Zoren: Eagles, NFL join the broadcast world this week
While the Flyers and Sixers were eliminated in delayed hockey and basketball playoffs, and the Phillies are doing well in the midst of an abbreviated season made more intense by some coronavirus interruptions, the Eagles and their NFL cohorts are kicking off, as planned next Sunday and going through their announced schedule in hopes of competing in Super Bowl LV in February.
The first NFL game in the 2020 season is 8 p.m. Thursday on NBC (Channel 10) and pits the Super Bowl champs, Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs, against the team it beat in last year’s AFC final, the Houston Texans.
The Eagles take their initial 2020 flight on the road at
1 p.m. Sunday on Fox (Channel
29) against a Washington team that begins the season without a name, having relinquished its long-standing moniker, the Redskins, in response to long-standing Native American complaints it was offensive.
I wonder how many times announcers will say “Redskins” or “Skins” in spite of its official removal.
The Eagles also close their season on Jan. 3 at home against Washington.
In between, their 16 games will be seen on various networks, 10 on Channel 29, three on Channel
3, two on Channel 10, and one on ESPN. Besides their two bouts with Washington, the Eagles play two against the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants and one each opposite the Los Angeles Rams, Cincinnati Bengals, San Francisco 49ers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns, Seattle Seahawks, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints, and Arizona Cardinals.
Like the baseball, hockey, and basketball seasons, the NFL is beginning its 2020 games with most teams barring fans from attending in person. Exceptions are the Cowboys, Chiefs, Jaguars, and Dolphins, which will admit spectators on a limited basis. Several other teams have said they will begin their seasons with no one in the stands but will adjust that decision every few games. In some case, permitting fan attendance will depend on state or city policy in each individual venue.
Debate moderators set
The moderators for the three debates featuring President Donald Trump and Democrat opponent Joe Biden and the single bout between Vice President Mike Pence and contender Kamala Harris are an interesting lot.
They represent a harder-hitting, more no-nonsense lot than those who presided over 2016 political slugfests. Also, each moderator will fly solo rather than being part of a team.
Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace, one of the toughest and fairest questioners and one you can legitimately call a journalist, handles the first Presidential debate set for Sept. 29, in Cleveland.
Next, on October 7, comes the Vice Presidential contest with a newspaper columnist, USA Today’s Susan Page, who has been covering Washington for decades and is her paper’s Washington Bureau Chief. This year’s election will be tenth for which Page has been a lead reporter. She has interviewed six Presidents. The Pence-Harris match takes place in Salt Lake City.
Steve Scully, from C-SPAN, helms the second Presidential tussle from Miami October 15. NBC’s Kristen Welker, who cut her TV reporter’s teeth at Channel 10 and is now the Peacock Network’s White House Correspondent, presides over the third and last Presidential debate from Nashville October 22. Welker is a graduate of the Germantown Friends School.
‘Elinor’ is perfect for children on PBS Kids
A child’s curiosity is the impetus for “Elinor Wonders Why,” a new animated series making its debut today on PBS Kids.
Elinor of the title is a rabbit who looks and talks like a little girl and lives in Animal Town with her best friends, Ari, a bat, and Olive, an elephant.
The animal creatures stand for typical children who attend school, play games, and explore the terrain around them.
Elinor is the leader of the trio and a born scientist. She is inquisitive and not only asks questions but delves into something perplexing until she has an answer. Often, she enlists Ari and Olive in her quests to find out why something happens the way it does or why some things are different in various parts of Animal Town.
Elinor always wants to know “why?” Beyond that, she is observant and notices subtle things in nature that drive her to find out more.
“Elinor Wonders Why” is for pre-schoolers, but I, several decades beyond that status, got caught up in the various episodes I watched by wanting to know how something worked the way it does, from visual phenomena to different edibles growing in different soils, as Elinor is.
Elinor not only uses a scientist’s curiosity to conceive questions. She uses the scientific method to figure out what confuses her. In addition to her friends, she enlists her parents and teacher in her search for the way the world works.
In today’s opening program, Elinor is stumped by how two sisters, goats, can quickly hunt down anyone playing hide-andseek with them.
The lesson is one of hiding in plain sight. When Elinor finds what she thinks is a foolproof hiding place, the goats find her by looking for the long ears sticking up through Elinor’s girlish bob. They notice the large Olive by seeing her gray hide among greenery. As Elinor thinks about the situation, and asks the goats what they look for, she devises a scheme to camouflage herself and her friends. Hiding among flowers with long stalks that have the same color and shape as her ears is more successful than planting herself where the goats can spy her immediately.
In another episode, Elinor wakes her mother to find out about a sound she hears in the night. “Elinor Wonders Why” not only shows mother and daughter working as a team but makes the point that parents may not always have an immediate answers to the things on their kids’ minds and that it’s all right to say “I don’t know” and explore a mystery with them.
“Elinor Wonders Why” entertains as it proceeds to teach. It would not surprise me to find Elinor, Ari, and Olive dolls part of next Christmas’s toy list.
The show is conceived and written by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, both of whom are scientists who have written a lot for adults but making their first foray in addressing children with “Elinor Wonders Why.” Cham’s daughter, named Elinor, is an inspiration for the program. Cham, a robotics engineer, also writes a cartoon for adults called “Piled Higher and Deeper,” an online comic known more familiarly as “PHD.”
Whiteson is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.
Television theme songs
Dom Giordano posed one his regular question about favorites, this time the question, also asked of the audience for Dom’s 9 a.m. to 12 noon talk show on WPHT (1210 AM), was the best song introducing a television show.
Suddenly a flood of tunes, mostly from ‘70s Norman Lear and MTM show came rushing to my brain as serial earworms. Then, a couple of themes from NBC shows of the ‘80s and ‘90s flooded in.
From “Boy, the way Glenn Miller played” and “Lady Godiva was a freedom rider” to “Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A” and “Where everybody knows your name,” I rambled through song after song to determine which I liked best.
Some popular numbers like “Happy Days” or old-time themes like the ones introducing “The Beverly Hillbillies” or “Gilligan’s Island” were too familiar and ruled out. I liked the cited openings to “Friends” and “Cheers” better than the ditties from “The Golden Girls” or the “That ‘70s Show. Anything from an ‘70s ABC sitcom other than “Happy Days” was ruled out. I couldn’t stand anything but John Ritter on “Three’s Company” and find the “Laverne and Shirley” theme too cute. The current “Goldbergs” theme was eliminated because, as
with “Three’s Company,” I can’t watch an entire show.
I thought of switching tables on Dom and choosing the purely instrumental theme, like the whistled opening of “The Andy Griffith Show,” the nine glum notes of “Dragnet,” or the good and jazzy preludes to “Perry Mason” or “Peter Gunn,” but they didn’t make the cut. Nor did the snappy theme song from “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or the big band sound of “I Love Lucy.”
Dom’s listeners chose Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s funky hip-hop, and clever, “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” as their top pick.
As a song, it has merit. I have to agree it’s much better in musical and lyrical content than most themes and certainly qualifies for “best ever.”
I knew the audience’s choice, but I had to think further. Maybe Ann Hampton Calloway’s theme for “The Nanny” deserved the nod or the song from “The Family Guy.”
“Fresh Prince” and “The Nanny” made me consider comic themes. I always liked the finger snaps, side comments, and silly lyrics of the “Addams Family” song. (Neat, sweet, petite.) The most hilarious opener ever was Phyllis Diller’s number introducing “The Pruitts of Southampton,” which features Diller in a designer costume holding a cigarette in a long holder, walking around an estate like a socialite singing “How’d you do, how’d you do, how’d you do, my dear” while other characters talk about how broke the Pruitts are and how they’re posers. I particularly love the scene in which the butler hands Diller a bunch of overdue bills, and she promptly tears them up, sans glance.
“The Pruitts of Southampton” was going to be my final answer, but In the end, I went more traditional and selected the TV theme I hum or sing out loud the most and that happens to be from the series I love the most, even considering my undying affection for “I Love Lucy,” The Honeymooners,” and anything starring Ann Sothern in which she’s not voicing a 1928 Porter.
My conclusive choice was “Who can turn the world with her smile, who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile,” the theme from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show!”
Throw that hat in the air, Mary. Throw it high.