Q&A Hollywood
Q: Is “Hawaii Five-0” coming back?
A: Those were real emotions you saw in the last season finale of “Hawaii Five0” — it was the whole cast saying “aloha” to each other and the show.
I won't go into the details, but the final episode of Season 10 ended with a pretty emotional goodbye. It was hefty material to work with, but the actors got an extra dramatic boost two hours before shooting when the showrunner, Peter M. Lenkov, informed them that the show had been canceled.
Lenkov told Entertainment Weekly that he has always written each season as if it were the last, because he was rarely sure of a renewal. And so, while the episode ended in a bunch of emotional farewells, he also had a plan in mind to undo it all if he got a renewal. But he found out ahead of shooting the final episode that this would in fact be it, so he told the actors and he let them ad lib their own goodbye scenes.
“So everything you see there is genuine emotion ... raw, because it's really coming from their heart,” Lenkov said in the interview with EW.
Q: Why do I recognize the host of the “Spring Baking Championship?” I'm on Season 6.
A: I'm glad that you clarified, because Food Network's “Spring Baking Championship” has been through a few hosts in its six seasons on the air. Current host Clinton Kelly is now tied with original host Bobby Deen for the longest run, having fronted the past two seasons.
Given all that turnover, Kelly must have seemed like a safe pair of hands to the show's producers. He's a reality TV veteran — you probably know him either as co-host of ABC's foodthemed daytime talk show “The Chew” or as co-host and stylist on the landmark TLC fashion reality show “What Not to Wear.”
He did more episodes of “The Chew” (since it aired daily instead of weekly), but “What Not to Wear” had the bigger impact.
He was on the latter show for its entire 10-year run, from 2003 to 2013 — a time when TLC's slate of stripped-down, averageperson-focused reality shows were reshaping the network (and parts of the reality genre) in their image.
Q: Was the scary movie “The Turning” based on anything? I thought it had that sort of feel.
A: It appears Hollywood is getting tired of the name “The Turn of the Screw,” the novella by Henry James, which has been adapted as a film or TV show a whopping 36 times. One of the most recent adaptations is the 2020 film “The Turning.”
The many remakes could be an expression of a popular desire to “solve” the book, in the words of New Yorker literary critic Brad Leithauser. The story leaves it up to the reader to decide (122-year-old spoiler ahead) whether the governess is living in a haunted house or whether she's insane.
Published in 1898, it is now viewed as a classic of the horror genre, alongside other often-filmed titles such as “Dracula” and “Frankenstein.”
“The Turning” was a relatively faithful take on the source material (by horror standards, anyway), aside from the fact that it was set in the present and not at the end of the 19th century.
Despite the age of the book, there does seem to be a sudden frenzy for it among filmmakers (even if they're not so excited about the title). Two more adaptations have been released just since “The Turning” came out in January.
The U.K.-based Garsington Opera recorded its operatic take on the story and released it online this past winter. It's available free through GarsingtonOpera. org, if you're interested.