 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
TELEVISION REVIEW | 'THE CHEF JEFF PROJECT' |
 |
The addition of a baby to a family is supposed to be one of life's happiest events - but for some, the road can be a little rocky. Discovery Health's all-new BABY WEEK kicks off on Monday, March 1 at 8 PM
(ET/PT,) showcasing the joys - and the struggles - that arrive with a new baby.
With four
all-new specials airing nightly through Thursday, March 4, BABY WEEK follows the firsthand
accounts of parents facing the challenges that accompany their little bundles of joy. From the difficult topic of postpartum depression, to unorthodox parenting styles, to miracle pregnancies, this BABY WEEK's programming slate offers a unique and candid glimpse into what life is sometimes like after baby.
On January 26th at 10pm, be prepared to unravel the clues and uncover the truth, on the premier episode of Discovery Health Channel’s “Mystery ER.”
The patient is dying. The doctors are baffled. Nothing is what it seems. Clues and symptoms lead nowhere. The clock is ticking. Unless they find answers, people will die. These are real life stories, the most baffling medical mysteries straight from the Emergency Room. Weaving together interviews and re-enactments, Mystery E.R. follows doctors and investigators as they attempt to unravel the most unusual cases of their lives.
The current schedule:
Episode 1: Friday, January 26 at 10pm on Discovery Health Channel
Episode 2: Friday, February 2 at 10pm on Discovery Health Channel
Episode 3: Friday, March 2 at 10pm on Discovery Health Channel
Episode 4: Friday, March 9 at 10pm on Discovery Health Channel
Please check local Discovery Health Channel listings to confirm these dates and times.
If you live in the UK, tune in to Discovery HD to see the world’s most exotic and amazing vacation homes and unusual people who create them.
Amazing Vacation Homes showing on Discovery HD 20 January at 13:00 "Beach Homes"
Amazing Vacation Homes showing on Discovery HD 20 January at 13:30 "Mountain Homes”
Amazing Vacation Homes showing on Discovery HD 21 January at 11:00 "Beach Homes"
Amazing Vacation Homes showing on Discovery HD 21 January at 11:30 "Mountain Homes"
http://library.digiguide.com/lib/programme/Amazing-Vacation-Homes-266082
On December 28, 2006, the Spanish version of X-Testers began airing in Central American and Spain under the name "Superagentes Paranormales."
And down under, Australia and New Zealand launched the series on September 2nd, 2006.
All over the world, entranced audiences are discovering the paranormal through the eyes of the X-Testers.
Missed the incredible moments of Amazing Babies on your TV? Not to worry. Now you can catch all the poignant, miraculous, and sometimes heart wrenching stories of childbirth all over again, as Discovery has released the first season on DVD.
People Magazine, November 27th 2006 (Page 174)
CURTIS STONE: Take Home Chef
AGE: 31
STATUS: Single
HOMETOWN: Born in Melbourne; currently divides his time between Los Angeles and London.
On his show, Stone approaches women in grocery stores and offers to go home with them and cook. Here's his sexy supermarket shopping guide.
SEXIEST AISLES? "Fresh fruit, shellfish, chocolate."
BEST APHRODIASIACS? "Chocolate is one of the sexiest things in the market. Also chili pepper, oysters, champagne."
SECRET INGREDIENT? "Fresh vanilla is amazing. It even works with seafood."
KITCHEN ESSENTIAL? "I always peek in a woman's freezer. The more ice cream, the more it impresses me."
For Your Consideration.
Amazing Vacation Homes has been submitted for the Daytime Emmys in the following categories:
Single Camera Photography
Single Camera Editing
Take Home Chef has been submitted for the “Lifestyle Show” category.
A Chef You'll Want to Take Home With You Kaitlyn Edsall
Cooking shows are hardly a new phenomenon. Julia Child started them off with her no-nonsense approach to French cuisine. Martha Stewart made television cooking “a good thing,” and most recently, Rachel Ray has conquered everything from the airwaves to cracker boxes.
But today, many networks are trying to put a fresh spin on the old television recipe. Fox found a way to make cooking into a reality show with “Hell’s Kitchen,” a concept repeated on Bravo with “Top Chef.” In the UK, “The Naked Chef” has been mixing things up, but it’s TLC that has discovered the tastiest way to whip up a new cooking show, and it’s called “Take Home Chef.”
“Take Home Chef” combines cooking with reality television and a generous dash of sex appeal for a genuinely delicious TV treat. Host Curtis Stone — a particularly scrumptious, blond morsel from down under who also happens to be an accomplished chef — uses his extensive culinary skills to lend a hand to the kitchen-clueless women of Los Angeles.
Each episode begins with the tall, buff Stone roaming a supermarket, usually a Whole Foods, in search of a hot young shopper. Once spotted, Stone bombards the oblivious chick with his camera crew and offers to cook her and whoever she’s planning to cook for — usually a boyfriend or husband — a fabulous gourmet dinner. Of course, the girl never objects to taking Stone home with her, nor does she turn down the free groceries and Crate & Barrel housewares they inevitably pick up on the ride home.
The most entertaining part of the drama happens when they get home and things start heating up in the kitchen. The women, of course, flee to “freshen up” for the cameras, and presumably for the Aussie hunk, and then they get down to cooking. Or rather, Stone cooks while the women pretend to help, pour wine and giggle profusely. The most delectable part of this awkward display is that these women all have significant others due home at any moment.
And what do the men find when they do come home? Sure, dinner’s on the table, but there’s also a camera crew and a handsome chap greeting you at the door. Not exactly every man’s dream homecoming.
But there’s more to drool over than just Stone — the “Take Home Chef” does not ignore the necessary element of every successful cooking show: fabulous food. Due to his English and Aussie roots, Stone likes to make a lot of rich curry dishes and uses a lot of sausage to create an oddly delicious effect. All food is, of course, presented to perfection.
Stone also solved the mystery I’ve been trying to unfold since I saw LOVE ACTUALLY — it turns out that banoffee pie is pie made of bananas, caramel and whipped cream. How sweet.
Curtis serves up these culinary confections and then leaves the couple to enjoy their dessert without him. Though I don’t see why they’d ever want him to leave.
“Take Home Chef” conveniently airs every weekday on TLC from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., and new episodes air every Friday at 7 p.m. — just in time to inspire you to get busy in the kitchen yourself.
Or you can just sit back with your Easy-Mac and devour each yummy episode. Either way, stay tuned.
Upon receiving a copy of “Rockets Red Glare,” the Marshall Space Flight Center declared that “apart from its entertainment value, [this program] is also a worthwhile tool for communicating key principles of aerospace and rocket flight vehicle safety.”
Rockets Red Glare is a primetime one-hour special chronicling history’s most dramatic rocket failures and how they changed the course of rocket design.
Discovery Channel content arrives on iTunes
By Prince McLean
Discovery Communications on Tuesday announced that content from its family of networks is now available for purchase on Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store.
The offering includes more than a dozen series from the Discovery Channel, as well as TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health Channel and Discovery Kids.
Focused on providing informative and compelling content that people can use to enrich and improve their lives, the Discovery programming available on iTunes includes: "World's Best" travel series, "Nation Parks Short Films" and "Passport to Europe" from the Travel Channel; "Amazing Babies" and "Pregnancy for Dummies" from Discovery Health; and "Kenny the Shark" and "Save-UMS" from Discovery Kids.
Keck: The Miniseries
Don’t look for Richard Chamberlain swashbuckling his way through surgery, but this Discovery Health documentary brings the real-life adventures of USC doctors and patients to the small screen.
You’d never peg Mike Mathis for a Trojan die-hard. A graduate of Occidental College, the veteran TV producer’s closest connection to the university is attending the same San Marino church as USC President Steven B. Sample.
And yet, Mathis is the mastermind behind the six-part miniseries “USC Medical” that aired on the Discovery Health channel in April and May, reaching some 40 million American homes.
Had the university purchased six hours of advertising, it couldn’t have presented the Keck School in a more flattering light than this documentary highlighting the real-life stories of the doctors, patients and medical students of USC and its affiliated hospitals.
Just how did Mathis, with no direct ties to the Trojan Family, hit on the Keck School for this project? Wanting to model a series after ABC’s “Hopkins 24/7” and “Houston Medical,” Mathis says he “immediately thought of USC because it’s here in the community where I live. It’s a huge medical center; it’s very renowned and respected. And I knew there were interesting stories at that hospital. I just knew it.
“People go through life and death situations here – hurting people, frightened people, delighted people – all going through these crucial moments. We just wanted to be there with people who were willing to let us tell their stories.”
Mathis’ instinct was right.
The first episode featured a live-donor liver transplant performed on mother and daughter by USC surgeons Rick Selby and Nicolas Jabbour. It also had a segment on surgeon Melvin Silverstein’s compassionate handling of a frightened breast-cancer patient convinced she was going to die. In a later episode, Silverstein himself becomes the patient when he undergoes open-heart surgery to repair a valve. Hours later, he faces a near-death crisis with a ripped aorta – corrected in a life-saving procedure performed by friend and colleague Vaughn Starnes, a cardiothoracic surgeon. In a separate episode, Starnes operates on an hours-old infant born with a heart that only works on one side.
In all, some 30 stories lace through the six one-hour episodes. We see twins diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the eye; a burn patient’s excruciating skin reconstruction recovery; a heart-transplant candidate’s anxious wait for a donor organ. Student stories show the hardships faced by Amy, a USC undergraduate living with cystic fibrosis; the strain on Keck first-year students Ebonie Smith and Nohemi Gonzalez as they brace for exams; and the tender relationship that develops between surgical fellows Laura Klein and Lina Romero and their mentor, again breast surgeon Mel Silverstein, who is himself haunted by the drug-overdose death of his daughter years ago.
“There are some very moving stories in the six hours and some heroic doctors and heroic patients,” says Silverstein. “I think looking at the six hours will give a lot of people hope.”
It took nearly a year to make these six hours of television. Film crews began taping in July 2003. “We filmed almost every day for seven months,” says Mathis, whose Pasadena-based production company has made numerous programs for the Discovery networks as well as for the Travel Channel, TLC and HGTV. Before starting his own production company, Mathis directed episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries” for years.
For this project, Mathis set up a field office at USC University Hospital, where his researchers were sure to bump into physicians.
“After a while, when they passed each other in the hall or rode together on the elevator, the doctors would say: ‘Hey, you know this interesting thing is happening tomorrow. Why don’t you be there?’ recalls Mathis. “Access is everything.”
The crews followed the doctors as they made the rounds through USC University Hospital, the Doheny Eye Institute, USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center. When necessary they trailed them across town to USC partner hospitals such as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Baby Kyle
Surgeon John Gross reunites Teresa and Chris Chavez with their baby, who has just undergone surgery to reshape his malformed skull. Had the congenital defect gone uncorrected, Kyle would later suffer brain damage.
Art courtesy Mike Mathis Productions
Whenever the doctors were on duty, so were the filmmakers: “I had several late-night calls from doctors. They’d say: ‘Look, right now we’re going to harvest a heart. Do we want to be there?’ My people would jump out of bed and go,” Mathis says.
The result is a more intimate view of the Keck School than has ever before been seen. “These doctors let us right into the operating room. They said, ‘Bring the camera in, see what we do.’”
What they do, the producer found, is fascinating. In one episode, we literally watch trauma surgeon Juan Asensio remove a metal shaft impaling a man’s leg, then race up the elevator to clamp the bleeding artery of a gunshot victim already in surgery. We see how emergency physician Susan Stone balances a career in the ER with her personal struggle with leukemia. We see orthopedist James Tibone, physician to the Trojan football team, hustle on the sidelines to examine a fresh injury and, later, hustle in the operating room to reconstruct a player’s torn knee. We see epidemiologist Jim Dwyer turn himself into a guinea pig after he is diagnosed with a rare cancer for which no known therapy exists.
The key, says Mathis, is just to be there as the stories unfold. “They unfold for us just as they do for the viewer. We’re filming what happens. We don’t know how it is going to end and neither do the doctors.”
“USC Medical” is serious reality-television that takes you behind the scenes. “You don’t normally get to see a surgeon as he trains a fellow with her first surgical procedure,” Mathis says. “You don’t get to watch surgeons give people bad news. Those are dramatic stories happening all the time.”
There’s no script and no preconceived plotline. Nothing is staged and the stories don’t necessarily end happily. “Not everyone that we followed lived,” says Mathis. “Then again, there were people who looked like they weren’t going to make it who are fine. It’s just like life.”
Mathis’ crews shot hundreds of hours of digital video. Back at the production studio, a wall of bookshelves holds the cassettes, meticulously labeled, logged and transcribed before being transferred to digital editing terminals where the stories were assembled, narrated and scored.
Winning the physicians over wasn’t easy. “They kind of eye you,” says Mathis, recalling his first meetings. Their skepticism is understandable, he adds. “You’re at someone’s mercy when you let them film you. If you’re a doctor, you’ve got a career that you spent decades working on. You don’t want somebody coming in and trivializing it or misrepresenting it. At the end of the day, trust is everything: trust that you’re not just doing a hatchet job.”
Filming in deeply private, sometimes life-and-death situations involved a great deal of red tape. Mathis spent four months just getting the ball rolling. “I’ve never worked on a show that had as many legal issues as this one had,” says the Emmy-nominated, 20-year-veteran TV producer and director. Once they had finished negotiations with USC’s attorney, he explains, “We had to turn around and do it again with all the different hospitals involved.”
That Mathis himself has no background in medicine he considers an asset: “I come to everything like a viewer. I don’t know what retinal blastoma is: I have to learn like everyone else,” he says. The program’s director and camera operators are seasoned medical filmmakers, however: it wouldn’t do to have the crew pass out during surgery, Mathis jokes.
The rest, he says, is just follow-through. “Once the doctor says, ‘You can come with me and meet my patients and listen to me talk to them,’ and the patient says, ‘You can come home with me and see what it’s like to have a baby with this condition,’ our job is just not to mess it up.” – Diane Krieger
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/autumn04/AlumniAndFriends.html
Copyright 2010 © Mike Mathis Productions | Terms and Conditions |