As the holiday week unfolds, some stars grab our attention.
There are a couple of Grammers and a couple of “Dr. Quinn” alumni. Mario Lopez shows up three times; so do the Rockettes (shown here). Here are some glimpses: Read more…
In acting terms, let’s think of this as a long pause – a 30-year one, actually,.
In 1992, Danny Pintauro finished his eight-year run on “Who’s the Boss?” He had done the show for half his life; he’d also done movies and a soap opera. It was time for a break, including college.
Then the break got longer. When Lifetime’s “A Country Christmas Harmony”(shown here with Pintauro and Brooke Elliott) arrives at 8 p.m. Friday (Nov. 18), it will be the first time most viewers have seen him acting in three decades.
In the interim, he said, he faced “the trauma of being a child actor” and “of being outed so early.”He was addicted to meth and tested positive for HIV. Read more…
Two kindred spirits, a generation apart, have merged in the macho-man TV world. There’s:
— Sylvester Stallone, 76. He created John Rambo and Rocky Balboa, 40 and 46 years ago.
— Taylor Sheridan, about 52. Four years ago, he created John Dutton and “Yellowstone.”
Now they’ve combined for “Tulsa King,” which has a two-part arrival: On Sunday (Nov. 13), it debuts on the Paramount+ streamer; a week later, its first two episodes will be on cable – 9 and 10 p.m. Nov. 20, right after “Yellowstone,” on the Paramount Network. “We’re both steeped in the alpha tradition where, you know, life is hard,” Stallone told the Television Critics Associatioon. Read more…
So now we know what we might be doing during a long, cold winter.
We can stare at our TV sets, catching lots of shows that are new or semi-new or, at least, re-arranged.
This week, ABC, NBC and Fox announced their mid-season plans. Combined, in January and February they’ll have five new drama series (two of them about missing-persons units), three new comedies (including “Not Dead Yet,” shown here with Gina Rodriguez), three new reality shows and about a dozen season-openers, plus some shows changing nights. Read more…
Sasha Clayton and Nicole Lecky have a lot in common, actually.
Both are blessed with beauty and musical talent. But both grew up in London’s hard-scrabble East End, with no easy way to get into show business.
From there, they diverge wildly. Sasha is fictional, the central character in “Mood,” a six-part mini-series (with music) on AMC+ and BBC America. In the opener (10 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6), she lashes out fiercely at … well, everyone; her world implodes.
And Lecky (shown here) is real. She stars, sings, wrote the scripts, overcame the things that shattered Sasha. “It was a mixture of, I guess, talent and tenacity,” she told the Television Critics Association. Read more…
Here are some moments in the life of a successful TV actor. Jim Hoffmaster (shown here) was:
1) Visiting his high school alma mater in Durand, Mich., when a young woman rushed in, grinning. She was meeting the guy who played Kermit on “Shameless” – “my favorite character on my favorite show.” Later, he was cheered at a street fair in Lansing, Mich.; it was, he said, “the closest I’ve ever been to being mobbed.”
2) Back home in Los Angeles, in his crowded studio apartment. No, he doesn’t have elegant dinner parties there. In fact, he never has guests … and he sometimes eats soup straight from the can.
Those scenes are in “Acting Like Nothing is Wrong,” a documentary now reaching film festivals (including the East Lansing Film Festival on Nov. 10). The contrasts — a vivid view of the life of a supporting actor — will surprise viewers … as they surprised the filmmaker. “He warned me what his apartment was like,” Jane Rosemont said, “but it was still a bit of a shock.” Read more…
Here’s a fresh approach to daddy-daughter problems:
He had too much alcohol and too many absences. She avoided him. “The only way these two were going to heal their relationship was on the set of their own NBC sitcom,” Debby Wolfe said.
Now that show is here. “Lopez vs. Lopez” (shown here) debuts at 8 p.m. Friday (Nov. 4) on NBC; Wolfe created it, with George and Mayan Lopez playing versions of themselves that are exaggerated – a little.
“There was a time when we didn’t speak and were estranged for about three years,” Mayan told the Television Critics Association. That split, George said, “was so painful and so much my fault.” Read more…
When Leslie Jordan first got there, Hollywood knew what a star should look like.
That was 40 years ago, when TV was dominated by Tom Selleck and Selleck types. A star would be 6-foot-4, handsome, a lades man, with a Midwestern-type voice.
And Jordan (shown here), who died Monday (Oct. 24), was the exact opposite. He was 4-foot-11, gay, with an impish charm and a pronounced Tennessee accent.
“I realized that my job was the funny guy that comes in with the zingers,” he told the Television Critics Association in 2018. Read more…
After decades of TV movies, Kellie Martin (shown here) had a good reason to step back.
That was during the start of the pandemic, when her daughters were 13 and 4. “They had never needed me more,” she recalled. “There was so much to figure out, with online schools and everything else.”
Now, two and a half years later, she’s finally returned to acting. She has a small and dead-serious role in “An Amish Sin,” at 8 p.m. ET Saturday (Oct. 29) on Lifetime.
Her return, she said, was partly because of the story – from real-life accounts of Amish girls whose sexual abuse reports were discounted. And also because a friend asked her to. Read more…
It’s a subject that’s close to most people, elusive to some.
It sometimes soars above us, sometimes not. It droops or dazzles or delights or just disappears.
We’re talking about hair, and the special role it has had in Black history, before and after the Afro-powered (shown here) ’70s. Now that’s the subject of “Hair Tales,” a six-hour series available on Hulu and (9 p.m. Saturdays) on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
Yes, six hours on hair. There’s a lot to talk about, said producer Michaela Angela Davis. “There’s joy, there’s resilience, there’s challenge. There’s history … there’s hysteria.”
