After putting “The Real Love Boat” in drydock, CBS has a mid-season plan for Wednesdays.
The night will no longer be all-reality. This winter, it will juggle reality (“Tough as Nails,” then “Survivor”), game shows (“Lingo” and “The Price is Right at Night”) and an action series (shown here) – a fresh twist on the James Cameron film, “True Lies.” Read more…
The movie “Father of the Bride” has already been made twice – first with Spencer Tracy and then (shown here) with Steve Martin. So let’s try it again:
The setting this time is Florida and the time is … well, this Saturday, Nov. 12. The bride’s name is Tiffany, after the place where rich people buy glitter to impress each other. And the wedding will be at her father’s resort.
By custom, a wedding is all about the bride. This time, however, that’s problematic. For this father of the bride, it’s always all about him.
At a reception, the father’s speech or toast should be five minutes or less, filled with kind words. But that’s not his style; he likes to talk for two hours or more, mostly about himself and about people he’s mad at. Read more…
CBS has re-discovered Christmas – and has Mariah Carey (shown here) to prove it.
The network announced today (Nov. 10) that it will have a two-hour Carey concert, at 8 p.m. Dec. 20. She’ll sing in Madison Square Garden, including her perennial hit, “All I Want For Christmas is You.”
The show will also spread across the rest of the Paramount universe – on Paramount+ and rerunning at times (not yet announced) on MTV. Read more…
A speck of sanity has been restored: Jimmy Kimmel (shown here) will return to hosting the Academy Awards.
That will be March 12 and will be much-needed. In a statement, Kimmel said being chosen a third time is “either a great honor or a trap.”
It may feel like both. Let’s review: Read more…
(Finding Leslie Jordan’s final TV work on Fox has been a bit tricky. His “Call Me Kat” episode, on Nov. 3, was bumped by the World Series; so was his visit to “The Masked Singer” on Nov. 2. The latter was rescheduled for 8 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6 … but will be bumped again, if the Series goes to seven games. Meanwhile, here’s the story I wrote after Jordan died in a car accident.)
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) at 67, 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…
There was a brief time when Thursdays were overloaded with great medical dramas. “ER” and “Chicago Hope” collided.
And now? Tuesdays are the time for very good – and, at times, great – ones.
Last week (Oct. 25), it was “The Resident” with one of its best episodes, complete with a wedding and a crisis. This week (Nov. 1), “New Amsterdam” (shown here) soars.
The two don’t directly compete anyway; “Resident” is usually 8 p.m. on Fox, “New Amsterdam” is 10 p.m. on NBC. That’s especially true this week, because the World Series has taken over Fox; “Resident” fans might seek out “New Amsterdam” to fill their no-doctors-tonight void. Read more…
For people who want ther shows to be offbeat, off-kilter and other-worldly, here are two pieces of good (sort of) news:
— “Doctor Who” will be around for a long time … albeit a bit harder to find. When it finally returns (in November of 2023), it will be on the Disney+ streaming service.
— And “Miracle Workers” has another season set. That starts at10 p.m. Jan. 23 on TBS, with Daniel Radcliffe and Geraldine Viswanathan in, the network says, “a dystopian future full of radioactive mutants, killer robots and a tyrannical homeowner’s association.”
“Who” has been around since 1963 (with long pauses) and has had 13 people starring as The Doctor. The current one, Jodie Whittaker, was the first female Doctor; David Tennant, who was the 10th Doctor, will do some specials, before Ncuti Gatwa becomes the show’s first Black star. Read more…
It took 100 episodes to get there, but “The Resident” is where it should be. So, at last, is Dr. Bell.
In short, the episode (shown here) that airs tonight (8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27, on Fox) is surprisingly good. It’s:
— The third-best “Resident” episode yet. The only ones better were a clever Halloween-out-of-town hour, a few years back, and a post-pandemic season-opener.
— And the second-best broadcast-TV hour I’ve seen this fall, topped only by the second episode of ABC’s “Alaska Daily. Read more…
Alongside the agony of war in Ukraine (shown here), there’s another process: documenting war crimes.
The result, said Tom Jennings – director of a “Frontline” report at 10 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 25) on PBS – will be a tribunal that “will essentially be a new Nuremberg: Nuremberg 2.0.”
That, however, would be a long time from now. Raney Aronson-Rath, the “Frontline” producer, points to the successful conviction of Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian general. That “took over five years – just the trial …. Collecting of evidence before that was multiple years.” Read more…
Long before Angela Lansbury solved murders on TV, she had a vibrant movie career.
That started 40 years before “Murder, She Wrote,” when the teen-aged Lansbury drew an Academy Award nomination for “Gasligh.” (show here, behind Oscar-winner Ingrid Bergman. She would get another nomination the next year (for “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) and another 17 years later, for her chilling maternity in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Now all three films are part of a 24-hour tribute to Lansbury that Turner Classic Movies has set for Nov. 21. She died Tuesday, five days shy of her 97th birthday; see separate commetary here. Read more…
