Jennifer Hudson, 31, plays a star
in three early episodes. That gives “Smash” two “American Idol”
alumni … neither a winner. Katharine McPhee was runner-up in 2006.
(“I voted for her like a million times,” said Megan Hilty, who
now plays her nemesis.) Two years earlier, Hudson finished seventh;
she went on to win an Oscar … and, on Sunday, to sing spectacularly
prior to the Super Bowl/

– Jeremy Jordan, 28, plays the key
newcomer – a waiter who is confident he'll create a great musical.

That partly reflects Jordan's past. “I
was a waiter … for like a year-and-a-half,” he said.

Jordan had grown up in Corpus Christi,
Texas, acting in community theater (directed by his grandmother) and
singing in choirs. He graduated from Ithaca College in 2007 and by
2009 was doing general chorus work in “Rock of Ages” on Broadway.
“I was so excited to be a swing on Broadway,” he said. “That
was like a dream come true.”

Bigger Broadway dreams would follow. He
was the back-up lead in “West Side Story,” starring twice a week
in one of Broadway's great roles. He starred in a failed “Bonnie
and Clyde” and a successful “Newsies,” getting a Tony
nomination. He co-starred in a movie (“Joyful Noise”), married
Ashley Spencer (who has done four Broadway musicals, none with him)
and started work on “Smash.”

Now he's key to the makeover. His
character writes songs for “Hit List,” which Andy Mientus (who
plays his writing partner) calls a “sort of off-off-Broadway,
fringe-y, edgy show.”

The new season follows the early
moments of “Hit List” and the tweaking of “Bombshell.” That's
the Marilyn Monroe musical that started last season, with epic
song-and-dance numbers. “When those moments worked in Season One, I
dare anybody to say what could be better,” Meron said.

At first, critics agreed. The pilot
episode was “positively magical,” Tanner Stransky of
Entertainment Weekly said. Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times
called it a “triumph”; Tim Goodman of the Hollywood Reporter
called it a “cable-quality drama … 'Glee' for grown-ups.”
Robert Bianco of USA Today called it “smart, focused, suspenseful,
musically on target and almost completely beguiling.”

Then that focus seemed to fade. After
writing the first three episodes, Rebeck wrote only three of the next
12, while returning to writing plays. “It was where her passions
really lay,” Meron said.

The plots that followed brought groans.
There were the family woes of the lyricist (Deborah Messing). There
was the hiring of a star who couldn't sing – then was poisoned by
the despised Ellis.

Maureen Ryan of the Huffington Post
called it “brain-meltingly bad.” Kevin Fallon of the Atlantic
bemoaned “how rapidly and sharply the show's quality has dipped.”
Bianco demanded solutions: “Leave Julia's deadweight of a family at
home. And no one is allowed to visit Ellis in prison.”

Ellis isn't in prison, but he's
off-camera. Other plots vanished as “Smash” tries to slice its
bad half.

– “Smash”opens season 9-11 p.m.
Tuesday (Feb. 5), NBC

– Then 10 p.m. Tuesdays

Now that the Super Bowl's over, there are plenty of other things to grab out attention. The previous blog deals with a superb new show, "Monday Mornings"; the one that follows this will deal with Tuesday's return of "Smash." First, here's the story I sent to papers, interviewing the people in a deeply involving HBO documentary that debuts Monday (Feb. 4) and reruns often:  

By MIKE HUGHES

Not yet a teen-ager, Terry Kohut felt
he had nowhere to turn.

He was sexually abused, he said, at a
school for the deaf in Wisconsin. “I couldn't tell anybody.”

Certainly not the administration. The
alleged abuser, Father Lawrence Murphy, was assistant director when
Kohut arrived (at age 10) in 1960; he became director in '63 and
school principal in '67.

And not his family. “My mother had a
lot of pain in her life,” Kohut said, through a sign-language
interpreter. “If I was to tell my mother, that was just one more
thing in her life.”

His father, he has said, committed
suicide. Kohut, then 11, returned to St. John's School for the Deaf,
in the Milwaukee suburb of St. Francis, keeping his own secret. “I
thought I was the only one being molested. Later on, I found that
everybody in my dorm was.”

There were many, said Sheila Nevins,
the president of HBO Documentary Films; “200 children were abused
by one Father there.” Now an HBO film views the long fight against
Murphy.

Students did finally take action,
sending a letter to Milwaukee Archbishop William Cousins in May of
1973. Then things moved slowly, critics say:

– It was a year before Murphy was
removed from his job as St. Johns director. He continued as
fund-raiser and alumni director for a few months, then was
transfered.

– Compensation was sparse, said
Laurie Goodstein, a New York Times reporter. “The very first victim
was promised a settlement of $5,000 …. They never even paid him the
money. (They) promised him the counseling; he never received the
counseling.”

– And for the rest of his life – 25
years after the first charges – Murphy remained a priest.

That last part is what caused Kohut to
finally come forward. In 1995, he sent a letter to Murphy, with a
copy to Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland.

“(I) would lay away every night,
shaking in fear that this would be a night you would touch me,”
Kohut wrote. “Can you imagine that? …. I remember almost
everything now. It is all so ugly.”

Wheatland wrote to Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), asking for a canonical trial. He
received a reply 10 months later, approving the trial. In January of
1998, however, Murphy pleaded for leniency, due to poor health.
Vatican officials advised against a trial; seven months after writing
that plea, Murphy died at 72, at a Northern Wisconsin casino.

“I begged the Vatican to please
defrock Father Murphy,” Kohut said. “It was very upsetting. I
only wanted justice, and they ignored me.”

Now he's hard to ignore. The
Archdiocese of Milwauee filed for bankruptcy protection; an
estimated 570 alleged sex-abuse victims pursued civil claims in
bankruptcy court.

The St. John's case has been crucial,
said Richard Sipe, once a Benedictine monk and now a counselor
dealing with sexual abuse. “You have people without a voice, having
a strong voice …. It's wonderful.”

– “Mea
Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”

– 9-11
p.m. Monday (Feb. 4), repeating at 4:05 a.m.

– Also:
11 a.m.Thursday (Feb. 7), 4 p.m. Feb. 9; 6:15 p.m. Feb. 15; 1 p.m.
and 11 p.m. Feb. 19; noon Feb.24.

reM

This is a busy TV time, so please read the previous blogs. There's one on the "Shakespeare Uncovered" on Friday (Feb. 1) and several on the Super Bowl and the shows that come before and after it.

But now we'll jump ahead to Monday (Feb. 4). I think "Monday Mornings" is the best new show since HBO's "The Newsroom." Here's the story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

For actors, words can be streaky
things.

Sometimes, they come in great cascades;
sometimes, they're parsed out sparingly. Just ask Keong Sim.

On stage, he's said: “What relish is
in this? How runs the stream? Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.”

And in a terrific new cable show, he
says this: “Sorry die. Not sorry did.”

In both cases, he was saying the words
of masters – William Shakespeare's “Twelfth Night,” David
Kelley's “Monday Mornings,” a new medical series on TNT.

Kelley has been doing this for decades,
from “L.A. Law” and “Picket Fences” to “Ally McBeal” and
“Boston Legal,” winning 10 Emmys. “He's even better than his
talent suggests,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who is producing the new
series with him. “He has a wonderful soul.”

And often, he gives his characters rich
bursts of dialog. In “Monday Mornings,” the chief of surgery lets
loose. It's “a chance to legitimately chew some scenery,”said
Alfred Molina, who plays him.

But then there's Dr. Sung Park, who
knows some English words, but is reluctant to use them. Gupta created
the character in his “Monday Mornings” novel, working from
experience. “With a lot of surgeons,” he said, “everything is
about efficiency in all aspects of their life, including language.”

And for Sim, this is new. “I was an
English-lit major, so I can kind of verbally have diarrhea,” he
said.

He grew up in a Vietnamese-American
family in Chicago, graduated from the University of Chicago, then did
theater, from comedy to musicals to Shakespeare. As Sebastian in
“Twelfth Night,” he had such verbal tangles as: “No, sooth,
sir: my determinate voyage is mere extravagency.”

Now he's Dr. Park, the exact opposite.
“He cuts right to the chase,” Gupta said.

Gupta's parents learned English as
children, then emigrated from India and were engineers for Ford. At
43, he lives in Atlanta with his wife (a lawyer), three daughters and
many lives; he's a neuorosurgeon, a medical-school associate
professor, CNN's medical correspondent and the author of three books.

“For the non-fiction books, I would
schedule my writing,” Gupta said. “I couldn't do that for
fiction; it was either there or not …. I wrote some on the plane to
Haiti.”

Kelley was reluctant to do another
medical show after six “Chicago Hope” seasons. “Then I read the
book and saw that it was completely different …. The staple of
this book were those M&M meetings.”

That's “morbidity and mortality,”
with doctors discussing what went wrong. “It is so raw,” Gupta
said. “It is so human; it is so candid. You shut the doors. The
administrators aren't invited; the lawyers aren't invited. This is
about the doctors holding each other accountable.”

It's a fine arena for a writer and
actors. There's Jamie Bamber, “Battlestar Galactica.” And
Jennifer Finnigan, who often does comedies; her husband, Jonathan
Silverman, is a doctor in several episodes. And Tony-winner Bill
Irwin, Tony-nominee Molina, Golden Globe-winner Ving Rhames and more.

Many have huge bursts of medical
phrases and emotional bursts. “By the end (of one day), I had no
more jaw muscles,” Sarayu Rao said.

And Sim sits back, ready to say it all
in five words.

– “Monday Mornings,” 10 p.m.
Mondays, TNT.

– Debuts Feb.4; opener repeats at
12:05 a.m., then at 11:30 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 9.

So now the subject turns to Shakespeare and Welsh archers and King Henry V's victory over the French at Agincourt.

This is mixed turf for me. I have knowledge gaps about Shakespeare, mostly because his words are so long and ... well, Shakespearean. People didn't talk like that in small-town Wisconsin, where I grew up.

I do know a little about Welsh archers, because my father was one. He aimed at deer, rather than Frenchmen, but the idea is the same. This instinct did not pass down to me; I root for the deer.

But the whole notion of Henry V and Agincourt is fascinating. Jeremy Irons talks about it in a PBS special Friday (Feb. 1); here's the story I sent to papers:

By MIKE HUGHES

On the fields of France, this looked
like an epic mismatch.

The French had a 5-to-1
advantage at Agincourt, some reports say, in October of 1415. They also had the
home-field advantage; British troops were weary and ill.

Then the British won big. That changed
history and fueled Shakespeare's “Henry V”; it's a key part of
“Shakespeare Uncovered” this week. “Standing on the field was
extraordinary,” said Jeremy Irons.

He was standing … and riding a horse
… and firing bow-and-arrow at the historic site. “The most
enthusiastic Jeremy ever was was when he was firing at me across the
field at Agincourt,” said Richard Denton, the “Uncovered”
producer.

And he was learning more about the
battle:

Yes, the British had emotion. In “Henry
V,” the 28-year-old king proclaims the might of “we few, we happy
few, we band of brothers.” But there were other keys to victory,
Irons said, including:

– Poor strategy on one side. “You
know the French. They are very classy and stylish and all of this ….
They wore amazing stuff and great armor and lovely horses, and they
pranced around being gorgeous.”

– Great Welsh archers. Using long
bows, they filled the sky with steel. “They were massive things,” Irons
said, with arrows that “would pierce armor, come straight through
your metal helmet …. Something like 30 tons of steel fell out of
the sky during Agincourt.”

Within two years, England had won the
northern half of France and Henry had married the French king's
daughter. It was a moment Englishmen cherished … and one
Shakespeare took advantage of, 185 years later. “He was the first
great showman,” Denton said.

Shakespeare had a new theater and
acting company to support. Knowing that audiences loved history
plays, he wrote four that encompassed the years from Richard II to
Henry V. He added.

– A zestful knight who returned in
two more plays. “Falstaff did become hugely popular,” Irons said.

– And, Irons said, “a
father-and-son relationship ….He was writing about the human
condition.”

In one play, Prince Hal clearly prefers
to party with Falstaff; his dad, King Henry IV, is saddened.

And in the next, Hal has become Henry
V, ready to lead a band of brothers – and an array of archers –
to an upset victory on the fields of France.

– “Shakespeare Uncovered,” 9-11
p.m. on three Fridays, PBS (check local listings)

– This week (Feb.1): “Richard II,” with
Derek Jacobi; “Henry IV” and “Henry V,” with Jeremy Irons

– Feb. 8: “Hamlet,” with David
Tennant; “The Tempest,” with director Trevor Nunn

– Already aired: “Macbeth,” with
Ethan Hawke; “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It,” with Joely
Richardson. You can find them under “video” at www.pbs.org.