Day: April 9, 2021

Small-town Wales propels big-time actors

It took a mere half-century for two sorta-neighbors to meet and work together.
That’s on “Prodigal Son” (9 p.m. Tuesdays on Fox), which has just returned from a month-long break. Michael Sheen co-stars and Catherine Zeta-Jones has joined the cast; they play doctors at a prison (shown here), with a key difference: She’s an employee, he’s a prisoner.
Here are two people who grew up in the same southwestern area of Wales, at the same time, yet never quite met. “We actually have childhood friends” in common, Zeta-Jones told the Television Critics Association. “My mom and dad know his dad.” And yet, they’d “never met before; I’d admired (him) from a distance.”
That distance was about 5,000 miles. Zeta-Jones, 51, became a Hollywood star – an Oscar-winner (“Chicago”), married to an Oscar-winner (Michael Douglas) – while Sheen, 52, was starring in British theater and TV. Read more…

Best-bets for April 11: a horror hello, a shameful goodbye

1) “The Nevers” (shown here) debut, 9 p.m., HBO. Victorian-era society seems far removed from fantasy horror. Still, 19th-century England gave us Frankenstein and Hyde and Jack the Ripper and more. And now it’s the backdrop for a cosmic event, leaving many people (women, mostly) as “the touched.” An orphanage patron (Olivia Williams) shelters them, a brothel owner (James Norton) pursues them and a cop (Ben Chaplin) feels torn. Read more…