Day: March 17, 2021

Best-bets for March 19: Basketball tourney hits full-speed

1) Basketball, CBS. The first full day of the NCAA tournament wipes out CBS’ soap operas and cop shows, plus various talk and game shows. The best games should be the ones with similar seeds: On CBS, that’s 12:15 p.m. ET (Florida, No. 7 seed in a 16-team region, and Virginia Tech, No. 10) and 7:10 (North Carolina, No. 8, and Wisconsin, shown here, No. 9). The others are at 3 p.m. ET (Ohio State, No. 2), and Oral Roberts, No. 15) and 9:40 (San Diego State, No. 6, and Syracuse, No. 11). Read more…

“Aretha” soars along a vast and soulful life

Some lives are neat and fun-sized; they can easily be condensed into a movie or less.
Then there are the grand exceptions: Starting at 9 p.m. Sunday (March 21), the National Geographic Channe;’s four-night, eight-hour mini-series (shown here) will view the overflowing life of the late Aretha Franklin.
“Aretha had such … a long career,” writer-producer Suzan-Lori Parks told the Television Critics Association, She had “a beautiful life, full of peaks and valleys that we can only imagine living.”
Her music reflected that range. She went from gospel to jazz, then was dubbed “the queen of soul.” She rocked; she dabbled in disco. And when Luciano Pavarotti turned ill, she sang opera at the Grammys. Read more…