1) “Nature,” 8 p.m., PBS. Here’s a fresh approach, centering on a tree that prospered for five centuries in the Scottish highland. The hour imagines the natural history around it and adds some human history – farmers, rebels, even the future Queen Mary. The notion is a stretch, but it offers gorgeous scenes (the generic Scottish scene here isn’t from the show), plus insights into evolving nature. Read more…
PASADENA — On the way to becoming a TV star and producer, Melissa Rauch (show here) was strongly impacted by laundry appliances – twice.
Really. These days, she stars in the revived “Night Court” (8 p.m. Tuesdays, NBC, starting Jan. 17), a show she and her husband willed into existence, in the midst of a pandemic and a baby boom.
But long before that, there were times when she scrambled for comedy gigs. “There were stand-up nights in a laundromat,” she recalled. “People would be doing their laundry next to you.”
And much earlier, Rauch found herself being mocked for her height, or lack thereof. Her mother’s suggestion was to have fun with it; they concocted a story: “I would tell people that I was playing hide-and-seek in the dryer and someone accidentally turned it on.” It was a clever notion that, alas, backfired: “Now I was the weird kid who shrunk in the dryer.” Read more…
