Ken Burns
PBS is teaming up with filmmaker Ken Burns to adapt Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer into a documentary.
"Cancer touches nearly everyone in this country, and public media can play a vital role in educating Americans about this disease," Sharon Percy Rockefeller, president and CEO of the PBS station WETA in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "We will illuminate cancer as never before, exploring in depth its history, sharing the experiences of those battling it, and offering new hope by spotlighting some of the most extraordinary research being done today.
read more
Ashley Rickards, Brett Davern
How did any of us survive high school? Forget grades. We're talking insecurities, anxieties and social terrors, which have rarely found such vivid comic voice as in MTV's wonderful comedy Awkward, which begins a third season of emotionally harrowing hilarity with back-to-back episodes (Tuesday, 10/9c).
It's junior year (or "the beginning of the end") for the show's self-consciously angsty narrator/blogger Jenna (the terrific Ashley Rickards), who you'd think might be in a happier place having spent the summer cocooned with full-time no-longer-secret boyfriend Matty (Beau Mirchoff). No such luck. With other friends having spent their off time in Europe, hooking up and changing their looks without keeping her in the loop, Jenna worries she's being sidelined, left behind, forgotten. It doesn't help that her sadistic tyrant of a new creative-writing teacher, the heartless Mr. Hart (Anthony Michael Hall), burrows into her fragile psyche with the very first assignment: "Write about your greatest fear." Where to begin?
read more
Dust cloud approaching, Boise City, Oklahoma, April 15, 1935
The iconic photos from the southern plains states during the Great Depression say it all: the haunted eyes of weary mothers, children with their faces wrapped against the choking dust and families piling their belongings into trucks and heading to California.
In the two-part documentary The Dust Bowl, filmmaker Ken Burns (The Civil War, Baseball, Prohibition) focuses on the nearly decade-long drought that, coupled with unsustainable farming techniques, destroyed millions of acres in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico.
read more
David Letterman
Nevermind the hurricane, the show must go on — and it did Monday night at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where David Letterman hosted CBS' Late Show to an audience of zero. "It was very strange for all of us to be standing there and watching the show, with all of it looking the same, except for...
read more
Hugh Bonneville
It's awfully early for the summer TCA press tour — which began over the weekend, and continues through next week — to have peaked. It's even more rare for an entity like PBS to steal the bigger, richer, more hype-heavy broadcast networks' thunder.
But it's hard to imagine any single event, or show, generating a more enthusiastic, jubilant vibe during the annual gathering of the Television Critics Association than the opening night party in honor of Downton Abbey, perfectly timed to celebrate the period drama's astounding 16 Emmy nominations.
read more
Danny Pudi, Donald Glover
Welcome to May sweeps (albeit still in April) and, more important, the countdown to the end of the official broadcast season on May 23. Meaning an end, for now, to those pesky repeats and the start-and-stop scheduling of favorite shows. Reason enough to celebrate? Wait until you see what NBC has in store for you tonight (or at least for those choosy few who gravitate toward the network's better Thursday night comedies).
read more
The Central Park Five
Renowned for his epic PBS documentaries, Ken Burns is aiming for his first proper theatrical release in 27 years with a controversial new feature. The filmmaker, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon, have jointly produced and directed The Central Park Five, a two-hour documentary about five New York teenagers whose convictions in the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger rape case were overturned after years spent in prison, and their current search for justice.
read more
Katie Couric and Josh Elliott
One lesson learned in this wearying week of morning-show warfare: Some people should never give up their dream day job. Which is why it was so gratifying for the week to end with the announcement that Today's Matt Lauer was staying put for years to come. I'd like to think he saw the future — or maybe Today's future — staring at him on Wednesday, when he sat across from...
read more
Henry Ian Cusick, Kerry Washington
With a title like Scandal, surely you didn't expect subtlety to be on the menu of Shonda Rhimes' latest ABC potboiler. But as a companion piece to her enduring and still entertaining breakthrough Grey's Anatomy, it's just what the doctor ordered. If your doctor happens to be an indulgent "Dr. Feelgood" ...
read more
Keith Olbermann
This is one of the more jam-packed weeks of a seriously overstuffed TV summer, so let's break it down by night.
MONDAY
COMEBACK: The mercurial and always opinionated Keith Olbermann, most recently ousted from his MSNBC perch, brings his act back to cable with the same title (Countdown) but a new network (Current TV). His eclectic roster of contributors will include documentarian Ken Burns, comedian Richard Lewis and filmmaker Michael Moore. Let the ranting begin.
GUILTY PLEASURE: [As seen in TV Guide Magazine] RuPaul's Drag U, Logo at 9/8c. Think...
read more