Giant Freshwater Stingray
By Jeff Pfeiffer
“The biggest fish we’ve seen! A real-life Loch Ness monster.”
That’s how biologist Zeb Hogan describes a creature encountered in one of the new summer episodes of National Geographic Channel‘s popular Hooked series, which journeys across the globe with anglers and scientists to see the most extreme encounters in megafishing, and the research being done to protect these fish.
By Jeff Pfeiffer
Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s brilliant animated comedy Futurama is having a Family Guy-type resurrection as it will be returning to production on 26 new half-hour episodes more than six years after its last original episode aired on FOX. The episodes w
ill be running on Comedy Central beginning in mid-2010, with a broadcast run also possible. Comedy Central has been airing reruns of the series since 2006, along with the Futurama movies made since its cancellation. It has been the movies’ blockbuster performance on DVD and Comedy Central that helped revive interest in bringing back the series.
“We’re thrilled Futurama is coming back,” says Groening. “We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000.”
Cohen adds, “We’re excited and amazed that the show is coming back, perhaps due to some sort of mysterious time loop.”
“When we brought back Family Guy several years ago,” comments 20th Century Fox TV chairmen Gary Newman and Dana Walden, “everyone said that it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, that canceled series stay canceled and cannot be revived. But Futurama was another series that fans simply demanded we bring back.”
By Jeff Pfeiffer (aka RabbitEars)
First of all — yes, yes, it’s true. RabbitEars is really me. I’ve hidden long enough! But be honest with yourself. You’re not too surprised, are you? After all, have you ever seen RabbitEars and me at the same place, at the same time?
But now to the main business at hand. Discovery Channel has announced the return of its summer favorite, Shark Week, in August. Just as many sharks need to keep swimming to survive, so this ratings juggernaut has moved ever forward since its debut back in 1988. And as in previous years, the event again reflects our love/hate relationship with sharks. We find them fascinating, yet are scared to death of them. Likewise, Shark Week tends to present itself under the guise of educating and informing us about these misunderstood creatures, yet the shows often deal with shark attacks, and feature some lurid titles. But it works. This year follows the same formula, with new programs including:
By RabbitEars
Don’t forget this weekend to tune in to Discovery Channel‘s great new miniseries Nature’s Most Amazing Events. Discovery co-produced the series with the BBC, their production partners on Planet Earth. That series set the bar for natural history programming so high that I wasn’t sure if this new series woul
d be quite as awe-inspiring. While Planet Earth remains on a level of its own, this series comes very close to it and is still the best nature show — or any show period — you’re likely to see this year. And it is unique in that each of its six episodes focuses on one particular event, in one location, in the natural world, where Planet Earth, as its title indicates, globe-trotted all across the world in each episode. The focus on individual events here lends a bit of intimacy to the epic landscapes as we get to meet particular creatures and how they respond to events ranging from floods and ice melts to huge salmon runs and migrations.
By RabbitEars
This Saturday sees the season finale of Saturday Night Live, but the laughs are continuing into prime time the next night, May 17 at 9pm ET, with NBC’s premiere two-hour special Saturday Night Live Just Shorts. Andy Samberg hosts this program that, for the first time, puts together the greatest short films from the series’ past 34 years. The historic special will feature many fan favorites, including “Synchronized Swimmers,” starring Martin Short and Harry Shearer; Robert Smigel’s “TV Funhouse”; and the Emmy-winning digital short “Dick in a Box,” with Justin Timberlake. Also included are “Lazy Sunday,” “Japanese Office,” “United Way” (with Peyton Manning), “MacGruber,” “Star Wars Screen Tests,” “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey,” “Mr. Bill” and more.
By Jeff Pfeiffer
NBC’s award-winning series of public service announcements called “The More You Know” is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, making it the longest-running network public service campaign. Since 1989, hundreds of stars, and two U.S. presidents, have taken part in these messages designed to raise awareness of critical social issues. You might know them; they go along the lines of something like these:
By Jeff Pfeiffer
Ryan Murphy, creator of Nip/Tuck and Popular, is back with a new series, and it looks to be a
nother winner. But with Glee – making a sneak preview debut May 19 after the final performance show of this season’s American Idol, then returning to air regularly in the fall — don’t look for the same of what made those first two shows hits.
“I’ve done sort of eight years of darkness and really adult stuff [with Nip/Tuck],” Murphy recently told reporters on a conference call, “and I was like, ‘Okay, I want to try something different. I want to do a show that has a bigger heart and is kinder. But make no mistake — it still has an edge.”
By RabbitEars
Arches National Park in Utah
I just had a chance to screen an hourlong preview of Ken Burns’ next project following his amazing film The War from a few years back.
Premiering Sept. 27 on PBS, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea continues Burns’ obvious fascination with American history, and both the everyday and well-known people who lived through it, but also adds splashes of a larger, colorful canvas to the intimate archival photos and film footage he has been so masterful at presenting in the past. It’s the story of the history of America’s national parks — which the film describes as an idea “as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence, and just as radical.”
By RabbitEars
Famed NBC Today show weatherman Al Roker is going to be entertaining and informing people about their local and national forecasts on a second network starting this summer at a to-be-announced date. Wake Up With Al will be a new weekday series airing 6-7am ET on The Weather Channel, which Roker will be co-hosting with current Weather Channel meteorologist Stephanie Abrams.
“Simply put, Al Roker is synonymous with weather,” says Lisa Gersh, interim CEO of The Weather Channel. “He has an energy and a style that jumps off the screen, and we already know that people want to wake up with him in the morning.” (Ladies, any comment?)
Wake Up With Al explores all aspects of the day’s weather, with Roker appearing both in studio, interacting with guests and viewers, and in the field reporting on the compelling weather stories of the day.
“Over the years, I have be
en out covering the same snowstorms, hurricanes and tornado aftermath as the folks at The Weather Channel,” says Roker. “It is really exciting to be working [there], bringing the best weather information to people as they start their day. And now I get free baseball caps and fleeces from two of the best information networks in the world.”
The show will air live from both New York City and Atlanta, with Roker reporting from the former, Abrams the latter.
_____________________________
Roker: Credit: NBC
Abrams: Credit: The Weather Channel
By RabbitEars
In the first for the network, Cinemax exclusively debuts the latest, never-before-seen, uncensored music video from Eminem. The video is for the song “3 a.m.” — the third track to be released from his new album Relapse, which is coming out May 19 and is his first original studio album in over four years. Fortunately, the video — directed by Syndrome — does not air at 3am; you can see it at 10pm ET/PT this Saturday, May 2.
_________________________
Credit: Karin Catt
