Hollywood Q&A

A: Let’s get this out of the way: Matt LeBlanc is probably never going to match his “Friends” success again (and maybe no one ever will). With that in mind, “Man With a Plan” was a pretty solid success story, though, to answer your question, not solid enough to earn a fifth season. But that right there is the success: it got four full seasons; most shows don’t. Understandably, that wasn’t enough for some of the show’s devoted fans, who campaigned for it to be saved. A petition was launched that had some pretty good early momentum, but that fizzled out shortly after the series finale aired in the summer. And now many of the stars are moving on to new things.

A: It’s an understatement to say that “Twin Peaks” has never been straightforward. The show, whose plot was revealed through a long series of nearly inscrutable hints, is taking the same approach to its renewal status. Since the end of the revival season, which aired on Showtime in 2017, people involved with the show (and some who aren’t) have dropped little suggestions here and there that it could return again, but nothing more than that.

All this is to say we don’t know if it’ll come back again.

The hinting started a few months after the revival season (technically Season 3 of the show) wrapped, when Showtime programming head Gary Levine name-checked series creators Mark Frost and David Lynch at a press event, saying that “the door at Showtime is always open to Mark and David for more ‘Twin Peaks’ or anything else they want to talk about.” Then, in 2019, the Hollywood Horror Museum, which counts Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer,

among its board members, tweeted: “Someone we know who is ‘in the know’ just let something very interesting slip about the future of ‘Twin Peaks.’” A few days later, series cast members Kyle MacLachlan (“Desperate Housewives”) and Michael Horse (“North of 60”) posted even more cryptic hints of a renewal. Horse shared a still from the first series of his character being ‘shushed,’ while MacLachlan said he was “thinking about … doughnuts this morning” (his character was basically a doughnut fiend on the show).

A: There seems to be no end to what sports broadcasters will do to fill time, especially in the era of the 24-hour sports network. And while the computer modeling they did in “Rocky Balboa” (2006) is a bit more elaborate than you usually see on TV, even that had a real-world inspiration.

The computer simulation in “Rocky Balboa,” which pitted the contemporary young champ against a prime version of Rocky, was actually based on a documentary film called “The Super Fight,” released way back in 1970.

That movie took a similar approach, minus the animation, to simulate a fight between history’s only two undefeated heavyweight champions: Muhammad Ali (the champ at the time) and Rocky Marciano (who retired 14 years earlier). Statistics were fed into a cutting-edge (at the time) computer to determine probabilities for who would win. Of course, watching a computer tabulate stats makes for a boring movie, so they combined it with reallife footage of Ali and Marciano sparring to play out scenarios of how the fight could have gone.

Have a question? Email us at questions@tvtabloid.com. Please include your name and town. Personal replies will not be provided.