Jennifer Hudson is about to raise her ‘Voice’ again
Published 12:00 am Monday, September 3, 2018
Q: I enjoyed Jennifer Hudson as a coach and judge in “The Voice.” Will she be back on that show?
— Laurie Davis, Buffalo, New York
A: You’ll be glad to know that the Grammy and Oscar winner is returning for the upcoming Season 15 of the NBC competition, which begins Sept. 24. Kelly Clarkson also will be back, with the two of them joining founding panel members Adam Levine and Blake Shelton.
Q: Will Sela Ward return to “Westworld”?
— Dave Hunter, via email
A: Though viewers of the HBO series know her character’s fate apparently has been determined, there’s nothing to say she can’t resurface in sequences that might be out of a linear time order. However, it also will depend on her availability, since she has a full-time job for the coming television season.
Two-time Emmy winner (for “Sisters” and “Once and Again”) and “CSI: NY” alum Ward will be back in a CBS crime procedural, since she was a late addition to the cast of executive producer Dick Wolf’s “FBI,” which premieres Sept. 25.
She’ll enter the show in the second episode, playing the New York bureau chief.
Q: Does MeTV plan to show “Laugh-In” or “Hee Haw”?
— David Little, Los Alamos, New Mexico
A: That channel changes up shows a couple of times a year, and we can’t speak to what it may be planning for the future, since its schedule switches usually aren’t known almost until they happen. However, for the time being, we can report that both of the shows you cite currently have other television homes.
“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” is a staple of the weekday lineup on Decades, with two episodes running back-to-back each day. And the country-flavored music-and-comedy show “Hee Haw” gets regular runs on RFD-TV.
Q: When did Jane Pauley begin as host of “Sunday Morning”?
— Kim Elliott, Edgewater, Florida
A: She’ll soon mark her two-year anniversary in that role on the CBS program, since she succeeded Charles Osgood (who, in turn, succeeded founding host Charles Kuralt) in October 2016. “Today” alum Pauley also will help mark an overall milestone for the series when it makes an extremely rare venture into primetime, celebrating its 40-year history in an hourlong special Sept. 14.
Q: I’ve been enjoying the new “Match Game” with Alec Baldwin. Over the years, did the show have any other hosts besides him and Gene Rayburn?
— George Jason, North Kingstown, Rhode Island
A: Rayburn was its longest-tenured host, through various changes — a switch of networks, the first syndicated version, an edition that combined it in the same hour with “The Hollywood Squares,” etc. When the show was revived in the early 1990s, Bert Convy was slated to be the host, but his illness necessitated someone else getting the job (Ross Shafer).
Much later in the ’90s, another syndicated “Match Game” installed Michael Burger as the host. Then in 2006, a CBS “Gameshow Marathon” that encompassed revivals of several classic games featured Ricki Lake. A Canadian variation was done several years ago, and Baldwin surprised a lot of people by beginning his ABC take on the show — as host and executive producer — in 2016. He insisted on using the same long-stemmed sort of microphone that was one of Rayburn’s “Match Game” trademarks.
Q: Now that “The Americans” is over, will Keri Russell be doing another series?
— Tom Frederick, via email
A: In a manner of speaking. A recent winner of a Television Critics Association Award for her last season on the FX drama, the actress also is a current Emmy nominee for it. Rather than going back to TV right away, Russell will be appearing in another series of note: She’s in the cast of “Star Wars: Episode IX,” co-written and directed by J.J. Abrams, who has been a big factor in her career.
He was one of the masterminds of “Felicity,” the show that made Russell a star, and he also employed her — memorably, if relatively briefly — in “Mission: Impossible III.” Her “Star Wars” character hadn’t been specified at the time of this writing, and it wouldn’t surprise us if it’s kept under wraps up to the picture’s schedule release at the end of 2019.