1) “America’s Got Talent” season-opener, 8-10 p.m. Tuesday, NBC. The ratings leader is back, ready to spend most of the summer on auditions. The panel — Simon Cowell (shown here), Sofia Vergara, Howie Mandel and Mel B — will see lots of acts, some of them weird and most of them talented. On Aug. 18, they’ll finally shift to live shows, with viewers voting, Read more…
1) “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984, shown here) and its sequel (1987), 6 and 8:15 p.m., Sundance. On Sunday, Netflix will add this year’s ceremony, with the America Film Institute giving Eddie Murphy its Lifetime Achievement Award. First, here are two of his best films, skillfully mixing action, intensity and big, Murphy-style humor. Read more…
Strolling through a broadcast museum recently, I was struck by:
1) The immense role of late-night TV; and
2) How odd it is that CBS shed its late-night role. By dumping Stephen Colbert, it abandoned a slot it had struggled to get.
For CBS, late-night had long been a serious void. It was the “empty piece of the jigsaw puzzle that’s glared at us over the decades,” Howard Stringer, the network president, once told reporters.
That void was filled by David Letterman in 1993 and then by Colbert in 2015. For 33 years, CBS had a piece of what NBC has had almost forever. Read more…
