Updates on Netflix’s upcoming final season of “Grace and Frankie.”
You have questions. I have some answers. Q: I absolutely fell in love with “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix during the pandemic. I understand there will be one final season. Can you confirm?
A: Yes. The coming seventh season of the series starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin will be the last. “Netflix isn’t doing long-term series anymore,” series co-creator Marta Kauffman told the Los Angeles Times awhile back. “And we are really lucky that we got the seventh season.”
The pandemic stalled work on the final season after four episodes had been done but the cast reportedly went back to work in June. No word on when the final season will arrive. Speculation has focused on 2022, but co-star Martin Sheen said in a SiriusXM interview with Bruce Bozzi that Netflix could run the four completed episodes as a package sooner than that if it chose.
Q: Although they have lost popularity in the last few years, I for one have always enjoyed the Miss Universe and Miss America competitions. Will they be held this year and be shown on TV?
A: The 70th Miss Universe presentation will be held in Israel in December, its website says, with telecasts on Fox and
Telemundo. Miss America marks its 100th birthday with a December event at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut; I have not yet seen an announcement of a broadcaster for it.
Q: Where is the TV show “Death in Paradise” shot?
A: The fictional island of Saint Marie on the show is played by Guadeloupe, which an MSN.com report described as “a French-speaking island group in the southern Caribbean Sea. Guadeloupe is 629 square miles in size and has a population of roughly 400,000 people. It is part of the European union and has the euro as its official currency.”
Q: Back in the late ’80s or early ’90s there was a TV movie about four young women who moved into a beautiful beach house to meet wealthy men. They all did, except for one who fell in love with a gas station mechanic. She figured it was just her luck to meet a guy with no money. But, unbeknownst to her, he was very wealthy. It was a true “feel good” movie ... can you help?
A: At first I suspected you were remembering “How to Marry a Millionaire,” a 1953 movie that also inspired a ’50s TV series. But it’s more likely that you saw the 1990 TV movie “Rich Men, Single Women” — although it had three, not four women. The Internet Movie Database says the women “plot to catch wealthy husbands by throwing a party at a mansion to which they have temporary access. Obvious love stories follow involving an ex-ballplayer, a secretly wealthy mechanic and an ad exec.” Based on a novel, it starred Suzanne Somers, Heather Locklear and Deborah Adair.
Q: What can you tell me about Lionel Stander, who played Max on “Hart to Hart”?
A: Stander was at first a successful character actor, including in classics such as “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” and the 1937 version of “A Star Is Born.” But as an active and outspoken liberal, he found his movie career stalled more than once by the anti-communist witch hunts in the late 1930s and 1950s, as well as by his defiant, heroic testimony before a congressional committee in 1953. The New York Times has said, “Ostracized from Hollywood, Mr. Stander found work in the theater, on Wall Street and in comedies and spaghetti westerns in Italy, where, in his 60s, he became an unofficial mayor of the Via Veneto in Rome.” But he eventually worked again in American movies and TV, especially “Hart to Hart.” He died in 1994 at the age of 86.
Do you have a question or comment about entertainment past, present and future? Write to Rich Heldenfels, P.O. Box 417, Mogadore, OH 44260, or brenfels@gmail.com. Letters may be edited. Individual replies are not guaranteed.