Ready or not, TV is starting its Christmastime avalanche.
That starts with the Thanksgiving Day parade and ends with Christmas Day movie marathons . Over a four-week stretch (see the separate story for a full list), it will range from the classics – Rudolph and Frosty, Scrooge and the Grinch (shown here) and more – to the new.
Well, a few new things, anyway. Read more…
At the core of “Interior Chinatown” (shown here), which arrived recently on Hulu, is a waiter named Willis.
He’s someone we know, maybe someone we are. He goes through life being semi-noticed. A fan of cop shows, he feels he’s like a background player, the guy whose only function is to find a body or witness a crime.
Soon, that changes; this series – all 10 parts arrived at once — is filled with wondrous flights of fantasy. But before that, Willis symbolizes many people:
— Maybe undernoticed Asian-Americans. “I grew up watching TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I just never saw Asians,” Charles Yu, who wrote the series (and the book it’s based on), told the Television Critics Association. Read more…
We can quit worrying about orphaned situation comedies, floating around without partners.
Fox finally has a sitcom to pair with “Animal Control.” Those shows arrive Jan. 2 … six days before ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” finally gets a pairing.
For Fox, that’s part of a busy mid-season shuffle. The network adds an exceptionally strong drama (“Doc,” shown here) and obsesses on its Feb. 9 telecast of the Super Bowl. Read more…
This a question few of us are ever asked:
What’s it like, really, to carry an enormous cross?
“Heavier than I thought it would be,” Kaliko Kauahi said.
That duty falls to her in the third episode (shown here) of “St. Denis Medical,” which airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19. A patient insists surgery can’t begin until her cross arrives; it was up to Val (Kauahi’s character), the administrative nurse, to hoist it out of the truck and through the hospital corridors. Read more…
The music world has plenty of people who flash and fade, who soar and then sag.
But occasionally, it has someone whose work seems eternal. That includes Patsy Cline, the subject of a PBS concert at 9 p.m. Friday (Nov. 25), under the “Great Performances” banner. (Shown here is one of the performers, Grace Potter, at a previous evet.)
“The fact that we’re here, 61 years after her passing, is a testament” to her impact, Julie Fudge — who is Cline’s daughter and a producer of the special — told the Television Critics Association.
Yes, 61 years. On March 5, 1963, Cline died in a plane crash. She was 30, with a husband, a daughter and son (ages 4 and 2) and a rising career. Read more…
The world keeps showing us geniuses with tortured souls. We get a grumpy Beethoven, a dreary Poe, a troubled Michelangelo.
But then there was Leonardo da Vinci, resisting stereotypes.
“The sense we get … is that he was more-or-less a happy person,” said Sarah Burns, whose epic profile of him starts Monday (Nov. 18) on PBS. “That he was the life of the party, even, in some ways.”
He was a gifted painter (an example is shown here), in a vibrant time for eager thinkers.
“They’re in these bodegas, where they are learning math,” said David McMahon, Burns’ husband and filmmaking partner. “They’re reciting poetry. They’re playing music. It feels a little bit like Warhol’s Factory, without the (drugs).” Read more…
Kieran Haile was about 16 when an uncle handed him a book and mentioned a personal connection.
He said, “one of our granddads got chased out of town,” Halle recalled.
He promptly shrugged it off, as busy teens tend to do. The book told about the Wilmington, N.C., insurrection (shown here) and massacre of 1898, which is profiled in a PBS documentary at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12. At first, Haile considered that just another nasty footnote to history.
“Part of me was like, ‘Okay, so what?’” he told the Television Critics Association. “’Like, Black people have always suffered … Why should my family be any different?’” But this was very different. His great-great-grandfather ran the newspaper for a thriving Black community that was shattered by a mob. Read more…
David Alan Grier has finally entered his family legacy, working in a hospital.
Alas, it took him 68 years to get there. Also, it’s fictional.
Grier (shown here) stars in “St. Denis,” a hospital comedy from the “Superstore” and “American Auto” people. It debuts at 8 and 8:30 p.m. Tuesday on NBC, with Grier as a doctor he describes as “an old curmudgeon,” surrounded by people who are younger and more frantic.
That medical setting should sort of fit. Grier’s father was a psychiatrist; most of the offspring followed suit. “My brothers and sisters – psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, mental health,” he told the Television Critics Association. “That was all part of my upbringing …. I grew up around Black doctors.” Read more…
These used to feel like different worlds.
There were humans, with their cities and streets and such. And somewhere beyond, there was nature.
“Nature was ‘other,’” filmmaker Nate Dappen said. “It was something that you went to find and it wasn’t happening here.”
Until we found it everywhere. An example is “San Diego: America’s Wildest City” (shown here) at 8 p.m. Wednesday (Nov. 6) on PBS, under the “Nature” banner Read more…
So there is some logic to the TV world, after all:
Michael Emerson will soon be a recurring character on “Elsbeth,” the show that stars his wife, Carrie Preston. (They’re shown here.)
That starts Dec. 12, with Emerson-playing Milton Crawford. CBS says he’s a “haughty, soft-spoken judge” from a prominent New England family.
And yes, that combination has always seemed logical. “I would love, obviously, to have my husband come on the show,” Preston, 57, told the Television Critics Association session in July. Read more…
