The Star Online: Entertainment: TV & Radio
The Star Online: Entertainment: TV & Radio |
| Comedies 'Girls', 'Louie' headline Peabody Awards Posted: 27 Mar 2013 09:20 PM PDT REUTERS - Irreverent U.S. cable television series Girls and Louie on Wednesday headlined the winners of the annual Peabody Awards, the oldest and one of the top honors in broadcasting. The awards recognize excellence in television and radio broadcasting, as well as by webcasters, producing organizations and individuals. HBO's Girls, which has earned creator and star Lena Dunham, 26, two Golden Globe awards and a slew of Emmy nominations, was lauded by the Peabody panel for its "singular, decidedly unglamorous take on sex and the single girl." Comedian Louis C.K.'s Louie, a cult hit on FX of unconnected story lines and vignettes about a single father in the entertainment business, was praised as a "milestone of comedic reach and candor." The Peabody panel, which also honors international and local programs, awarded a prize to WVIT-TV, an NBC affiliate in West Hartford, Connecticut, for its coverage of the elementary school mass shootings in December in nearby Newtown. Other notable winners include British broadcaster ITV's documentary on the late BBC presenter Jimmy Savile that explored allegations of decades-long sexual abuse by the once beloved star. The BBC science-fiction drama Doctor Who won an Institutional Peabody Award for its ability to evolve with the times over its some 50 years in production. Producer Lorne Michaels, the driving force behind NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, won an individual Peabody Award for career achievement. The website SCOTUSblog.com, which provides analysis and archival material on the U.S. Supreme Court, also won an award and was praised as a one-stop shop for information on the court. A 16-member board of critics, experts, and news and entertainment industry insiders select the winners of the annual awards handed out by the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners will be honored at a ceremony in New York on 20 May. |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2013 02:36 AM PDT Ex-mafioso Lou Ferrante takes viewers into the secret world of mobsters. WHEN former mobster Lou Ferrante was serving time in a maximum security prison in Pennsylvania, he couldn't bring himself to watch Tony and his friends take care of business on popular mob drama The Sopranos. "The mobsters that I was in jail with would watch The Sopranos every week and I would say 'Oh, come on guys. Why do you want to look back at that stuff! That's what got us here'," said Ferrante in an exlusive phone interview from New York city. Now at 44, Ferrante said it was difficult for him to relive his gang life on television. He can be seen on Discovery Channel's Inside The Gangster's Code, a documentary series in which he uses his mob and prison experiences to explore gang life in different parts of the world. "For me, it was too painful to even look at because I lived it. I didn't want to think about the people we have victimised." As a teenager growing up in Queens, New York, Ferrante and his gang used to hijack delivery trucks. Then he became part of the mafia by joining the infamous Gambino crime family. He became a loan shark and joked that his interest rates were better than most banks in the United States. Then in 1994, the FBI caught up with him and he was sentenced to 13 years in prison on various racketeering charges. He was able to appeal against one case and was released in 2003 after serving almost nine years in prison. In prison, Ferrante said, he got into an altercation with one of the guards. His misdemeanour landed him in solitary confinement and that's when he had an epiphany. "I tried to grab the guard's necktie through the food slot and he called me an animal. He said I belonged in the 'zoo' that I was in. And I just realised that I was an animal. I don't want to be one anymore and that was the beginning of the change that took place inside me." Ferrante thought he had all the answers: "I was as ignorant as everyone else. Then I called up a friend and asked him to send me some books. And what I got was Adolf Hilter's Mein Kampf, Julius Caesar's Gallic War and a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte." It was then Ferrante discovered his love for words. Upon his release from prison, he went looking to get published. "I did not want to write anything to do with true crime. Unfortunately, every publisher and agent that I went to would say 'Give us your story, we feel like your story is too important to overlook'. I held out for, like, three years, I just didn't want to talk about prison." Eventually, Ferrante took the worst times of his life and made the best out of it. In 2009, he released a memoir about life in prison entitled Unlocked: The Life And Crimes Of A Mafia Insider. Then in 2011 came a business advice book, Mob Rules: What The Mafia Can Teach The Legitimate Businessman. "Everything I do today, as far as business is concerned, I learned from the mob; how to keep my word, how to resolve differences in people and everything else. Basically, I just strip away the violence that the mafia has and just took the business-savvy part." On the Discovery series, he said: "I travel around the world and I enjoy meeting gangsters, because I feel that I've walked in their shoes. Although I'm on the right side of the law now, I do understand that and I'm sort of able to unravel them (gangsters) for the viewers. I think we get an insider's perspective on different subcultures around the world and just the way gangs operate." He explained how he made the experience of going on a whirlwind trip to prisons in South America and Europe bearable for his production crew. "I have to let the film crew know that if we're interviewing an inmate and he's got to run off and do something – which happens occasionally – we have to let him go because he's basically running the prison. He controls the inner workings of the prison. It's like allowing the warden to take care of his business." He added: "What goes on inside the prison is a sensitive thing and the film crew would pretty much refer to me. I was able to lead them through the ins and outs, and I thank God we were able to do it safely." He also made it a point to make sure that the show does not glamorise gang life. "In one of the episodes, I came across a body and I said 'that's real gang life'. In movies, the actor gets up, wipes the ketchup off his face and goes on to the next scene. But in real life, gangsters get killed, (a guy's) in the street and he's dead. I look for opportunities to take the veneer off organised crime and show the raw brutality of it." Ferrante hopes viewers will see that there's a global phenomenon taking place and gangs are everywhere. "When people feel displaced, that they can't find work because of the economy, they have to commit criminal deeds to survive. You know, I think criminal activity and gangs is a growing subculture and hopefully this will help heighten awareness of gang problems around the world." Catch Inside The Gangster's Code tonight at 10pm on Discovery Channel (Astro Ch 551). |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2013 02:38 AM PDT CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is still one of today's most watched shows. As television shows go, it is an utterly predictable formula – a cops-and-criminals drama spiced up with graphically gruesome details, a music video-worthy soundtrack and implausibly attractive investigators, with the whodunnit teed up at the start of each episode handily solved within an hour. While CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has cleaved to this formula since it first aired in 2000, it has managed to stay fresh, partly by enlisting some big names in television and film, including Golden Globe winner Ted Danson in 2011 and Oscar-nominated actress Elisabeth Shue last year. Danson is best known for playing quirky, sardonic characters including bartender Sam Malone on the sitcom Cheers (1982-1993), which won him two Golden Globes. And he seems more than happy to be in a long-running hit series. "I'm thrilled that it remains the No. 1 watched show in the world even after I joined,'' the 65-year-old actor quipped during a press conference in Los Angeles recently. "The different kinds of people who come up to you and talk about it still surprise me." He plays D.B. Russell, supervisor of the CSI team in Las Vegas. Shue, 49, saw her film career peak in the 1990s, when she won an Oscar nomination for playing a prostitute in the 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas. Since then, her projects have been few and far between, as she has been reluctant to leave her children with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, two daughters and a son, aged six to 14. "I decided to be on CSI knowing that my youngest was in school. I had a tough time deciding to do any television shows when she was still young because I didn't want to miss out on any moment in her life. "But I'm glad I chose CSI because it's a show that is an ensemble – there are a lot of great characters so I still get time off to take care of my family and keep that balance. And the show's very well-run." While she is used to working on dramas, acting out stories about murders and dead bodies was a bit of an adjustment for Danson, who is more of a comedic actor despite three Emmy nominations from 2008 to 2010 for his role in the Glenn Close legal drama Damages. "There are times you can see smoke coming out of my ears because the words are so hard," he says of the multisyllabic scientific and technical terms that trip off Russell's tongue. "It's very difficult to memorise, so I am a little tired right now." Comedy is nevertheless more challenging, he adds. "Because it's very hard to get the right tone of what's funny. In drama, there's an old joke that you can show up drunk, depressed and divorced and the camera goes, 'Ooh! Wow! That's interesting!'." Over the years, the CSI cast have had more opportunities to flex their dramatic muscles as the show's writers have delved increasingly into the lives and personal stories of their characters. But its chief appeal is still its forensic "procedural" element, the whodunnit-on-steroids genre that it pioneered, in many ways, leading to the spin-offs CSI: Miami and CSI: New York, as well as similar shows such as Bones and Cold Case. "This show has stuck to what made it great early on, they really do provide you with a forensic mystery that is as honest as you can make it, considering you have 45 minutes to tell a story," says Danson. "We try to make the science as real as possible and they have stuck to that formula. I think that is what makes it successful." – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Season 13 airs on AXN (Astro Ch 701) on Wednesdays at 10pm. You can also watch repeats of Season 12 on the same channel. |
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