Day: May 28, 2020

News and Quick Comments

It’s a Connicks/COVID road trip

CBS is preparing another special stuffed with social-distance music.
This one is led by Harry Connick Jr. and his daughter, Georgia (shown here), a filmmaker. “United We Sing: A Grammy Salute to the Unsung Heroes” (8-10 p.m. June 21), a road trip to New Orleans, will include the greats of jazz (Herbie Hancock, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Jon Baptiste, Irma Thomas, Trombone Shorty) and pop.
Connick grew up in New Orleans, where Ellis Marsalis (the father of Wynton and Branford) was one of his music teachers. Marsalis died April 1 at 85, of pneumonia brought on by COVID-19. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 28, 2020

Stories

“Quiz” captures a TV obsession

Back in 1998, all of England seemed obsessed with “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?”
Old people watched it; they always seem to like quiz shows. But so, surprisingly, did others.
“I was 18 years when it launched,” writer James Graham, whose delightful “Quiz”(shown here) starts Sunday on AMC, told the Television Critics Association in January.
He first saw it on a Saturday, he said. “I was a hugely geeky child. I should have been out with my friends, but I was at home with my grandparents watching.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 28, 2020

Daily Best Bets

Best-bets for May 30: Fun with Wiig and Carell

1) “Saturday Night Live,” 11:29 p.m., NBC. Over a three-week stretch, “SNL” has been rerunning its social-distance episodes. Here’s the third one, a season finale that’s erratic, but shows improvement. Alec Baldwin opens the show as a bleach-gulping president, Kristen Wiig (shown here in a previous setting) hosts, Boyz II Men (plus Babyface) are music guests and Tina Fey has a terrific bit about the woes of sudden home-schooling. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 28, 2020