MARIAH CAREY

However many celebrities have a good holiday season, Mariah Carey appears destined for one of her best.
Not only are she and husband Nick Cannon (“America’s Got Talent”) celebrating their status as parents-to-be, but she’s making the rounds to promote her second CD of seasonal tunes, “Merry Christmas II You.”
One of her stops — a most appropriate one — is NBC’s 13th annual edition of “Christmas in Rockefeller Center” Tuesday, Nov. 30.
“I’ve never done this before, so I’m really looking forward to it,”
the friendly Carey says. “When I had my first Christmas record a while ago, I would have thought somebody would have tried to make that merger, but this is going to be fun for me. I do love all those kinds of very Christmas-y events … and hopefully, it won’t be too cold.”
The lighting of the Christmas tree in New York’s Rockefeller Center is a traditional highlight of the NBC special, which Al Roker and Natalie Morales of “Today” will host. Sheryl Crow, Josh Groban, Jessica Simpson, Annie Lennox, Kylie Minogue, Internet sensations Susan Boyle and Charice, Welsh singer Katherine Jenkins, and young soprano Jackie Evancho (who competed on “America’s Got Talent”) also are on the musical bill.
Carey certainly has enough Christmas songs from which to choose for the show. “Merry Christmas II You” includes an “Extra Festive” version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” her holiday standard that she also co-wrote. Also on the CD are “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “The First Noel,” a medley of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “The Little Drummer Boy,” and several more songs Carey co-authored.
One of those — “Oh Santa!” — is what Carey expects to perform on “Christmas in Rockefeller Center.” It’s also slated to be the theme song of the new ABC Family movie “Christmas Cupid” Dec. 12.
Carey says the Rockefeller Center show’s producers want the tune, “and it’s already been No. 1 on the (Billboard magazine) holiday chart, which is amazing. It’s pretty festive, but it depends. If they decide they want something slow, I’ll do something slow.”
The No. 2 slot on that Billboard chart also went to Carey, for “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” as “Merry Christmas II You” was being released at the start of this month.
Included as well on the CD is “O Holy Night,” which Carey recorded live with a choir in the South Central district of Los Angeles. “I actually did it a while ago,” she says, “and I held onto it. I kept the idea of another Christmas album afloat by doing new stuff every year, and that song was done at a time when I was sort of in between labels. I decided I would do something different, so I did that version with a video and everything.”
One of the producers of “Merry Christmas II You” is Randy Jackson, the one judge who’s lasting into the new season of “American Idol” that begins in January on Fox. Carey maintains that he “absolutely” is still the Randy Jackson she always has known, even when he was more of a presence in recording studios than on television screens.
“That’s one of the things that I think is so special about him as a person,” Carey confirms of Jackson, who also has served as musical director for several of her concert tours. “He is exactly the same guy. People wouldn’t believe it. I can’t even believe it sometimes.”
Expect Carey to make many more television appearances in the weeks before Christmas, a main one being her own ABC special Dec. 13. That hour will merge performance sequences, taped at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre, with segments in which Carey will surprise several of her fans by making their holiday wishes come true … literally.
“I’ve spoken with my mother about coming in and doing our version of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful,’ ” Carey reveals of the ABC show. “We have never performed it live together, so I’m really excited about it.
That’ll be a nice moment.”
Carey also believes there are many such moments on “Merry Christmas II You,” which is why she’s pleased to embark on a heavy media schedule for it, even while well along in her pregnancy.
“I just feel I’m in a different place in terms of being comfortable with my creative freedom,” she says. “I love a lot of stuff from the first Christmas album, but every year, I skip certain songs. I won’t be happy unless I fast-forward through them, so I figured if I did a new album that felt good, I could make my own playlist. This is like the sequel to a first movie.”
And in Carey’s view, there’s no better time than Christmas for such a
sequel: “No matter what else is happening in my life, everything else stops at that time, and it’s time to do something really fun. However the rest of the year has been, I never let the holidays go by with me in a bleak, glum mood. I just won’t do it.”

EVERYONE’S CHEERING FOR THE CFL

This is the one time of the year that hockey as a national religion is swept aside by football as a nation building exercise. As Chris Schultz says, when it comes to the Grey Cup, everybody is cheering for two things: the league and the country.
“It’s a hard thing to go wrong,” says the TSN analyst. “There is a good sense of patriotism in a Grey Cup game. And you see every single jersey. You even see Baltimore Stallions jerseys. You may see a Moncton jersey on somebody’s back, hoping they’ll get a CFL franchise.
There just is a sense of attitude gratitude.  Let’s really enjoy the fact that we live in a free country. I know that sounds silly. But it’s not. People have a real, genuine good time there.”
This year, on Sunday, Nov. 28, the big game will be broadcast live on TSN from Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton. At this writing, the only parties that were certain to make an appearance were geriatric rockers Randy Bachman and Fred Turner, who are expected to be taking care of business at the halftime show, and Nova Scotia rock band the Trews, scheduled to perform the national anthem.
If viewing numbers have anything to say about it, there may just be something to Schultz’s theory of pigskin nation building. The game routinely draws an audience of 3 or 4 million — from every region of the country.
As for the live show, ticket sales set a record this year, with a sellout in just one week.
Schultz has covered the league as an announcer for 15 years and was a CFL lineman for another nine, appearing in two Grey Cups, with the Toronto Argonauts, in 1987 and ’91.
So he has seen the big game from both sides.
“At the national anthem, it kind of dawns on you that this is it,” he says. “It’s the last  game of the year — especially for the veteran players. They know that the team will never be the same. Through free agency or whatever, it’s a different group of guys next year. So there’s an awareness of the finality of it all, and it’s all or nothing.  And all that work you did does start to flash back in your mind.
“It’s a good feeling, a feeling of energy throughout the stadium, and energy within you. The two I played in, I was more ready to go than I’ve ever been.”
Over the course of this season, it was rarely in doubt that the best team was Calgary, and the big surprise was how competitive a lot of the league was — especially in the East. For the first time in years, the Montreal Alouettes weren’t a shooin for conference champions. Both the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and last year’s laughingstocks, the Toronto Argonauts, were serious contenders through most of the season.
“Although Montreal were the class of the East again, (Hamilton and
Toronto) at least closed the gap,” says TSN play-by-play announcer Chris Cuthbert. “They made it a bit of a race. There was a point around Labor Day that, had things worked out, there could have been a three-way tie for first place in the East. In southern Ontario, there has been a rejuvenation. I don’t think it’s a surprise in Hamilton, but I think it’s a very pleasant surprise in Toronto. I think even the most optimistic member of the Argonaut brass didn’t anticipate much more than a six-win season.”
The Argos passed that mark about halfway through, and for much of the season, the league standings were a mirror image of what they usually are, with the Eastern teams lining up as three of the five top teams in the league. For the first time in recent memory, it never looked as if there would be a Western team crossing over to the Eastern playoffs — and the reverse seemed a distinct possibility.
This, in a roundabout way, brings us to what may be the most interesting story of the West, the incredible melting Eskimos.
Edmonton fans, once the most justifiably smug in the country, had to watch their once-mighty team degenerate into league punching bags.
“I think Eskimo fans are living their worst nightmare,” Cuthbert says.
“This is beyond what anybody anticipated. I think in large part everybody thought Edmonton had a chance of playing on their home turf in the Grey Cup, and that’s clearly not going to happen. “I know Stampeders Quarterback Henry Burris has kidded that it was nice of the good neighbors to the north of Calgary to host a Grey Cup game in their honor.”
Burris made that crack long before the two final teams had been decided — and it was still in doubt at this writing. But those words could come back to haunt him, because, as Schultz says: “it’s not about the best team; it’s about the best team that day.”

DRAGONS DEN WITHOUT A DEN OR DRAGONS

There may not be any preening big-ego businesspeople or a melodramatic atmosphere, and the overall feeling is nicer. But that doesn’t mean “Homemade Millionaire,” airing Fridays on TLC, isn’t about competition.  In this show, only one would-be entrepreneur walks away with a deal at the end of the episode. And the prize is a little more solid than the vague capital investment of “Dragons’ Den.”
In this case, three women come onto the show — hosted by Kelly Ripa — and make their pitches to a focus group of women who rate the desirability of their product.
The two who are picked by the focus ladies move on to further challenges, working under the tutelage of inventor and how-to author Wendy Robbins. Each episode also features guest judges and experts such as chef Emeril Lagasse and fashion designer Diane Gilman.
Anyone who has ever seen any of the design challenge shows or home-reno competitions knows what comes next. The two remaining women are given a series of “challenges” designed to prepare them for the big pitch to the executives at the U.S. Home Shopping Network. This leads to the midshow montage — which has become as predictable as the musical interlude in a 1960s romantic comedy.
In the first episode, the competition consisted of three women with hair products to peddle, which, of course, meant some intense competition and the requisite undercurrents of hostility and resentment. At one point, the women were given a half-hour to create before and-after photo promotions, which had them competing for props, models and so on. The winner gets mentoring by some top businesspeople, a deal to market her product on HSN and a chance to live happily ever after.

RESTREPO: WAR THROUGH SOLDIERS’ EYES

Politicians, activists, pundits and academics have all had their say about the war in Afghanistan, but on National Geographic Channel on Monday, Nov. 29, soldiers on the front line get to tell their own stories.  Released by National Geographic Entertainment to theaters in July, the documentary “Restrepo: Afghan Outpost,” and, at the time of this writing, with its very rough language intact, has passed the $1 million mark at the box office and was a winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
But for journalist and author Sebastian Junger (“The Perfect Storm”), who worked on the film with director, producer and photojournalist Tim Hetherington, the major takeaway is not the money or the prize but what he learned about people who were largely unfamiliar to him — American soldiers.
Junger and Hetherington tracked Second Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, based at the 15-man Outpost Restrepo — named after a medic, PFC Juan “Doc” Restrepo, who was killed in action — in the rugged and remote Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, for an entire deployment in 2007 and 2008. Although Junger has been in battle zones around the world, this was his first time embedded with the military. “I’ve always been with civilian populations,” Junger says in the incongruous setting of a hotel lobby in Beverly Hills, Calif., in August.  “So I was with Battle Company, and I just really liked those guys. I grew up in the wake of Vietnam, and my image of the U.S.
military was not particularly positive. But I was just so impressed by the men that I was with.”
Junger first met Battle Company in the Korengal in 2005 on assignment for Vanity Fair. He returned in June of 2007 for Vanity Fair and ABC News but also with the idea of making a documentary and writing a book. Three months after the deployment ended, Junger and Hetherington traveled to Battle Company’s home base in Italy to conduct in-depth interviews.
Junger’s book is called “War,” and Hetherington has also released a book of photographs called “Infidel” (after the tattoo the men of the company have as a symbol of their bond).
“They’re so well-trained,” Junger says of the soldiers, “and they’re so disciplined under fire. It’s not that I thought they wouldn’t be; it was just amazing to see that.”
Asked what his goal was with “Restrepo,” Junger says, “Lost in the very important public conversation about the war is the experience of the soldiers themselves. The left wing and the right wing both have their ideas about that experience, but what we wanted to do was spend enough time with soldiers in a remote outpost to actually show what the experience is. Whether you’re against the war or for the war, these are American citizens who volunteered to fight.  They’re over there, and they’re fighting and getting killed on behalf of this country, and they’re coming home. The better we understand their experience, the more successful we’ll be at incorporating them back into society.”
The film could also have a strong effect on those who know and love veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. “They often can’t talk about it themselves,” Junger says, “so this is a way for people who love these guys who went over there to fight to look through the keyhole into this weird room called combat. They can’t go into it themselves, but now they have a little peephole to look in there and understand what went on there, starting with the families and then broadening out to everyone who sees it.”
On Sept. 10, the White House announced that 25-year-old Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta of Battle Company, First Platoon, would receive the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top military award, for his actions during a nighttime Taliban ambush in the Korengal on Oct. 25, 2007.
Giunta was interviewed for Junger’s “War,” but, because he’s in First Platoon rather than Second Platoon, he doesn’t appear in “Restrepo.”
However, while following Second Platoon, Hetherington caught the only footage of the Battle Company operation that earned Giunta his honor — and also resulted in Hetherington breaking his leg.  “He had to walk all night on it,” Junger says in a follow-up phone interview in early October, “because they couldn’t get him off that mountain.”
Fortunately for Junger, he was able to get a rare firsthand account from a Medal of Honor recipient.  “To get a Medal of Honor,” Junger says, “you have to be brave, and often, bravery gets you killed.”
Asked what he thought of Giunta when the two finally sat down to talk, Junger says, “He was very polite, humble, really charming young man.
He had a lot to say, and I had a tremendous respect for him and how he was processing and talking about the experience. He was a completely honest guy, honest about his feelings, honest about everything.”

NOVEMBER CHRISTMAS

Get the tissues out. You’ll need them — and more than once — for “November Christmas,” a truly moving, superbly cast new CBS movie that does the Hallmark Hall of Fame tradition proud.
Airing Sunday, Nov. 28, the drama stars Sam Elliott (“Mask”) and Karen Allen (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”) as a couple still dealing with a tragedy of their own when they come to the aid of a family newly relocated to their town.
John Corbett (“Sex and the City”) and Sarah Paulson (“Deadwood”) play parents hoping to enable their seriously ill daughter (Emily Alyn
Lind) to celebrate the holidays early fearing she may not have much time left. Elliott’s character sells pumpkins and Christmas trees, and he initially doesn’t understand the couple’s need for such items out of season. Once he does, he and his wife try to help them realize their dreams.
“It felt like it might work,” Ellliott says of the film, based on a Greg Coppa short story and fi lmed by director Robert Harmon in Nova Scotia (where he also makes Tom Selleck’s “Jesse Stone” movies for CBS). “I think it goes beyond a lot of Hallmark stuff,” Elliott adds.
“It’s really a good piece. The story was certainly all there. This picture touched me.
I had some friends who lost a kid who would have been about the age of our kid in the movie. The father is deceased now; he was a fireman, and he was someone I got very close to. I knew what that loss meant to him over the long haul. He was not verbal about it at all, but whenever it came up, it was really evident that he never got over it.
The loss of a child is just not supposed to happen.”
“November Christmas” struck a similar chord with actress Allen, and her leading men also proved to be big lures. “I’ve just adored Sam Elliott as an actor,” she says, “and I find him really lovely. The same goes for John Corbett. They were already committed to the project, so that was an immediate thing that made me think, ‘Ooh, I should read this script.’”
I thought it was a really beautiful story, then I had a talk with Robert Harmon, who seemed like the kind of director I would love to work with.  It turned out to be true. He’s a real actor’s director, and from the moment we arrived, we worked on this to make it as rich and complex as possible. And Sarah Paulson and I became fast friends, so it was just a terrific experience.”
Long married to actress Katharine Ross (“The Graduate”), Elliott often tackles action-driven fare instead, such as “Road House” and “Ghost Rider.” He may not be seen on television often, but he’s sure heard on
it: His deep, unmistakable voice fuels ads for products from beef to
(currently) trucks. “I’ve been very lucky,” he says.
Allen also has a professional life apart from acting. She operates a knitwear company from Great Barrington, Mass. (where she also runs a related shop), but she now hopes to be back in front of cameras more often.
“I created this design studio and store to get myself through the period when my son was in junior high and high school,” Allen explains. “I felt it was important to find something creative that I could really get involved in. Now my son is living in New York, so this opportunity has opened back up for me to work (as an actress) more. I’m just putting my feet back in the water, and it feels really good.”

JOHN LENNON IN NEW YORK

The gut-wrenching irony is that John Lennon loved the streets of New York.
He relished the give and take of a city where strangers talk to you, then keep going, whether you’re an international rock icon or a supermarket stock boy. On Dec. 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman approached him, and Lennon signed his new album, “Double Fantasy.” Later that day, Chapman fatally shot Lennon. In the 30 years since Lennon’s life came to a bloody end in front of his Upper West Side home, his genius has been celebrated.
Books, articles, films and plays have so exhaustively chronicled him that fans feel they know all there is of his 40 years.
And that’s a mistake. PBS’ “American Masters: Lennon NYC,” airing Monday, Nov. 22 on KCTS, features studio recordings, concert outtakes and home movies that have not been seen before. Yoko Ono, Lennon’s widow, asked PBS to make this documentary, she tells Zap2it. “You know what I realized, and was so amazing, was that only ‘American Masters’
could do it,” Ono says. “I did not know that camera was rolling when we did that.”
She refers to many moments over the years when people filmed them at parties, recording sessions and rehearsals. Then there were the concerts and press conferences – usually to call for an end to war – and all were filmed.
Ono is soft-spoken and very calm as she talks about the man she loved.
Her voice breaks, though, when asked what she hopes viewers take from this. “I hope that people know what an incredible human John was and what an incredible love he had for life,” Ono says. “He was not ready to die.”
And his fans were not ready to let him go, evidenced by their constant gathering in Strawberry Fields, a section of Central Park dedicated to Lennon, where a mosaic spells out “Imagine.”
Footage of Lennon, relaxed and happy, walking through Central Park, can’t help but tug at viewers’ hearts. He’s near the gothic building where he had long made his home. Lennon talks about why New York captivated him.
“I was just known enough to keep my ego floating,” he says, “but unknown enough to get around, which is nice.”
He was thrilled with the simple act of buying a coat. Clearly he could buy the factory, but it wasn’t the acquisition. It was the mundane act of walking into a store, browsing, trying on a garment and paying with his credit card, without fuss, that was so novel for him.
He and Ono originally lived in a tiny Greenwich Village apartment and thrived on the counterculture that was the Village of 1971. Clips show them in concerts and on TV shows and remind viewers how the government wanted him deported for protesting President Nixon and the Vietnam War. Lennon fought to stay in the city he loved. Though the film strays from New York, following Lennon to his wild days and nights in Los Angeles in 1973 and 1974, it mostly takes place in Manhattan. “I was overseeing it,” Ono says. “If something was not really right, I would have pointed it out, gently maybe. I was surprised that they wanted to put in the L.A. story.”
After Nixon was re-elected, Lennon and Ono were at a party, where Lennon had a loud tryst with a woman. Photos from the next day show a hung-over, recalcitrant husband on his knees in front of his wife. He then moved to Los Angeles, lived with their personal assistant, May Pang, and drank himself into a ragged mess. “I thought the hard-liners would probably say, ‘You didn’t have to reveal those things,’ but those things are known,” Ono says. “It is good that people are talking about that side of it. And he was a rocker and human. He was not one of those very proper persons. He was very alive, and he had incredible, incredible emotion.”
This film makes clear that Lennon and Ono shared an epic love. Yet Ono continues to be the flashpoint of hate. People still blame her for the Beatles’ breakup. “It is a very, very complicated situation in many ways,” she says. “I am surprised and rather concerned because I know many people in the world would still sweep (their love) under the rug.”
Their marriage rebounded after his West Coast wild days, and they went on living in New York, where Lennon was far ahead of his time. He took off five years to be a stay-at-home dad to Sean. “The thing is,” Ono says, “when John was really trying, trying very hard to be a daddy to Sean, and when he baked bread and some people were saying, ‘That is just a promo,’ he was very upset about that. These days I go to the park, and guys are pushing strollers. John is the only one who started it very courageously – not one guy would have been seen like that.”

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

There’s plenty of “comedy tonight” to be sure, but “Sondheim!  The Birthday Concert” — a star packed two-hour gala premiering Wednesday, Nov. 24, on PBS’ “Great Performances” (check local listings) — is devoted mainly to honoring the dazzling music and lyrics of Grammy, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Sondheim.
Taped last March 15 and 16 — just a few days shy of Sondheim’s 80th birthday — the program spotlights Broadway’s brightest stars as they pay tribute to the man who indisputably is the greatest living composer and lyricist in the American musical theater.
Hosted by David Hyde Pierce (“Frasier”), who also co-wrote the special with its director, Lonny Price, the evening features one Broadway luminary after another — Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch, Mandy Patinkin, Audra McDonald and Donna Murphy among them — as they perform songs from such shows as “Sweeney Todd,” “A Little Night Music,” “Into the Woods,” “Follies,” “Sunday in the Park With George” and others.
“I recently saw the program for the first time,” says Pierce, who won a Tony for the Broadway musical “Curtains” and currently is starring in the hit comedy “La Bete.” “Of course, obviously I was there and I knew how amazing the live concert was, but what I was most impressed with was how Lonny Price captured it. That’s not an easy thing to do, to give a television audience the experience that the people in the theater have.”
Price — who starred in Sondheim’s 1981 flop “Merrily We Roll Along,”
then went on to a successful directing career — also managed the daunting twin tasks of coming up with the overall format of the concert, which includes both stars re-creating the songs they originated in Sondheim premieres and a stunning array of scarlet-clad Sondheim leading ladies performing a selection of his hits, and coordinating the mind-bending logistics of getting all these busy stars in the same place at the same time.
“Lonny is the person who knew everyone in terms of the talent, the guy who could call in the favors and negotiate the wide range of some of the most important performers on Broadway,” Pierce says. “A lot of them have strong personalities to coordinate, and what is most amazing about Lonny is that he didn’t take the easy route. At the ending of the concert, there’s those women, all Broadway royalty, all together on the same stage at the same time, one after another, all bringing down the house. That was a very bold step for a director to make, and it paid off beautifully, both on TV and for those of us who were there live.  As for the man of the hour himself, Sondheim — who isn’t overly fond of the spotlight — admits to having mixed emotions about being the focal point of such a megaevent.  “I’ve been the ‘target’ of a number of benefits,” says Sondheim, whose book “Finishing the Hat:
Collected Lyrics (1954-81) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes” was published last month by Knopf.
“Wait, maybe you should say ‘centerpiece.’ I guess I think I’m the bull’s-eye, so that’s what made me think of ‘target.’ “Hearing my stuff sung really well and even occasionally played by a symphony orchestra is something I have done before, but this was a superlative example. The talent on the stage was just so extraordinary, particularly when you get to those six divas coming out in those red dresses. That’s pretty special. And the fi nale, with those 300 singers singing ‘Sunday,’ was uniquely thrilling. On some level, though, it’s embarrassing. If I had wanted to be in public, I would have been an actor.  My idea is to sit and listen in the dark, in the back of the theater, or go to the nearest bar when things are going wrong. So it was a combination of thrilling and flattering and embarrassing.”
Among the evening’s highlights are Joanna Gleason and Chip Zien re-creating their roles as the Baker and his Wife from “Into the Woods,” Patinkin and Peters reprising a duet from “Sunday in the Park With George,” and LuPone reuniting with two of her past onstage Sweeneys, Michael Cerveris and George Hearn, in a spirited performance of “A Little Priest.”
For sheer nostalgia, however, longtime Sondheim fans probably will be most deeply moved by 81-year-old John McMartin, the only surviving principal from “Follies,” giving a heart-wrenching performance of his song “The Road You Didn’t Take” from that show.  As for what current economics mean for the Broadway of tomorrow, Sondheim says he is most concerned for young authors trying to establish themselves in the theater.  “Young authors are not getting a chance to be heard, and producers are relying entirely on predigested material, which is what they call the ‘jukebox shows,’ where the audience is humming the tunes as they go into the theater, not coming out, and they know exactly what to expect, so there are no surprises,” says Sondheim, who makes it a fi rm policy never to comment on the work of other living composers. “It’s all a rehash, and it’s all because producers can’t, or don’t want to, take a chance when a musical costs $15-25 million.
“The only way young authors can get heard, and therefore the only way that musical theater can grow, is if they write for off-Broadway and it gets enough attention. That allows those young authors to make a living so they can write another one, which is the most important thing.”
“Sondheim! The Birthday Concert” airs on PBS’ “Great Performances” 7pm Wednesday on KCTS.

THE DAY THE DINOSAURS DIED

This would be the mother of all bad hair days — if anyone had hair. “Last Day of the Dinosaurs,” airing Sunday, Nov. 21, on Discovery, is a disaster film of epic proportions. The animated feature re-creates in remarkable detail the day an asteroid splashed into the Gulf of Mexico and touched off events that led to the end of the dinosaurs. It’s also broadcast in 3-D. (Check the Discovery website for information on how to get the glasses.) “Day of the Dinosaurs” combines data from a variety of sciences to piece together exactly what happened the day a mountain-size rock smashed into Earth, creating waves of destruction around the globe.  The story is told like a nature documentary, with the audience viewing from above and the unfolding destruction described in play-by-play by a narrator. The aim is to find “the truth of the event,” says the show’s producer, Richard Dale. “What would it have felt like to be there? What would the experience have been like?”
Although the story line combines research from a range of sciences from astrophysics to paleontology, the areas of expertise can be neatly divided into two categories, Dale says: the impact and the effects of it. In other words, scientists who understand how the asteroid got here and what happened when it did, and the ones who know what happened to everything that was here when it hit. “It’s an enormous bringing together of different disciplines,” Dale says. “And some of those are disciplines that normally talk to each other, and some of them aren’t.  In fact, what we found was, in the process of doing this, we actually helped many different disciplines to study the related areas, to talk to each other and consider things at cross-disciplines, sometimes for the first time.”
The film took 18 months to research, and then it went to detailed storyboards.
“There’s an annotated script that runs to several hundred pages,” Dale says. “It shows where each (scientific) assumption has come from. We had some very helpful experts who helped us throughout.” The film lays out in detail four parallel narratives, which tell the story from the points of view of the asteroid itself and dinosaurs in Mexico, British Columbia and Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.
“If the creatures in Mexico were the first to experience the effects of the impact, the creatures in Mongolia are among the last,” Dale says.  “And British Columbia, Canada, is where you get a lot of the creatures we know and associate with the dinosaur time and the late Cretaceous.  You’ve got the rexes, the triceratops, all the creatures that a dinosaur film had to have in.” The computer animation was created by Montreal’s Mokko Studio, which has produced special effects for such films as “X-Men Origins:
Wolverine” and “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
Mokko was responsible for the creatures, and because the film is 3-D, the studio also had come up with the landscapes upon which they roam.  The 3-D effect, Dale says, works the way it does in such films as “Avatar” — creating layers of detail inside the screen rather than things jumping out at the viewer.

TAYLOR SWIFT

You’re a top music star, one of the youngest, and you’ve just released your third album. How do you handle it? Taylor Swift is letting viewers experience that just as she did, as NBC offers a Thanksgiving-night treat with the new special “Taylor Swift: Speak Now” Thursday, Nov. 25. The hour retraces the days leading up to and beyond the late-October debut of the hugely popular, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter’s latest CD, which scored first-week sales of 1 million copies (the first time any album had achieved that since 2008). Her packed schedule included performances at a terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and on a double-decker bus in Hollywood.
“One of the things I wanted to do, during the craziest week of my life, was to document it,” Swift explains.
“I wanted to show how busy it would be, but I also wanted to find a way to showcase these new songs that mean a lot to me and to perform them in different settings. I really wanted to show what they look like in my mind. We did that on the ‘Fearless’ tour, and I’ve gotten to do it in music videos, but doing it like this in a TV special is something new for me. This is my first release where the album has come out in every country at the same time,” Swift adds, “so not only have I been doing press for all of America, but also for all over the world. That means TV, radio and magazines in every country, and that’s why it’s been so busy.”
Not that the soon-to-be-21-year-old Swift minds. “The thing about this release being worldwide (simultaneously) is that I asked for it,” she says. “I’m always looking for the next challenge, the next adventure, and the next way to step it up and take things a little bit farther than I’ve gone before. One of those risks was making it an international release, and another was writing all the songs by myself.”
Before “Speak Now” was issued, many of its tunes began making an impact on music charts and airwaves, including the title song plus “Back to December,” “Mean” and “Mine.” She also introduced “Innocent”
at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, her way of addressing Kanye West’s onstage interruption of her win at last year’s event. “I pushed myself so hard, writing and making this album,” Swift says. “I know that I take responsibility and ownership of every single line of every second verse or bridge. It all had to be something I could stand by and be proud of, and after two years of working on the album, I just had a gut feeling it was done. After all those months of never being satisfied and digging through my mind for a better way, I just knew.
“I’m so excited for it to be released, but I’m also a nervous wreck, because I know how much it means to me. I’m just hoping it means something to everybody else.”
Since Swift wrote the whole “Speak Now” album on her own, it’s little surprise — even to Swift herself — that guessing games about the songs’ inspirations have been plentiful. The hunches often center on fellow music star John Mayer and “Twilight” actor Taylor Lautner, her leading man in last winter’s film “Valentine’s Day.”
“As time has gone by,” Swift reflects, “and as I’ve been fortunate enough to have my career move to a place where people actually care who the songs are about, I’ve always vowed that I never would change the way I wrote songs, even if people are speculating about them. I don’t mind speculation! “I’m always more inclined to write songs about personal information like dates and times and visuals,” she adds, “to paint a picture as accurately as I can, but I can tell you that it’s not a comfort zone for me to actually talk about who they’re about.”
The “Speak Now” special isn’t Swift’s only holiday-week television
date: She’s also nominated as favorite country music female artist in the annual American Music Awards, which ABC broadcasts Sunday, Nov.
21. Swift’s work on “Speak Now” becomes eligible in the next music-honors cycle, and she maintains she’ll simply take that if and as it comes. “I have been so lucky to have these memories that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life,” she says of the many award wins she’s accrued over four years. “If you’re lucky enough to remember jumping up and down in the middle of the street and screaming and dancing around after the Grammy Awards, that’s something you can’t ever forget. The reason why I celebrate like that, and why I get so emotional, is that I treat it like it’s the last time I’ll ever win anything.”

Tori & Dean: their dream, our nightmare

There are a few reality series that are, in a way, little weekly horror movies. “Keeping up With the Kardashians” springs immediately to mind, as does anything involving Tori Spelling and her Canadian-born husband, Dean McDermott.
Though it would probably have worked better on Oct. 31, “Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood” is getting the marathon treatment Sunday, Nov. 21, on Slice. Call it a late Halloween present. You get the idea that the objectives of this thing are a) to show us that the “glamour couple” are just folks and b) to make us envy their
fabulous lifestyle. We suspect that these aren’t the reasons audiences are watching. The people in this show are a little bit like the characters in a British sitcom. In real life, after five minutes, you’d start smacking them.  On TV, there’s something cruelly addictive about them. You watch, and they spout lines that no sentient human — other than a bad comedy writer — would say.
They embark on a “camping” trip in a $250,000 RV with another couple and enough luggage to supply the Russian royal family for a year. Then they start fretting about discomfort, snakes, sleeping “outside” and,
of course, shopping. At the end, they opt for a hotel — as if spending a night in a rolling mansion were an unendurable hardship.
Dean complains that the house is so big, he can’t find his wife in it — and then pouts and asks, “Can we get a smaller house?”
Tori confides — to her Gay Best Friend — that she and Dean are so busy it’s difficult to “prioritize” their relationship. Then they plan a 2,000-mile road trip on a whim.  After a while, you begin to wonder if
this isn’t just another awful sitcom written by people with no connection to reality.

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