Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

Video presentation here. The official word: CBS today unveiled its new 2020-2021 primetime programming lineup featuring one new comedy, two new dramas and 23 returning series. Additional new series will be announced at a later date. For 2019-2020, the Network finished #1 for the 12 th  straight season, winning 17 of the past 18 seasons. The two new shows for fall include the comedy B POSITIVE, from award-winning executive producer, writer and creator Chuck Lorre and Marco Pennette, starring Emmy Award nominee Thomas Middleditch and Tony Award winner Annaleigh Ashford, and the drama THE EQUALIZER, starring Academy Award nominee and multi-hyphenate Queen Latifah. The shows debuting later in the season include the new drama CLARICE from acclaimed executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet, starring Rebecca Breeds in the title role, and returning favorites S.W.A.T. and UNDERCOVER BOSS. In addition, CBS will broadcast SUPER BOWL LV on Feb. 7, 2021. “ We’re excited to c...

Reality, sports and some pickups from elsewhere. The official announcement: Responding to real-time shifts in the marketplace, FOX, this season’s #1 network among Adults 18-49, and the only network to experience year-to-year growth in the demo and Total Viewers, is announcing its Fall 2020 schedule. The programming slate includes Season Four of television’s #1 series, THE MASKED SINGER, new drama series NEXT and FILTHY RICH, as well as all-new seasons of returning animated series THE SIMPSONS, BLESS THE HARTS, BOB’S BURGERS and FAMILY GUY, along with Gordon Ramsay’s hit cooking competition series, MASTERCHEF JUNIOR. Also, making its network television debut is police drama L.A.’S FINEST, starring Jessica Alba and Gabrielle Union, along with the third installment of COSMOS, entitled COSMOS: POSSIBLE WORLDS. In midseason, original programming includes 9-1-1 and the #1 new drama 9-1-1: LONE STAR; along with new comedy CALL ME KAT, starring Mayim Bialik and executive-produced ...

On the first full weekend in March, we flew from Ohio to Virginia for my 93-year-old mother's funeral. That alone would have had me thinking about the impermanence of life, although it is hardly the only death in the family. Both my wife and I lost spouses. My father died more than 20 years ago. Both of my wife's parents are gone. Last year we bid farewell to a beloved uncle. There had been many months of late when Mom's various ailments had me wondering when the call about her would come. Yet when it did, it was wrenching; I still have those times when I think I should be calling her, and she has been in the front or back of my mind ever since she passed. Moreover, our funeral travels took place during the beginning of the larger national grappling with mortality. COVID-19 was in the air, and the alarms about it visible at airports, where the desks by the departure gates had bottles of hand sanitizer and you could begin to see people in gloves and masks. We returned t...

Like most of you, I have been trying to find ways to fill the days. There has been work, still, as I struggle to teach online, and the bride wrangles church work.We've been catching up on home projects, or starting new ones. Yesterday I put together new porch furniture we ordered -- although it won't be going outside until after an expected windstorm has passed. We have posters to put up in one of the rooms, and may have figured out the wall arrangement; we're one frame order away from getting that done. I reconfigured some things on the walls in my room. There has been TV watching -- Little Fires Everywhere, the completely nutty season premiere of The Good Fight, a slow binge through Rizzoli and Isles (easy to kill time when the brain demands little, but not something that I  feel guilty about watching) and, recently, a march through the Fast and the Furious movies, seeing the transition from a movie that took itself seriously to one that saw amusement in its core to th...

One of the oddities in the new season of Brockmire  is that, in the 2030s, Jim Brockmire's pornographic fantasy includes Ann-Margret. Brockmire seems too young to have connected with the singer-actress who is a major element of '60s iconography in the Mad Men  Season 3 episode "Love Among the Ruins." Her performance in Bye Bye Birdie  (some of which is above) was so ... invigorating that even the closeted-gay Sal recalls seeing a Broadway actress in the role who, when compared to Ann-Margret, "didn't have that. "* And Ann-Margret did have that: a sexiness that was not coy and coquettish; she was unabashed, hungry, eager -- and knowing. One of the flaws in her casting in Bye Bye Birdie is that she seems too smart for some of the fan-girl excesses in the part. Consider her instead in Viva Las Vegas, nominally a cornball Elvis Presley movie but one where attention diverts to Ann-Margret whenever she is onscreen, no matter how badly a sequence itself has...

The song "Blue Skies" has a long history , longer in fact than I realized. I think the first version of the song that I know was Benny Goodman' s, and the song predates that vintage gem, For that matter, I did not know that "Blue Skies" has an extensive connection to "Star Trek: The Next Generation ," which explains its appearance in the season finale of "Star Trek: Picard." What was strikingly resonant about its inclusion was that the season finale of "This Is Us" also involved the song, lovingly, in a monologue by Dr. K (the great Gerald McRaney), the doctor who delivered Kate and Kevin and brought Randall to the family. The monologue was pretty good, although the show conceded that it was not as good as a previous Dr. K chat, and much the same could be said of "This Is Us" overall this season. Yes, there were astounding moments, including the nothing's-sacred verbal brawl between Kevin and Randall in the final...

Most of my recent reading has been on the lighter side: easily digested detective stories to distract from daily events without demanding too much. A major exception is Allison Moorer's book, above. Moorer is a well-regarded singer-songwriter and the sister of another fine musician, Shelby Lynne. In addition to their solid solo work, they collaborated on the album Not Dark Yet, which everyone should listen to. But Blood is only partly about music and sisterhood; the driving force to it is Moorer trying to deal with a family nightmare: her father killed her mother and then himself outside the family home when the girls were in their teens. Working through events, memories, life before and after, relationships, songs, family and how to understand something that is basically incomprehensible -- Moorer has created a poetic examination of what pain does to the heart and the soul. Moorer has also released a deeply wrought album called Blood, but you do not need to hear it to feel ...