Stories

Yes, crime world has room for savvy veterans

Even in a show about a young drug dealer, there’s room for wizened character and veteran actors.
Consider “Power Book III: Raising Kanan,” which starts its fifth and final season at 8 p.m. Friday on Starz. The show began with a teen druglord-wannabe; still, it also has room for people who have done Shakespeare, Broadway and situation comedies, including:
— Tony Danza, 75, who began doing sitcoms almost a half-century ago. Now he’s a Mafia godfather.
— Wendell Pierce, 65, who jumps between Shakespeare’s “Othello” onstage and a good-nature police captain in “Elsbeth.” Now he plays what he calls “just one of the coolest, most laidback gangsters in South Jamaica, Queens.”
— And Patina Miller (shown here), 41. She’s been a vibrant musical-theater star on Broadway and in London. Now she plays what Pierce calls “a character we’ve never seen before — a Black woman leading a crime family.” Read more…

By Mike Hughes / June 7, 2026

Stories

Summer streamers push us to old and new worlds

As June arrives, we start scrambling around the TV universe.
Broadcast networks are sinking into a summer of reruns and reality. If we want more … well, that’s why the world invented streaming and cable.
Some shows, listed below, offer the full range. One (“Little House on the Prairie”) takes us back to the frontier; others — including new “Simpsons” episodes and a “Big Bang Theory” spin-off (shown here) — fling us into alternate worlds.
There are shows produced by Barack Obama (who was elected president) and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (who was arrested, as a teen, for drug-dealing) and Mindy Kaling (who was Kelly in “The Office”).
In short, there’s a lot. This sampling leans heavily on the start of the summer, with more announcements expected. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 31, 2026

Stories

Late-night: Networks coveted it; CBS abandoned it

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…

By Mike Hughes / May 28, 2026

Stories

Brooke faces the big questions — murder, technology and Canadian niceness

It’s time to probe two of life’s persistent stereotypes:
A) Older folks have trouble keeping up with modern times; and B) Canadians are really, really nice.
Our guides (via a Zoom interview) are Brooke Shields, 60, and Amalia Williamson, 31. They star in “You’re Killing Me” (shown here), the “cozy mystery” series that streams new episodes Mondays at www.acorn.tv. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 21, 2026

Stories

Summer TV: sports, games, a few dramas and more

The summer TV season looms, bringing a little of this, a little of that and a lot of sports.
A lot. Basketball has staked out June 3-19 on ABC; baseball has Saturdays on Fox and Sundays on NBC. And this year, Fox obsesses on soccer’s World Cup, from June 11 to July 19.
Around that, however, there’s room for a modest number of non-reruns, including (shown here” NBC’s “Surviving Earth.”
The streamers will keep pouring out new shows, year-round. (Netflix, for instance, has its promising “Little House on the Prairie” reboot July 9.) But for this overview, we’ll look at the five major broadcast networks.
Most of the big summer shows are back (“America’s Got Talent,” “Big Brother,” “Family Feud,” etc.), except for the troubled “Bachelorette.” Fox started two of the best shows — “The 1% Club” and “MasterChef” — early. Also, PBS has its Sunday dramas, plus lots of documentaries, new and old.
Added to that are three new series. We’ll start there: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 18, 2026

Stories

250th celebration adds music, fireworks, more

For public-TV, America’s 250th-birthday celebration has added a key step.
Now it will be a “weekend celebration.”
Previously scheduled on PBS was the tentatively titled “America Made in Virginia: 250 Years Together,” on Saturday, July 4. Now the night before has “A Capitol Fourth” (shown here in a previous year) including a new song (“American Made”) from Trace Adkins and fireworks above George Washington’s Mount Vernon home.
Yes, that means this “Fourth” event will actually be on the third, but that’s nothing new: Through its 37 years, “The National Memorial Day Concert” has been on the eve of the holiday; now “Capitol Fourth,” from the same producers, will do the same.
Those two events help bookend the public-TV celebration: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 14, 2026

Stories

Fox’s fall feels familiar; new shows will wait

There will be one thing missing from Fox’s new fall line-up. That’s … well, “new.”
The network has renewed most of this season’s shows (including “Best Medicine,” shown here), but will start the season with zero new shows.
There are a few coming later — a “Baywatch” reboot, plus Stephen Fry’s “Interrogator” and the “Marriage Market” reality show — but they’re not expected until January.
“We have a rich history of launching shows in the mid-season,” said Michael Thorn, the network president. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 11, 2026

Stories

Ted Turner’s death at 87: the gambler cable needed

There was a time when cable-TV was more than a swap meet or a corporate shell game.
It was an adventure and it needed risk-takers. It needed people like Ted Turner, who died today (Wednesday, May 6) at 87.
Turner eventually merged his empire — CNN, TBS, TNT, TCM — into Warner Brothers, then regretted it. Warner has since been part of three more mega-deals..
Huge fortunes have been made by men whose names we’ll quickly forget. Turner will always be remembered.
I’ve written about him in my book-in-progress, “Television, and How It Got That Way.” Here are those portions: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 6, 2026

Stories

This is Broadway’s time, on TV and beyond

For much of the year, the world sort of forgets about Broadway. Then comes a two-month surge.
In New York, that means a fresh world of dancing cats, rocking vampires and an entire village consumed by show tunes.
And for the rest of us. watching on TV sets? First, PBS delivers a four-Friday stretch of music, old (“Top Hat” is shown here) and fairly new. Then CBS has the Tony Awards. Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 6, 2026

Stories

His first century has been mostly splendid

David Attenborough’s first century has been quite splendid or rather tragic.
The good news: Attenborough — who turns 100 on Friday (May 8) — revolutionized the way we see nature on TV.
“People had never seen a pangolin on television,” he wrote. “They had never seen a sloth. We showed them the largest lizard … and, for the first time, birds-of-paradise dancing in the New Guinea forest.”
And the bad? During his century, he wrote, nature has struggled. “This is the true tragedy of our time: the spiraling decline of our planet’s biodiversity.”
Now come ample chances to survey both extremes: Read more…

By Mike Hughes / May 2, 2026