Southern Bookman

Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon back together at "Pardon the Interruption" studio

Tony Kornheiser returned to the "Pardon the Interruption" studio Monday for his first on-set appearance with co-host Michael Wilbon since before the Covid epidemic began.

For nearly four years, Kornheiser's been doing the daily show from his home.

Kornheiser joked that he'd awakened from a dream in which he'd been doing the show from his basement and attic for four years.

Wilbon cracked in a pop-culture reference for the show's baby-boomer audience that Kornheiser was like Bobby Ewing from the old "Dallas" show, returning as if nothing had happened.

In contrast to Kornheiser, Wilbon's been doing one of ESPN's signature shows from various locations around the country, sometimes appearing on the Washington, D.C. set.

As Kornheiser frequently jokes about, Wilbon often performs from Phoenix and Chicago, where he has homes. He also broadcasts from cities where he does his NBA Countdown show.

The PTI on-set reunion appears brief: Wilbon at the end of the show said he'd be traveling again, and Kornheiser sounded unclear about whether he'll regularly appear in the studio.

That raised speculation about whether Kornheiser's return is a prelude to his retiring.

Old-time viewers like me hope that's not the case. Each day, I look forward to his benediction "Happy time, people."

 

 

 

 

Alabama-Georgia game marks end of SEC games on CBS, a beloved Southern ritual

The Southern tradition of Saturday afternoon SEC games ends this weekend.

For years, the network's stirring theme at 3:30 p.m. meant the party had begun. Time for beer, bourbon and football.

CBS' broadcast turned SEC football into a national event. The Iron Bowl, Florida-Georgia, LSU-Ole Miss: The memories of great players, big plays and crazy coaches flood back.

No more War Eagle, Vols, Tigers, Crimson Tide, Dawgs, Wildcats, Gators, Commodores, Rebels, Aggies on the network whose logo looks like a Sunday morning hungover eye.

The cheerleaders, the bands, the stadium crowds from Gainesville to Athens to Oxford to Tuscaloosa to Auburn to Baton Rouge trumpeted regional pride.

Verne Lundquist, the longtime SEC voice, was our kindly uncle, turning stadium press boxes into our common front porch. 

Next season, the SEC game shifts to ESPN. The "world leader" has shown SEC games for years, but even with Chris and Kirk, they never matched CBS

Sadly, the SEC's beloved partner will now show the country Big Ten games.

Saturday afternoon's Alabama-Georgia showdown also marks the end of the SEC infrastructure fans have come to know and love for years.

With Oklahoma and Texas joining the SEC, the East-West division setup will be scrapped for a conference-wide free-for-all. Instead of the division winners, the top two finishers during the regular season will compete for the SEC title.

Traditional games like LSU-Mississippi State, which have endured since the 19th century, will be erased.

The already bloated Big Ten will add USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington from the ravaged Pac-12. That will at least give the Big Ten more appealing games than its present surfeit of mediocre teams like Rutgers, Northwestern, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, and so on.

Perhaps CBS might find a game or two almost as appealing as Michigan-Ohio St., at present the only Big Ten game the nation cares to watch.

CBS' chatty Brad Nessler has never replaced Uncle Verne in SEC fans' hearts, and we loved to hate color analyst Gary Danielson.

Yet, they also became part of the SEC nation. Nessler's last goodbye will bring an end to a great era of SEC football.

 

You need a scorecard to keep up with college sports realignment

This will be the last season of college football stability that has prevailed since the last conference shakeups.

In the most recent round of upheavals, the venerable Pac 12 imploded with the exit of Oregon and Washington to the bloated Big 10 and Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to the Big 12, which has nicely rebounded from the loss of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC.

The new conference lineups kick off in 2024, making this a lame-duck season for the current configurations.

With the Pac-12 unable to land a TV contract, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah headed for the life boats, following last year's bombshell when USC and UCLA announced they were joining the Big 10.

Old rivals were abandoned: Oregon State, Washington State, Stanford and Cal. That's what's left of the Pac 12, which once pioneered expansion.

The SEC for now doesn't plan to add any new teams beyond the Sooners and Longhorns, although Florida State is unhappy with the ACC and would like to join rival Florida in the country's top football conference, as well as baseball and women's basketball. The addition of Oklahoma will boost the SEC's softball prowess.

Clemson and Florida State and possibly Miami, Virginia Tech and North Carolina appear likely SEC targets. Would the Tarheels betray Duke, their longtime basketball rivals? Old school ties mean nothing anymore.

As is often pointed out, the realignment is driven by TV money. Yet the economic downturn of college football driver ESPN casts doubt on whether the lucrative TV deals will continue.

TV networks CBS, Fox and NBC still see college football and basketball as ratings bonanzas. Yet that could change in the shifting media landscape.

Streaming looks like the most promising future for TV sports. Before its collapse, the Pac-12 was seeking a TV deal with streaming service Apple TV. The defunct league might have died with a premature move toward the future.

 

Women's U.S. Open comes to Pebble Beach for first time

Golf great Annika Sorenstam returned to the U.S. Open to play Pebble Beach.

While Pebble Beach represents a breakthrough for veterans like Sorenstam, young stars like Rose Zhang and Lydia Ko will regularly compete for the national championship at such iconic courses.

After years of delayed promises by the United States Golf Association, the women's open will be played at Pebble Beach this weekend. The course has been the site of six men's opens, producing champions like Tiger Woods, Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus.

In the future, the women's open will be played at historic U.S. Open courses such as Oakmont, Oakland Hills, Riviera and Merion.

Three-time open winner Sorenstam said she accepted an exemption to the open just to play Pebble Beach, the spectacular public course that runs along the Pacific Ocean on California's Monterrey Peninsula. Former star Michelle Wie West is also competing. 

Young stars like the 20-year-old Zhang have taken over the women's game. Out of the top 20 players, 19 are in their 20s. The new generation's powerful play has drawn rising media attention to the women's game.

Zhang, who recently won the championship in her first LPGA tournament after a stellar career at Stanford, is receiving media acclaim rivaling that of Woods when he joined the PGA. The tour rookie is among the favorites to win the open.

The players will compete for an all-time high purse of $11 million, with the champion winning $2 million.

In another first, the women's open will be shown on prime time in the East Coast, broadcast by NBC. 

Women's golf has long deserved Pebble Beach's majestic stage.

 

My late romance with Rachel Brosnahan and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"

I fell in love with Rachel Brosnahan as the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Amy Sherman-Palladino's show about a Jewish housewife becoming a major comedian didn't hook me when it first appeared on Amazon Prime in my first days of streaming.

But I recently watched the show's concluding fifth season, enthralled by the series' evocation of New York City's show-biz glamour in the early 1960s.

Like "Mrs. Maisel's" TV talk show host Gordon Ford, I developed a serious crush for Brosnahan's Mrs. Maisel, with her gorgeous face, perky comments and stylish 1960s outfits and hats.

I was also enchanted by the show's references to 1960s pop culture celebrities like Jack Paar, Princess Margaret and Jane Jacobs.

A deep admirer of Lenny Bruce in my college days, I was especially intrigued by Luke Kirby's sensitive portrayal of the drug-addicted comedian, persecuted by police and a free-speech martyr after his death from a heroin overdose.

The romantic themes, show-business lore and portrayal of Jewish culture captivated me. The parade of characters, from mobsters to black entertainers, TV comedy writers, nightclub owners and newspaper editors and reporters, created a tapestry like that of a great novel.

At low moments, I'll look back at the splendid scene of Brosnahan and Reid Scott as the smitten Ford dancing in a grubby New York City diner to Ella Fitzgerald's "I'm Beginning to See the Light."

I saw the light of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

Nikola Jokic heads for home

Nikola Jokic sounded like an everyday workingman rather than an NBA star.

"The job is done and we can go home now," the 6-11 Denver Nuggets leader told ABC's Lisa Salters after leading the Nuggets to the franchise's first NBA championship Monday night with a gritty 94-89 victory over the Miami Heat.

Jokic's unemotional response displayed the understated eloquence of old-time heroes.

He might have been Gary Cooper at the end of "High Noon." Unlike in the film, when Cooper's sheriff was forced to act alone, Jokic received strong support. Jokic credited the unselfish play of his teammates.

After the game, Jokic exhibited gracious sportsmanship, embracing and congratulating each Heat player. He also praised the Heat in the interview with Salters.

During the postgame celebration, Jokic appeared nonchalant, holding his tiny daughter and not wearing his championship T-shirt. He acted like a craftsman who had completed another day's work.

Like Odysseus going back to Ithaca, Jokic just wanted to return home.

Soon he'll see his native Serbia again. But first comes the championship parade in Denver.

He's now an American hero too.

 

 

Iranian Pulitzer-winning playwright Sanaz Toossi discusses immigrant experience, why she turned to TV

Sanaz Toossi, who won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize this week for her play "English," can't make a living as a playwright despite a burst of success in the theater.

The 31-year-old Iranian-American writer said in a New York Times interview Thursday that she supports herself by writing for television, which allowed her to buy health insurance.

Toossi's now on strike along with other members of the Hollywood writers' union seeking increased pay and benefits from TV streaming. But media landscape changes threaten the abundant era for TV writers that has prevailed for more than a decade.

As cable TV channels and streaming services like Netflix expanded, successful playwrights turned to TV writing to earn lucrative livelihoods.

Yet changes in media technology and audience fragmentation brought reduced compensation for writers in recent years, culminating in the walkout. As the strike continues, TV production has ground to a halt.

Playwright and TV screenwriter Alena Smith in a revealing article for the Los Angeles Review of Books mourns the lack of sustaining theater income for American playwrights.

But TV opportunities for writers have also eroded, as the strike exposes. Smith in a sobering assessment of the future says that the Internet and decline of cable will disrupt the TV landscape.

Smith, a Yale Drama School MFA graduate, said she earned only $13,000 as a playwright over six years, including a federal grant. She supplemented her income with odd jobs before heading to Hollywood, where she created the popular Apple TV+ series "Dickinson."

Broadway and the New York theater once sustained American playwrights like Eugene O'Neil, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

From 1920 to 1940, 130 new plays were produced on Broadway each year, Smith discloses. From 1980 to 2014, the number of new productions plummeted to 14 a year, and will fall even lower as revivals, musicals and juke-box confections vie for declining audiences.

Smith foresees a similar bleak ice age for writers as the TV landscape fragments.

Toossi, the single child of Iranian immigrants, has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the theater, capped by the Pulitzer.

"English," in which four Iranians take English lessons at a storefront school outside of Tehran in order to pass a language proficiency exam, premiered in 2022 at the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater Co.  Before capturing the Pulitzer, Toossi won the Lucille Lortel Award for outstanding Off-Broadway drama.

The play is frequently produced around the country, and Toossi has received commissions from several local theater companies. Her second play, "Wish You Were Here," a comedy about Iranian women's travails in America, was produced in 2022 by the off-Broadway Playwrights Horizon Theater.

But like other playwrights whose first love is the theater, she's turned to TV to survive.

Now that sanctuary is closing too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Schulman's "Oscar Wars" gives history of Hollywood through Academy Awards

Big stars. Monumental deals. Gossip, intrigue, betrayal, sex, politics, racism, memorable performances.

Michael Schulman's "Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears" like one of those 1950s movie extravaganzas builds excitement with an all-star cast and amazing stories, engagingly told.

Schulman writes with dramatic power, propelled by the magnetism of Hollywood stars and creators ranging from Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks to Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, Olivia de Havilland and her estranged sister Joan Fontaine to Hattie McDaniel, Dalton Trumbo, Harvey Weinstein, Steven Spielberg, Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Barry Jenkins and many others.

The New Yorker writer traces the history of the American movies through selected Academy Awards ceremonies through the years that he sees as especially significant.

From the awards' shows origins - shockingly a creation of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer - through the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock, Schulman examines the fierce personality conflicts, media campaigns and controversies behind the Oscars.

The book details how Weinstein changed the movie landscape with his relentless Oscar campaigns for movies produced by his upstart company Miramax. Schulman also renders an appalling litany of Weinstein's sexual assaults against female actresses and Miramax staff members.

In another impressive display of reporting and writing, Schulman gives a comprehensive account of how the Best Picture Academy Award was at first mistakenly given to "La La Land" instead of "Moonlight" in 2017. Schulman uncovers the confusion, duplicity, human frailty and magnanimity surrounding the shocking mix-up.

"La La Land" producer Jordan Horowitz after wrongly receiving the Oscar gracefully announced that "Moonlight" was the real winner, allowing Jenkins' study of a black gay child growing up in a Miami ghetto to receive recognition before the TV broadcast ended.

"Oscar Wars" gives a comprehensive account of how the Academy Awards' declining popularity matches the movies' fall from their cultural dominance in the 1930s and 1940s to increasing irrelevance.

While streaming and the decline of box office audiences present a new threat, Schulman affirms Hollywood's resilience,  surviving the talkies, the Depression, television and right-wing and left-wing attacks.

"Oscar Wars" in its wealth of details, captivating stories and glowing personalities unveils a bigger theme: that Hollywood's history is also that of America.

 

Midnight strikes again watching the NFL Draft

OK, I like the NFL draft.

Once again, I succumbed to watching the pro football spectacle Thursday night.

Grown men wearing ridiculous costumes. Cheerleaders and girlfriends. Mamas and daddies, brothers and sisters. Nick Saban in a pink sportcoat. Roger Goodell lifted off his feet by a burly lineman. Tears, hugs, kisses.

You know you're in deep when you find yourself contemplating Mel Kiper Jr.'s rule against drafting running backs in the first round and Booger McFarland's rhapsodies about obscure Big 10 defensive ends.

The young men parade across the stage, wearing hip-hop suits and hair. In interviews with the ebullient Suzy Kolber, they thank God and family. The new recruits will soon face the reality of the NFL meat grinder, receiving millions to risk permanent injury or death.

Some of them will fail, others achieve stardom. They will be analyzed on ESPN talk shows. From July through February, they will crash against each other, warriors like ancient knights transported to our TV screens.

Each team is like a small medieval kingdom. The Lions. The Packers. The Bears. The Eagles. The Giants. The Cowboys. The Bucs. The Saints. The Falcons. We know their histories, their personalities, their uniforms, their players.

Once again, I can't resist the NFL's hype machine.

 

Rediscovering "Hill Street Blues" on Hulu

"Hill Street Blues" remains one of network television's most exciting and innovative shows, 36 years after the NBC series ended.

I've been rewatching the ground-breaking police drama/comedy on Hulu, which also offers "NYPD Blue" and other classics from the 1980s.

When Michael Post's dreamy piano theme begins the show and the police cars scramble down the street of the gritty, unnamed city, I'm transported to a small, complex world of human frailty, kindness, heroism and despair.

The series' themes of racism, poverty and criminal justice inequities still roil the nation.

Originally broadcast from 1981-1987 on NBC, "Hill Street Blues" revived  the moribund network. After a slow start, the show grew into a ratings sensation, and won numerous Emmy awards.

Daniel J. Travanti's Capt. Frank Furillo commands the Hill Street precinct with judicious wisdom, treating his officers and the neighborhood's ethnic minorities with kindness and respect. He cooly handles the myriad crises that beset the precinct. Too bad more American police officers aren't like him. 

Furillo's torrid affair with public defender Joyce Davenport, portrayed by the sultry Veronica Hamel, smolders with an eroticism unmatched by cable television's more explicit shows. Their teasing love scenes, heightened by partial, sheet-covered nudity, say a naughty good-night to each episode. 

The precinct's police officers are a microcosm of humanity, like characters in a complex novel. Unlike with other network shows of the era, their storylines continue from episode to episode.

Michael Conrad's Sgt. Phil Esterhaus is the precinct's caring avuncular foundation. Conrad, who died of cancer after four years on the show, portrayed Esterhaus with experience-rich masculine authority, leavened by understanding humor.

Esterhaus' morning roll call, which he closed with the plea "let's be careful out there," opened each episode's new day.

Bruce Weitz's Mick Belker, Michael Warren's Bobby Hill, Charles Haid's Andy Renko, James B. Sikking's Howard Hunter, Betty Thomas' Lucy Bates, Kiel Martin's J.D. LaRue and Taurean Blacque's Taurean Blacque displayed a full range of emotions.

With all of their flaws, the officers carry out their police work with diligence, compassion and courage. Despite their good intentions, urban conflicts erupt into shocking violence.

NBC's then young chief Brandon Tartikoff eommissioned the series from MTM Projections. Developed by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, the show's frenetic pace, gauzy visuals, overheard off-screen dialogue and theatrical character interactions gave it the cinematic authenticity  of a Robert Altman movie.

Tartikoff took a chance on the show because NBC had sunk to the bottom of the ratings. The series fueled NBC's resurgence, leading to hits like "The Cosby Show," "Cheers," "NYPD Blue," "L.A. Law" and "Family Ties."

For my money, "Hill Street Blues" equals or surpasses lauded HBO's  shows like "The Sopranos" and "The Wire."

"Hill Street Blues" remains the exemplar of "quality television."