Harriet Tubman goes solo on Underground special episode

O’Reilly goes on vacation

NEW YORK, April 12, (Agencies): Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in the antebellum South to become a leading abolitionist, is best known today as a righteous figure and the future face on the $20 bill.

But for viewers of “Underground” this season, Tubman has come to life as a character on this drama about the treacherous journey to freedom along a secret network of safe houses that came to be called the Underground Railroad.

Now Tubman is the focus of something special, even unprecedented in episodic TV, with this week’s “Underground” episode. It will pause its overarching narrative for a night to let Tubman tell her own story in the form of a solo performance. More specifically, Aisha Hinds, who this season has portrayed Tubman, will deliver a powerful, passionate episode-length oration channeling Tubman.

For Hinds, it was “an honor and a call to duty.” The episode was to premiere on WGN America on Wednesday at 8 pm EDT, with back-to-back repeats continuing through a replay at 1 am EDT.

The episode is set in what appears to be a remote barn or storage shed where, some night in the late 1850s, a couple dozen sympathizers have gathered furtively to hear from this champion of freedom.

The script, written by series co-creator Misha Green and Joe Pokaski, draws on Tubman’s history and words.

Tubman calls slavery “the next thing to hell” and likens the taste of it to “all your teeth made of copper.”

Born into slavery at its most brutal extreme, she speaks of how initially she “spent all my time knowing things instead of believing them. And that’s the first step to truly being free, when you can see past all the things that you know and believe something better. It ain’t easy, but that’s the work that must be done.”

Stirringly Tubman recounts the work that won her freedom when finally she crossed the line into Pennsylvania. But the work wasn’t done once she escaped. Over and over, she returned to the South to lead others to safety.

“There ain’t no negotiations on freedom,” she declares. “Big or small, there ain’t no compromises, no half-measures .. Cause a country built on bodies will always need more for the slaughter.”

This remarkable episode was shot, like the rest of “Underground,” in Savannah, Georgia. Despite airing as the sixth of the 10-episode season, it was the last episode shot, during the final three days before production wrapped last November.

“Usually an episode would take six to eight days,” notes Hinds, who received the first half of the 45-page script just 10 days beforehand, and the other half a few days later. Could she possibly learn all that dialogue in such a short amount of time?

Day One called for filming the first two acts of the hour’s total of five.

“I laugh about it now, but I was so anxious,” she confides.

As a backup system, the producers arranged for her to wear an earpiece, with Green standing by to feed her any needed cue.

With this arrangement, “I breathed a sigh of relief,” Hinds recalls. But to her dismay she found the earpiece emitted a distracting level of static.

“I took a moment, I took a breath, and I removed the earpiece,” she says. “In that moment I knew that I had to depend on nothing else but Harriet Tubman. And every single word came out. That’s when I felt confident that Harriet had this.”

LOS ANGELES: Bill O’Reilly is taking a vacation from his Fox News Channel show amid sponsor defections triggered by sexual harassment allegations.

Announcing the break at the end of Tuesday’s show, O’Reilly made a point of saying it was planned and long in the works. He said he will return April 24.

Around this time of year, “I grab some vacation, because it’s spring and Easter time. Last fall, I booked a trip that should be terrific,” he said.

His vacation announcement comes as about 60 companies said they won’t advertise on his show. The exodus followed a recent report in The New York Times that five women were paid a total of $13 million to keep quiet about harassment allegations.

The amount of advertising time by paying customers on “The O’Reilly Factor” has been cut by more than half since the Times report, according to an analysis issued Tuesday by Kantar Media.

But O’Reilly, cable TV news’ most popular personality, hasn’t been abandoned by his audience. His show averaged 3.7 million viewers over five nights last week, up 12 percent from the 3.3 million he averaged the week before and up 28 percent compared to the same week in 2016.

“O’Reilly Factor” drew an average of just under 4 million viewers for the first three months of 2017, his biggest quarter ever in the show’s 20-year history.

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LOS ANGELES: John Cleese is set for a return to a BBC sitcom for the first time since “Fawlty Towers,” the broadcaster said Tuesday. The “Monty Python” legend will co-star alongside actress Alison Steadman in new six-part comedy series “Edith,” which has been commissioned for BBC One.

Created and written by Charles McKeown, who was Oscar-nominated for 1985’s “Brazil” directed by Cleese’s fellow Python Terry Gilliam, “Edith” will also star Jason Watkins, Jessica Hynes, Anne Reid, Rosie Cavaliero, James Cosmo and Peter Egan. The show re-teams Cleese and Steadman, who played husband and wife in Christopher Morahan’s 1986 film “Clockwise.”

“If you had carte blanche on your fantasy BBC One comedy cast then you’d not be far off the ‘Edith’ line-up,” said Shane Allen, controller of comedy commissioning at the BBC.

“It’s also a huge pleasure to welcome John Cleese back to the land of BBC sitcom -- his last one did all right.”

Cleese’s last BBC sitcom was “Fawlty Towers,” the farcical hotel-set show he co-created with former partner Connie Booth. “Fawlty Towers” originally ran for just two seasons in 1975 and 1979, and has become a comedy classic.