Day: September 24, 2021

The British master old-cop/young-cop tales

American TV may savor the good-cop/bad-cop concept.
But in England – where crime shows flourish – there’s old-cop/young cop. Just ask Neil Dudgeon (shown here), whose “Midsomer Murders” is starting a four-movie stretch on the Acorn streaming service.
“I spent a lot of times as a younger actor, (paired with) a senior actor,” Dudgeon told the Television Critics Association. “And the senior actor would do all the thinking and be rather brilliant at solving a crime. And then he would say to me: ‘Oh, look, he’s run off into the river. Chase him!’” Read more…

Hearst: life in the Trump-Murdoch-Kane lane

William Randolph Hearst lived a life of dizzying extremes.
It was part-Trump and part-Murdoch, with bits of the fictional Charles Foster Kane. It rippled with power, both symbolic (a castle, shown here, a movie-star lover) and real, with newspapers, magazines and more.
But there were also parts of Hearst that were surprisingly mellow. “People were expecting something as brash as his newspapers,” Victoria Kastner, a Hearst historian, told the Television Critics Association. “Actually, he was quite courtly and an elegant man with a sense of humor.”
astner – former official historian for Hearst’s San Simeon estate – is one of the commentators in a four-hour “American Experience” profile, from 9-11 p.m. Monday and Tuesday (Sept. 27-28) on PBS. Read more…

Best-bets for Sept. 26: Broadway’s back, with Tonys and more

1) Tony Awards, 7-9 p.m. ET, Paramount+. Back in March of 2020, Broadway suddenly closed. No one knew when it would be back or what would happen to the Tony Awards, with half the season’s shows still waiting to open. Now we know: Audra McDonald hosts a ceremony (a year late) for the half-season that happened. That skips three categories; see next item. And one category — best actor in a musical — has only one nominee, Aaron Tveit (shown here) in “Moulin Rouge.” Read more…