‘All Rise’ adapts to pandemic for finale

Gumbel’s ‘Real Sports’ returns to air before real sports

TBy Ryan Pearson

he legal drama “All Rise” has become the first US scripted television series to adapt the pandemic by producing an episode remotely, enlisting its stars to work from home on their own makeup, set design and lighting.

The season finale, airing Monday night on CBS, finds Simone Missick’s Judge Lola Carmichael presiding over a Los Angeles Superior Court bench trial via video conference.

Missick said she was exhausted at the end of each shooting day after making her own adjustments to costume and sound, converting her living room into an office and her dining room into a court room.

“I did pick up new skills. I think that I could be a location scout-slashset design coordinator. I don’t need to lead the department, but I could be in the background,” Missick laughed in a Zoom interview. “So if this acting stuff doesn’t work out, I could maybe pick up a career doing it virtually because that was the fun part.”

While most full-season shows cut production short due to stay-home orders, “All Rise” creator Greg Spottiswood said he realized that the dialogueheavy nature of his show allowed for remote production. A key challenge — predicting how the legal world would adjust to the novel coronavirus, with prisons becoming outbreak hotspots and video chats replacing in-court hearings.

“The justice system needs to find a way to respond to this moment. Technology is one of the ways that they’re responding to it,” he said.

Spottiswood said producers paid the full crew, even those that weren’t able to work, for the episode. While the show could produce more episodes remotely in a second season if necessary, he’s anxious to get back to sets and realworld locations.

Missick said her mother-in-law in Atlanta had been hospitalized with COVID-19 for eight days, with symptoms serious enough to require a ventilator. She had fully recovered by the time Missick began shooting, but it brought the coronavirus crisis close to home for

year career in corporate America with CBS, Viacom and Westinghouse Broadcasting. He retired in 2018 from his post as senior executive vice president and chief communications officer of CBS Corporation.

But unlike most of his peers, Schwartz the 38-year-old actress.

In her downtime after production, Missick has enjoyed Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere” and the Netflix series “Unorthodox.” But she’s been struck by how far away from today’s reality the action on the screen can feel.

“Everything is BC. It’s ‘before coronavirus.’ You’re watching people — they’re in restaurants, they’re hugging each other. You’re like, ‘God, I remember what that was like.’ Now, I think every show that comes after is going to have to deal with what this pandemic is.”

The HBO television show “Real Sports” is returning from a suspension forced by the coronavirus before the real sports themselves begin again.

Host Bryant Gumbel will preside from his Florida home in Tuesday’s episode of the sports news magazine, which is attempting to navigate technical issues and strike the right balance in dealing with a pandemic that has changed every viewer’s life.

Canceled

The March episode was canceled, both because some necessary travel proved impossible and the worry that some segments would appear tone deaf at a time when the sports world was put on hold, Gumbel said.

April marks the 25th year that “Real Sports” has been on the air, and it barely made its anniversary month.

The host will appear Tuesday in a roundtable with sportscasters Mike Breen, Joe Buck and Jim Nantz. The show will have a story about quick pivots, such as a company that switched from manufacturing lacrosse helmets to protective gear for medical workers, and another piece on sports entities that moved too slowly to cancel events.

Gumbel said he understands people who might believe that stories on sports aren’t right for the moment.

“But I also think you run the risk of overdoing it if (coronavirus) is all you have to offer,” he told The Associated Press on Monday. “We’re like every other operator right now. We’re trying

had a once-secret and then public side career as a lauded humorist and writer of 13 books who satirized the business world he was part of. Under the pseudonym Stanley Bing, Schwartz wrote a column in Esquire for 13 years and then in Fortune. to strike a very difficult balance between being responsive to what people want to know, and being responsive to that point at which they say, OK, I’ve had enough. Give me something else.”

The absence of sports right now isn’t really an issue for the show, he said.

“We are in the business of telling stories that have nothing to do, or very little to do, with who won and who lost,” he said. “Our difficulty was and is that we are a monthly at a time when the overall issue in our environment is a story that is not just changing daily, but by the hour and minute.”

The need to make a show that can feel relevant Tuesday and in two weeks steered Gumbel and his roundtable panelists away from such things as predicting when sports may return to issues like whether they’d be comfortable traveling to assignments.

It’s too early to tell which sports figures will emerge as leaders in any effort to bring games back, likening it to judging a trade or draft pick instantly instead of waiting for things to settle.

“I just hope that the commissioners are responsible enough to be taking their guidelines from the people who are the scientists and not from the people who are looking to get reelected,” he said.

Gumbel hasn’t hesitated to criticize the NFL in the past but believes league officials acted responsibly in conducting its annual player draft last week. The NFL was rewarded with weeks worth of high-profile coverage in newspapers and strong television ratings.

Gumbel offers a hat tip to his wife in helping him get the show off the ground again.

She’s had to learn how to operate equipment sent to their home by HBO. She operates the camera, sets the lighting, manages the audio and applies the makeup.

He doesn’t want to appear insensitive to people who are dying, but Gumbel can admit it: He misses sports a lot.

“Like everybody else, I think it was difficult for us to understand how much we watched, talked about it, cared about it, debated it, especially with our buddies,” he said. “It’s left a void, there’s no doubt about that.” (AP)

One, “Executive Summary: Stanley Bing,” from 1991, describes an unwelcome 40th birthday in the style of a corporate presentation. (AP)

PARIS:

Idir, an Algerian singer who gave voice to the Berber and Kabyle cultures, has died in Paris. He was 70.

Saturday’s death of the singer, whose real name was Hamid Cheriet, was confirmed on a post on his official Facebook page that read “we regret to announce the passing of our father (to all), Idir. Rest in peace.”

French media report that he died from pulmonary disease after being hospitalized on Friday.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune paid tribute to him on Twitter, saying that “with his passing, Algeria has lost one of its monuments,” and referred to him as “an icon of Algerian art.” Idir was a national treasure in his native Algeria.

Born on Oct 25, 1949 in Ait Lahcene, near the Kabylie capital of Tizi Ouzou and part of French Algeria at the time, he studied to be a geologist, but his life took a twist in 1973 when he was called up as a last-minute replacement on the radio to sing “A Vava Inouva.” It was a lullaby with the “rich oral traditions” of the Berber culture and became a beloved song in the country. (AP)