Latest news with #Columbo
The Citizen
10 hours ago
- General
- The Citizen
Watch: A gentle giant on tour – SA's surprise visitor from the Southern Ocean
Southern elephant seals are rarely seen on South African shores. Native to the remote Southern Ocean, these massive marine mammals – the largest of all seals – are usually found lounging on Sub-Antarctic islands. Yet, since November 2023, a sub-adult male nicknamed Columbo has been quietly making history, visiting one Garden Route destination after another. In the process, he has become a beloved, if unlikely, coastal celebrity. Columbo is one of a few southern elephant seals that regularly visit the Cape's beaches. The appearance of Columbo is more than a novelty; it provides a valuable opportunity to educate the public on how to coexist respectfully with wildlife. Each sighting of Columbo has sparked excitement among residents and marine conservationists alike, not just because of his species, but due to the unique journey he's embarked upon. Val Marsh from Stranded Marine Animal Rescue Team (Smart) posted on Facebook yesterday that Columbo first arrived in Dana Bay in November 2023, where he settled for a three-week moulting period – an essential but vulnerable phase in a seal's life. Since then, he's been spotted in Pinnacle Point, Victoria Bay, Herolds Bay, the Kaaimans River, Knysna, and as far west as Jongensfontein near Stilbaai. Yesterday, Columbo was spotted in Victoria Bay and the Smart team was on hand to monitor him. In May 2024, Columbo turned up in the Knysna Estuary – not just for a visit, but in need of help. South African National Parks reported that he was partially covered in creosote, a chemical contaminant, prompting an immediate cleaning intervention. Conservation workers gently sprayed him with biodegradable soap, allowed it to soak in, and carefully rinsed him off. Watch: Columbo in Kynsna in May 2024. Video: Del-Monte Roberts/Facebook In January, Columbo was found resting near Jongensfontein. Smart took the opportunity to administer a rabies vaccination. This was no ordinary jab as Columbo became one of the few southern elephant seals globally to receive the vaccine, as a precautionary measure due to the growing incidence of rabies among Cape fur seals, with which elephant seals can interact. The vaccination was administered by Dr Anthony Creighton and Sister Stefanie de Graaff of Hartenbos Animal Hospital, marking their first time vaccinating such a large and powerful marine mammal. Watch: Columbo in January when he was vaccinated. Video: Hartenbos Animal Hospital/Facebook Southern elephant seals are dangerous animals, and because of their size, it can be difficult to work with them, the Hartenbos team explained. After a difficult five-hour journey and plenty of community help, including getting their vehicle unstuck from sand twice, the team was able to vaccinate Columbo successfully. Watch: Columbo in Kynsna in May 2024. Video: South African National Stranding Network/Facebook Columbo's movements have continued to capture attention. In April 2024, he was seen lounging in Herolds Bay and later back on the rocks at Victoria Bay, appearing well-fed and now carrying a few battle scars – signs of the wild life he leads. By May, he had returned to Knysna, his likely 'haul-out' spot, where seals stay on land during their moult. Ocean Odyssey Knysna noted that moulting seals are protected from the cold not by fur, but by thick layers of blubber, making dry, undisturbed haul-outs critical for their survival. 'If only he could talk,' Marsh mused. 'He could write an extraordinary travelogue!' Buffel in Hermanus In February last year, Caxton Network News wrote about Buffel, another southern elephant seal. At the time, Buffel had decided to go ashore in Hermanus for his annual moult. Buffel has been seen around many of the Cape's beaches over the past few years and is identifiable by a scar above his left eye and a flipper tag (#16577). According to an article published on the Cape of Good Hope SPCA's website, it's rumoured that Buffel was born on Cape shores to a displaced mother. The SPCA says Buffel has come ashore to moult on Cape Town beaches, from Llandudno to Fish Hoek, for several years. 'Most haul-out sites are on Sub-Antarctic and Antarctic islands, which makes sightings of Buffel even more exciting.' While both seals remind us of the unpredictable nature of ocean life, they also highlight how closely tied we are to these rare visitors. Every sighting is not just a spectacle – it's a call to respect and protect the delicate balance of marine ecosystems, especially as human impact on coastal environments continues to grow. For now, Columbo continues his solo coastal odyssey – big, blubbery and blissfully unbothered. Long may he wander. Gordy goes around the block Another elephant seal, Gordy, has also been causing quite a stir lately. After being rescued from Gordon's Bay, Gordy turned heads again at Simon's Town naval base – and Mzansi can't get enough of his land-loving antics. The elephant seal that gave Gordon's Bay its 'seal of approval' after shuffling through a suburban part of the harbour town was safely returned to the ocean, but two days later arrived at the naval base in Simon's Town. Breaking news at your fingertips… Follow Caxton Network News on Facebook and join our WhatsApp channel. Nuus wat saakmaak. Volg Caxton Netwerk-nuus op Facebook en sluit aan by ons WhatsApp-kanaal. At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Yahoo
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Sirens' Is The Top TV Show On Netflix Right Now
'Sirens' is the top TV series on Netflix right now, according to the streamer's public ranking system. The dark comedy series features Julianne Moore as Michaela Kell, a mysterious socialite who lives a 'cult-ish life of luxury' at a 'lavish island estate,' the Netflix logline states. She hires Simone (Milly Alcock) who becomes obsessed with that rich lifestyle and forms a weird relationship with Michaela, so much so that her sister Devon (Meghann Fahy) decides to stage an intervention. The five-episode limited series, which debuted on May 22, has been called 'bizarre,' 'chaotic' and 'utterly addictive.' Kevin Bacon, Glenn Howerton, Felix Solis and Bill Camp also star in the series. Read on for more trending shows of the moment across streaming services, including Max, Peacock, Prime Video and Paramount+. And if you want to stay informed about all things streaming and entertainment, subscribe to the Culture Catchall newsletter. The 'Sex and the City' spinoff returned to Max on Thursday night with its Season 3 premiere. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Seema (Sarita Choudhury) and Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) all return as series regulars, and Thursday's episode includes a fun guest star who we hope sticks around for a while. You can read the HuffPost recap here. New episodes air on Thursday nights on Max. Speaking of guest stars, 'Poker Face' is chock full of 'em. Season 2 includes Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito and several other big-name actors. The mystery-of-the-week-series, now in its second season, centers on Natasha Lyonne as a modern-day Columbo, with a never-failing talent that helps her solve crimes: She can call anyone out when they're lying. New episodes air on Thursdays on Peacock. 'The Better Sister' stars Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks as two estranged sisters who are forced to reunite after one of their husbands is killed. The thriller series is based on a best-selling novel by Alafair Burke and premiered on Prime Video last week. Reviews have been mixed, and it has been described as both underwhelming and savvy. All episodes are streaming on Prime Video. 'Criminal Minds: Evolution,' the follow-up series to 'Criminal Minds,' was a top performer on Paramount+ this week. The series began another season in May, with new episodes airing weekly on Thursdays. It follows the behavioral analysis unit of the FBI, which investigates a network of serial killers born out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The show stars Joe Mantegna, A.J. Cook, Kirsten Vangsness and Aisha Tyler. If you're looking for other TV shows to watch, check out our What We're Watching blog. 'And Just Like That' Is Back — And Carrie's Love Life Is Still A Mess Actor Lauren Weedman Was Diagnosed With Bell's Palsy. Then, Hollywood Showed Up In The Most Unexpected Way. 'The Secret Lives Of Mormon Wives' Is A Fascinating Look At Faith And Social Media Fame
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Why ‘Elsbeth' creators Robert and Michelle King still watch dailies. All of them
Elsbeth was created as a deus ex machina. Back in 2010, on 'The Good Wife,' the writers kept painting our characters into corners, finding dilemmas they couldn't escape, and then finding ways for them to do so. Elsbeth Tascioni was such an escape. We wanted Alicia Florrick, our lead, to have to rely on a character who was the exact opposite of her: a quirky and confused lawyer with no color sense who was intuitively brilliant. In other words, a female Columbo — someone Alicia didn't know she needed until she arrived. It was a character meant to last only three episodes. Then we met Carrie Preston. Our casting director, Mark Saks, mentioned Carrie as someone who was available coming off of 'True Blood,' but we remembered her even more from a small part she had in the excellent Tony Gilroy movie 'Duplicity.' She played one of the only honest and vulnerable characters in it. And what was remarkable is she made honesty and vulnerability funny. The first scene we shot with Carrie was her introduction on the show. She entered Alicia's apartment and got the better of a cop who underestimated her. The scene had no obvious comic beats. It had some character shading but not much more. But one of the most valuable things a showrunner can do is to watch dailies. All of them. It's the best way to see how an actor tweaks a character, plays with inflection, finds comedy in lines you never thought were funny. That's what we saw in Carrie. The next episode we started writing toward those tweaks, finding the comic pauses she played up, never aiming straight toward a punchline, giving her an offbeat line or two, letting Carrie find the comedy. Almost immediately, Carrie made the character her own, bringing in a sort of aw-shucks Midwestern sweetness. But also there was a cunning there. Elsbeth knew she was being underestimated by her foe and she wasn't offended. She used it. And that goes to the core of what's fun about Elsbeth. It's never completely clear when her innocence is real or faux. We still watch Carrie in dailies, 15 years on, and love the way she makes Elsbeth both sweet and cunning. On 'The Good Wife' and 'The Good Fight,' we always thought of Elsbeth as a spice — an oddball character who strolls in every eight or nine episodes and offers a contrast to the more serious plot. Then the pandemic hit and we decided to catch up on all the streaming shows we missed. But we realized so many of the 'prestige' serialized shows felt like homework: too much backstory, too many episodes you had to absorb to be up to date. At the end of the day, we decided we just wanted to watch another episode of 'Columbo.' And we realized we missed Elsbeth, we missed Carrie Preston, and she would make a great female Columbo. And that's how it started. We talked to Fred Murphy, our director of photography on everything we've ever done, and discussed the usual cliches of New York police shows. They're gritty and grungy and handheld. We wanted just the opposite for 'Elsbeth': blue skies, a picture-postcard view of New York — Elsbeth's view of New York. We talked to Dan Lawson, our wardrobe designer on everything we've ever done, and we discussed how Elsbeth has to be the stranger in New York. All the New Yorkers had to be stylish, cool, all wearing versions of the same muted palette. Only Elsbeth didn't get the Upper East Side memo, wearing every wild color on earth. Those collaborations led the pilot and series toward its final iteration. Elsbeth was the ultimate tourist, ignoring every trash can and alleyway, seeing only the beauty of New York. Even the murders she sees as classy and pretty. We were running another show at the time, 'Evil,' a streaming series that couldn't have been more different. It was very odd to be on one call about the prettiest tourist locale to best sell Elsbeth's love for New York and another call about what a demon's guts should look like when Andrea Martin's Sister Andrea pops them like a pimple. The answers: Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink and red oatmeal. That's where Jon Tolins came in. Jon is a writer-producer and excellent playwright who we've worked with ever since 'Braindead.' He had Elsbeth's voice and attitude down perfectly, so we asked him to run 'Elsbeth' after the pilot. He's been running the show ever since. One of the joys about writing for TV is how much it's not a lone experience. It's an accumulation of great work from talented collaborators and friends. We'd love to take sole credit, but like the best TV, it's a group effort. And we still watch the dailies.
Irish Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
When it comes to ‘howcatchems', Poker Face is the new Columbo. Respect
An unwritten rule in journalism states that you need at least three occurrences of an unexpected phenomenon to generate a 'What's up with that ?' feature. Having fruitlessly searched for a third, I am, however, forced to settle for just two examples of current TV shows revisiting Columbo 's 'howcatchem' structure. You see that in the excellent Poker Face. You also see it in the amiable Elsbeth. What's up with that? There is also welcome evidence here of a drift back to a wider convention of classic telly, but we'll get to that in a minute. Let me take a pencil from behind my ear and flick through a tattered notebook while puffing on a cheap cigar. Where was I, ma'am? Ah, yes. Not the whodunit, the howcatchem. More formally referred to as the inverted detective story, such entertainments begin by showing us the crime being committed before following the coppers as they work their way to the solution. [ Donald Clarke: The enduring appeal of the greatest TV show ever made Opens in new window ] Both the current examples go further in their homage to their durable 1970s inspiration. Like Peter Falk in Columbo, Natasha Lyonne , as the wandering savant Charlie Cale in Poker Face, and Carrie Preston, as the relocated attorney Elsbeth Tascioni in Elsbeth (a spin off from The Good Wife), spend large parts of each episode making inexhaustible nuisances of themselves to that week's chief suspect. READ MORE Peter Falk as Columbo. Photograph: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty All three exhibit borderline-supernatural levels of perception. The moment they arrive on the scene, one tiny anomaly points them towards the perpetrator, and no amount of disingenuous evasion will distract them from their pursuit. The audience, rather than fretting over whether the butler did it, focuses attention on which apparently airtight element of the murder is set to spring a leak. Sometimes the murderer is strangely likable. They are almost always comfortably off and so in a position to look down their noses at Columbo/Cale/Tascioni. If you turned on your telly in a hotel room and encountered an episode of Dad's Army, Kojak or The Dukes of Hazzard it mattered not which 'season' it was from It is a perfect, easily replicable format, and nobody should be surprised – or irritated – that the makers of these new shows look to be paying it deserved tribute. The folk behind Poker Face have even gone so far as to imitate the graphics from Columbo in their own opening credits. Respect where respect is due. Something else is, however, worth noting in the popularity of these series. We are finally seeing kickback against the hitherto unstoppable move from TV in stand-alone episodes to continuous, season-long serials. Until relatively recently most sitcoms and cop shows offered you, each week, a self-contained story that reset before the end credits. There was, in the era of Columbo, occasionally some glacial progression. A new junior detective would turn up. We met his dog for the first time. Poker Face is a 10-episode mystery-of-the-week series following Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale. Photograph: Sky/Peacock. But, essentially, nothing of note changed in Columboworld between 1971 and 1978 (or, indeed, up to the close of the lesser revival in 2003). If you turned on your telly in a hotel room and encountered an episode of Dad's Army, Kojak or The Dukes of Hazzard it mattered not which 'season' (as nobody in Ireland then said) it was from. You would get one story arc that ultimately reversed any disruption to the established scenario. Harold never escaped his father in Steptoe and Son. Starsky and Hutch were forever in the same Ford Gran Torino. I was reminded how recently this changed when talking to Michael Cera , star of Arrested Development, two weeks ago in Cannes. One reason, he explained, the show did not catch on during its initial run, 20 years ago, was that the creators insisted on a continuing plot. 'If your friends said this show is funny and you watched episode six with no context, you really couldn't enjoy half of the humour or the story,' Cera told me. [ Benicio Del Toro and Michael Cera on The Phoenician Scheme Opens in new window ] Arrested Development arrived a few short years before streaming changed everything. Now every episode was sitting neatly in the same virtual space. Episode one was always available if you wished to get stuck into the larger narrative. Cliffhanger endings abounded. The dealers (streamers) soon had the users (viewers) hooked on a near-endless supply of gear (telly). Yet decisions made for the current, second season of Poker Face confirm there is still a desire for mainstream TV in discrete packages. The first outings of both that show and Elsbeth did have superficial, peripheral season arcs about which nobody much cared. It seemed there was a law against making a show that didn't at least tip its hat to the serial aesthetic. Even that has now gone for Poker Face. Speaking to GQ, Rian Johnson, creator of the show, acknowledged that he wanted to get away from 'the superstructure' and 'get back to what the show is really supposed to be about, which is, each week, let's have a fun mystery.' He delivers on that. Watch the new episodes in whatever order you prefer. It's 1978 all over again. Poker Face and Elsbeth are available via Now TV
Daily Mirror
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Legendary Columbo actor and Clint Eastwood co-star James McEachin dies
Perry Mason star and Clint Eastwood's frequent co-star James McEachin has died aged 94. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor died in January and has been buried at Los Angeles National Cemetery since April. The Columbo actor is best known for working on Clint Eastwood's many movies, including Bluff (1968), Play Misty for Me (1971), Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Sudden Impact (1983). James also appeared in many TV series such as All in the Family, Tenafly, Dragnet, It Takes a Thief, The Name of the Game, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Hawaii Five-O and Iroside. He also played Lt Ed Brock with Raymond Burr and Hal Holbrook between 1986 and 1995. On Matlock, he took on the role of police lieutenant Frank Daniels on the first series. He also played FBI Agent David Shore on The Rockford Files with James Garner. James had guest roles on Police Story, Emergency!, Columbo, TJ Hooker, St Elsewhere, Murder, She Wrote and Hill Street Blues. Not only was he an actor, he wrote several books. Some of his titles included 1996's Tell Me a Tale: A Novel of the Old South, 1997's Farewell to the Mockingbirds, 1999's The Heroin Factor, 2000's Say Goodnight to the Boys in Blue and 2021's Swing Low My Sweet Chariot: The Ballad of Jimmy Mack, a memoir. Before getting into acting, James served in the military. According to reports, he was one of only two survivors of the ambush of his unit in Korea and nearly died. He didn't eve know he received an award for his work until years later, when a California congressman searched his record and found his Silver Star. He also got his Purple Heart then, too. When he came back to the USA, he spent time as a police officer and a fireman before getting into music producing. His wife, Lois, with who he tied the knot in 1960, passed away in July 2017. * This is a breaking showbiz news story. Join The Mirror 's WhatsApp Community or follow us on Google News, Flipboard, Apple News, TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads - or visit The Mirror homepage.
