As always, the further we go back in Hollywood history, the more that fact and legend become intertwined. It's hard to say where the truth really lies.
May 19, 2009
The pilot episode of Glee aired.
"Pilot" is the pilot episode of
the American television series Glee,
which premiered on the Fox network on May 19, 2009.[1] An
extended director's cut version aired on September 2,
2009. The show focuses on a high school show choir,
also known as a glee club, set within the fictional William McKinley High
School in Lima, Ohio. The pilot episode covers the formation
of the club and introduces the main characters. The episode was directed by
series creator Ryan Murphy, and written by Murphy, Brad
Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Murphy selected the music
featured in the episode, with the intention of maintaining a balance between
showtunes and chart hits.
The
episode achieved 9.619 million viewers on first broadcast, and 4.2 million
when the director's cut version aired. Critical response was mixed,
with The New York Times's Alessandra Stanley
highlighting the episode's unoriginality and stereotyped characters, but
praising the showmanship and talent of the cast. The Daily News's David Hinckley opined
that the show was imperfect and implausible but "potentially
heartwarming," while USA Today's
Robert Bianco noted casting and tone problems, but commented positively on the
show's humor and musical performances. Mary McNamara for the LA Times wrote
that the show had a wide audience appeal, calling it: "the first show in a
long time that's just plain full-throttle,
no-guilty-pleasure-rationalizations-necessary fun."
Spanish
teacher Will Schuester (Matthew
Morrison) learns that Sandy
Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky), the head of William
McKinley High School's glee club has been fired for inappropriate sexual
behavior toward male student Hank Saunders (Ben Bledsoe).
The school principal,Figgins (Iqbal Theba),
gives Will permission to take over the club, and he plans to revitalize it,
naming the group New Directions. The club consists of fame-hungry Rachel
Berry (Lea Michele), diva Mercedes
Jones (Amber Riley), flamboyant countertenor Kurt Hummel (Chris
Colfer), paraplegicelectric guitar player Artie
Abrams (Kevin McHale) and stuttering goth Tina
Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz). Will's efforts are derided by Sue
Sylvester (Jane Lynch), head of the school's successful cheerleading team,
the Cheerios who soon plans to abolish the Glee club to restore her money
funded towards the spoilt Cheerios. His wife Terri (Jessalyn
Gilsig) is also unsupportive, suggesting that Will become an accountant to
increase their income and give up teaching. Rachel threatens to leave the club
if Will cannot find a male vocalist with talent comparable to hers. When the
school's football coach Ken Tanaka (Patrick Gallagher) allows Will to try to
recruit football team members, in return that he put a good word for Emma for
him (because Ken likes her), he discovers that quarterback Finn Hudson (Cory
Monteith) is secretly a talented singer. He plants marijuana in
Finn's locker, and blackmails him into joining New Directions. Finn, determined
not to disappoint his widowed mother, complies.
May 20, 1989
Gilda
Radner died.
In the fall of 1988, after biopsies and a saline wash
of her abdomen showed no signs of cancer, Radner went on a maintenance
chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but later that same year, she
learned that her cancer returned after a routine blood test showed that levels
of the tumor marker CA-125 had increased. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles on May 17, 1989 for a CAT scan.
Despite expressing her fear that she would never wake up, she was given a
sedative and passed into a coma during the scan. She did not regain
consciousness, and died three days later from ovarian cancer at 6:20 am on May 20, 1989; Wilder
was at her side.
Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989.
In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The Wellness Community.
Her gravestone reads: "Gilda Radner Wilder - Comedienne - Ballerina
1946-1989". She was interred at Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut.
By coincidence, the news of her death broke on early
Saturday afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time), while Steve Martin was rehearsing as the guest host for
that night's season finale of Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night
Live personnel—including Lorne Michaels, Phil Hartman, and Mike Myers (who had, in his own words,
"fallen in love" with Radner after playing her son in a BC Hydro commercial on Canadian television and
considered her the reason he wanted to be on SNL) had not known she was
so close to death. They scrapped Martin's planned opening monologue and
instead, Martin, in tears, introduced a video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he
and Radner parodied Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a well-known dance routine from The Band Wagon.
May 21, 1999
Soap star Susan Lucci wins first Emmy after 19
nominations.
“The streak is over…Susan
Lucci!” announces Shemar Moore of The Young and the Restless on this
night in 1999, right before presenting the Daytime Emmy Award for Best Actress
to the tearful star of ABC’s All My Children. The award was Lucci’s
first win in 19 straight years of being nominated in the Best Actress category
for her portrayal of Erica Kane.
A native of Garden City, New York, Lucci moved to New York City after
graduating from college in 1968. She played bit parts in the films
Goodbye,
Columbus and
Me, Natalie (both 1969) before landing the role of the
troubled teenager Erica Kane on a new soap opera,
All My Children. The
show debuted on January 5, 1970, and Lucci would go on to play Erica Kane over
the next four decades, as the character married no fewer than 11 times (to
eight different men, and several of the marriages were invalid), had several
children and grandchildren, was kidnapped, survived an airplane crash and a car
accident, battled drug addiction and became the owner of her own cosmetics
company (among other notable events). By 1991, Erica Kane was, according to
TV
Guide, “unequivocally the most famous soap-opera character in the history
of TV.”
As reported by the
New York Times, Lucci at that time was the
highest-paid actor on daytime television, earning more than $1 million per year
for her work on
All My Children. Her honors included a Best Soap Actress
win in a 1985
People magazine poll, and a 1989 Soap Opera Digest Editors
Award for an “outstanding contribution to daytime television.” One thing she didn’t
have, however, was an Emmy. She received her first nomination in 1978, and
before long had received several nominations in a row without a win. After
reportedly losing her temper after failing to take home the award in 1982 and
1983, Lucci began accepting her runner-up status with more humor. In the fall
of 1990, she appeared as a guest host on an episode of
Saturday Night Live,
in which all of the show’s cast and crew members carried Emmy statuettes past
her during her opening monologue. She also filmed a commercial for a sugar
substitute called the Sweet One, in which she lampooned her own hunger for an
Emmy.
Lucci was the favorite to win that May night in 1999, and Moore’s
announcement brought the audience in the theater at Madison Square Garden to
their feet for a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. Lucci’s
emotional acceptance speech brought tears to the eyes of many in the crowd,
including the talk show host Rosie O’Donnell and Lucci’s
All My Children
co-stars Kelly Ripa and Marcy Walker. After thanking her husband, Helmut Huber,
the
All My Children cast and crew and her fans, Lucci closed her speech
by announcing “I’m going to go back to that studio Monday and I’m going to play
Erica Kane for all she’s worth.”
In addition to her work on
All My Children, Lucci guest-starred
repeatedly on the prime-time soap opera
Dallas during the 1990s and has
appeared in a number of TV movies, including
Lady Mobster,
Mafia
Princess and
Secret Passions. In 1999, she starred on Broadway in
the revival of
Annie Get Your Gun. Lucci also competed in the seventh
installment of the reality series
Dancing With the Stars, which aired in
the fall of 2008.
May 23, 1994
"All Good Things..."
comprises the 25th and 26th episodes of the seventh season and
the series finale of the syndicated Americanscience
fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It is the 177th and 178th episodes of the series overall. The title is derived
from the expression
"All good things must come to an end",
a phrase used by the character "
Q"
during the episode itself.
Capt. Jean-Luc
Picard inexplicably finds his mind jumping between the present (
stardate 47988)
and the past just prior to the USS
Enterprise-D's first mission six
years earlier at
Farpoint Station and over twenty-five
years into the future, where an aged Picard has retired to the family
vineyard in
Labarre, France. These jumps occur without
warning, and the resulting discontinuity in Picard's behavior frequently leaves
him and those around him confused.
In the present, Picard is ordered to take the
Enterprise to
the edge of the
Romulan Neutral Zone to investigate a
spatial
anomaly.
In the future, he gains passage on the USS
Pasteur, which is
under the command of his now ex-wife, Dr.
Beverly
Picard, whom he convinces to find the anomaly.
In the past, despite having the
Enterprise's mission to Farpoint
Station cancelled by
Starfleet to investigate the anomaly, Picard insists
on continuing, believing the impending encounter with
Q to
be more important. After reaching the place where he had first encountered the
Q in the form of a net near Farpoint Station and finding nothing there, Picard
enters his ready room, only to find himself once again in Q's courtroom. Q
reveals that the trial started seven years ago never concluded, and the current
situation is humanity's last chance to prove themselves to the
Q Continuum,
but secretly reveals that he himself is the cause of Picard's time jumping. Q
challenges Picard to solve the mystery of the anomaly, cryptically stating that
Picard will destroy humanity.
As Jean-Luc Picard arrives at the anomaly in all three time periods, he
discovers that the anomaly is much larger in the past, but does not exist at
all in the future. As the past and present
Enterprises scan
the anomaly with tachyon beams, the USS
Pasteur is attacked by
Klingon ships,
but the crew is saved due to the timely arrival of the future
Enterpriseunder
the command of
Admiral William Riker. He fires
on several of the attacking Klingon warships, which causes them to flee the
neutral zone. It is revealed that Riker and Worf are in a feud over the late
Enterprise counselor
Deanna Troi,
with whom both had a serious relationship and who had died years earlier. Q
once again appears to Picard and takes him to billions of years in the past on
Earth, where the
anomaly, growing larger as it moves backwards in time, has taken over the whole
of the
Alpha Quadrant and has prevented the formation
of life on Earth. When Picard returns to the future, he discovers the anomaly
has appeared, created as a result of his orders, and the tachyon pulses from
the three eras are sustaining it.
Data and
Geordi determine that they can stop the anomaly by having all three
Enterprises fly
into the centre of it and create static warp shells. Picard relays the orders
to each
Enterprise. Each ship suffers warp core breaches, with Q
telling the future Picard that "all good things must come to an end"
just before the future
Enterprise explodes.
Picard finds himself facing Q in the courtroom as before. Q congratulates
Picard for being able to think in multiple timelines simultaneously to solve
the puzzle, which is proof that humanity can still evolve, much to the surprise
of the Q Continuum. Q admits to helping Picard to solve it with the time
jumping since he was the one that put them in this situation, and then goes on
to explain that the anomaly never actually existed and that his past and
present have been restored. He then withdraws from the courtroom and bids
farewell to Picard by saying "See you ... out there". Picard then
returns to the
Enterprise of the present and no longer jumping
through time.
As the senior staff plays their regular
poker game, they
reflect on the future the captain told them, to prevent them from drifting
apart. For the first time ever, Picard decides to join the game, expressing
regret he had not done so before, saying "...and the sky's the
limit," suggesting more adventures lay ahead for the crew.
To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".
Stay Tuned
Tony Figueroa
Show No. 233 with guests Mike Connors, David Breckman and JoAnn Paul
