Tag: TV show

Reba’s Best On-Screen Moments

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With her signature red hair and easy smile, Reba McEntire has maintained her gilded perch in the hearts of music fans for decades. In fact, 2024 marks the 50-year anniversary of her launch into stardom. The multi-hyphenate talent grew up singing in three-part harmony with her siblings as the local treasures of their small Oklahoma town. When Reba enrolled at Southeastern Oklahoma State University to pursue becoming a schoolteacher, she continued to perform locally on occasion. Serendipitously, her delivery of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1974 National Finals Rodeo caught the attention of country artist Red Steagall, who shepherded her through the kindlings of her musical career in Nashville.

(L-R) Rex Linn as Emmett, Reba McEntire as Bobbie on Happy’s Place, “Fish Fry Monday,” Episode 104. Photo by Casey Durkin/NBC.

After over a decade of soaring success in country music, Reba took her first strut across the silver screen in 1990. The monster movie Tremors was just the first of the star’s rolling list of Hollywood credits. Immediately, Reba ignited a second love and poured herself into building up an acting career.

From her famous self-titled sitcom to serving as a recurring judge on The Voice, Reba’s icon status endures the test of time. For decades, she has masterfully committed to the balancing act of maintaining both her singing and acting endeavors.

Her most recent feat saw her return to the sitcom stage with the launch of her new show Happy’s Place (NBC / Peacock) in October. To honor this beloved country diva’s ever-thriving legacy, we’ve compiled a short list of our favorite on-screen Reba moments.

Tremors (1990)

A canon event for ’90s media, Reba started out strong with Tremors as her inaugural film role. This monster-studded Western cult classic is lauded for its apt casting and ’50s-esque creature feature vibes. Alongside Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, and Michael Gross, Reba stars as “Heather Gummer,” a woman living in the small desert town of Perfection, Nevada. When Heather and her neighbors find themselves under attack by formidable, underground, carnivorous creatures known as “Graboids,” they must strategically wield their wit and weapons in order to survive.

While many struggle to transition between creative mediums, Reba’s first film appearance earned her the adoration of many. Her charisma and comedic timing accentuate the film’s charm, cementing her status as a versatile star capable of straddling the worlds of both music and acting alike.

Reba (2001 to 2007)

Few have the charisma and mass appeal to headline a sitcom titled in their own name. Even fewer have the charisma and mass appeal to do so for six successful seasons! Reba, the eponymous American sitcom, was a pillar of 2000s TV, running from 2001-2007. For five of its seasons, the feel-good show aired on Friday nights ranked 4th in its time slot, often with over 4 million viewers per episode.

The show follows “Reba Harte,” a middle-aged Houstonian woman whose life is torn asunder by discovery of her husband’s affair with his consequently pregnant dental hygienist mistress. Simultaneously, Reba’s own 17-year-old daughter becomes pregnant, and Reba must flex and pivot with all of her might in order to support her children.

Though the final episode of Reba aired well over a decade ago, the 2020s witnessed a resurgence of the show’s iconic theme song through a viral trend on TikTok. “I’m a Survivor,” performed by Reba and written by Shelby Kennedy and Phillip White, became an ironic anthem perfect for dramatizing even the most mundane of inconveniences.

Happy’s Place (2024)

The Queen of Country returned to her sitcom throne again this fall when the first episode of Happy’s Place aired on October 18, 2024. Similarly to her self-titled show, Happy’s Place centers around a woman whose life has been jostled by the discovery of previously unknown, kept-secret family members. In the case of Happy’s Place, Reba portrays Bobbie, a spunky Tennesseean who has been running her late father’s bar – the titular Happy’s Place – since his death several years earlier.

Much to her chagrin, Bobbie is dumbfounded by the news that she must share ownership of the bar with her newly-acquainted half-sister Isabella, the child of her father’s illicit affair. While reckoning with her father’s infidelity and forming a relationship with a sister decades her junior, Reba delivers a performance both comedic and heartwarming. The first season will be six episodes in total and it can be streamed on NBC (Fridays at 8PM ET) or on Peacock the day after airing.

Doing Push-Ups on The Voice (2024)

@reba Push-ups and inspirational quotes…we’re working more than just our vocal cords at #TheVoice ♬ original sound – Reba McEntire

Having made her debut on The Voice during its premiere season as a “Battle Advisor” to Blake Shelton’s team, Reba’s presence has been peppered throughout the show across its entire duration. During Season 24, Reba replaced Shelton as a coach, a position she maintains to this day.

Currently in the midst of its 26th season, Reba has dazzled viewers countless times, but this moment is our favorite. Just a few weeks ago, Gwen Stefani blocked Reba (a tactic judges use to prevent another coach from adding a singer to their own team during blind auditions). In a coy ploy at diverting attention from her made-for-TV snakery, Stefani drapes her body over the “BLOCKED” graphic and begins to do push-ups. As if the moment wasn’t iconic enough, Reba pushes the scene into absurdity when she follows suit, launching into a push-up routine in perfect form, putting Stefani to shame. Reba’s feat begs the question–should she pursue a third career in athletics?

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)

This uncommon comedy follows the journey of two oddly antiquated 30-somethings Star and Barb (played by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) as they leave their Nevada home for the first time to venture out on a Florida vacation. The two ultimately must disentangle themselves from an evil woman’s plot to wreak havoc in the fictional Florida town.

The offbeat film’s charm is only augmented by a cameo from Reba, who graces the set as “Trish,” the embodiment of Star and Barb’s playful ideations and daydreams. Trish emerges as a water spirit to guide the two lifelong friends with her wisdom and encouragement – a role Reba, with her natural charm and benevolence, portrays with ease.

Malibu Country (2012)

With “don’t reinvent the wheel” seemingly as their ethos, the visionaries behind Malibu Country did not stray far off the beaten path. In this project, Reba returned to the world of sitcoms in 2012 to depict the role of Reba MacKenzie. Reba’s country star husband has been caught (yep, you guessed it) cheating on her and she must upheave her life. She and her two children move to her ex-husband’s property in Malibu where they start life anew and Reba decides to recommit to the music career she had abandoned in order to start her family. The show only ran for one 18-episode season in 2012/2013, but it did garner a fairly hefty viewership during its short life.

Young Sheldon (2019 to 2022)

In this Big Bang Theory spinoff, Reba guest stars as a hair stylist named June, appearing in a total of six episodes throughout seasons 3-5. June is the eccentric ex-wife of Coach Dale, the new boyfriend of Meemaw, Sheldon’s grandmother. As ever, Reba delights the show with her comedic timing and warm approach; her presence doubly adored given that Young Sheldon brought her and Annie Potts, both beloved Southern talents, onto the same screen.

She even pulled off the gaffe of a career in one scene where she sings karaoke… poorly. In addition to stealing the audience’s heart, Reba also met her current partner, Rex Linn, while filming.

Reba has proven time and time again her status as national treasure. Though just a snapshot of the legend’s perpetually blossoming career, this list demonstrates just how impactful Reba’s life as an actress has been – astonishingly while also maintaining her official title as Queen of Country, recording and releasing albums, co-headlining a residency in Las Vegas, and much more.

At 69 years old and still yet to peak, we look forward to all the Reba roles, songs, and iconicity to come.

Photo Credit: Both photos by Casey Durkin/NBC.
Lead Image: (L-R) Belissa Escobedo as Isabella, Reba McEntire as Bobbie on Happy’s Place, “Ladies Night,” Episode 107.

Emmy-Nominated Docuseries Highlights the Impact of STAX Records

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It all began way back, nearly seventy years ago in Memphis, Tennessee, when an almost unremarkable thing happened: A record store opened its doors.

That a record store might exist in the home of the blues in 1957 was itself no remarkable thing. But this store, Satellite Records, was quite literally a sister operation to the recording studio next door. Satellite’s owner, Estelle Axton, was the older sister of the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart.

Stewart was a fiddler with a passion for country music. Long before the dominance of indie labels, Stewart had the idea to start his own studio and label, to get his music out to the masses. As luck would have it, his original country songs were… just fine. Nothing groundbreaking. But his work sparked the imagination of a young musician named David Porter, who strode into the studio one day and asked if he could lay down some tracks.

Long story short, Porter recruited some other artists who became a band known as Booker T. and the M.G.s – eventually the studio’s de facto house band. Suddenly, the label – named STAX as a combination of Jim and Estelle’s last names – was off to the races.

Now, a three-part docuseries from HBO titled STAX: Soulville USA is available for streaming on MAX. The series premiered at South by Southwest earlier this year and earned two Emmy Award nominations (Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction Program). While the series did not prevail in those categories, it is a powerful, thorough, emotional telling of the relationship between music, its makers, and the world in which they live.

The series’ director – Peabody, Emmy, and NAACP award-winner Jamila Wignot – strung together an incredible array of rare and never-before-shared footage of the rise and fall (and rise again) of STAX Records between 1961-1975. But footage isn’t just from inside the studio walls. We see musicians on their first trips to Europe, relaxing in the pool at the Lorraine Hotel – a frequent STAX hangout before it became the scene of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. There is footage from civil rights protests and speeches and moments of great grief and outrage. There are contemporary interviews with the musicians and staff of STAX and Satellite Records, including Axton and Stewart.

And always, at the heart of it all, there’s the music.

In a For Your Consideration panel also available on MAX, Mignot admitted that, when she was approached to direct the series, she was “really just into it for the music.”

“I thought it was going to be this great-big, beautiful music story,” she adds. “As I started to do more research, and particularly looking into the work that [STAX biographer] Rob Bowman had done, I understood that it was a much bigger story that touched on social issues, history, and [it] really was this beautiful story of these folks who were, I think, led by intuition and desire, and weren’t necessarily trying to do more than the things that they loved. But they were very responsive to the world that was around them.”

Of course, outside the walls of STAX studio and Satellite records, Black people were subject to the cultural and legal realities of living in the Jim Crow South.

“[Jim Crow] was too strong a system to tear down,” bandleader Booker T. notes. “In Memphis, you had to keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. Or fight.”

While that was the rule of the road outside, inside STAX studio, Booker T.’s band had two Black members and two white. Together, they developed an approach to Southern soul music that would become one of the most influential sounds of the 20th Century.

Granted, as the civil rights movement went through its various waves in Memphis and beyond, and STAX players marched on picket lines without their white bandmates beside them, this complicated interpersonal relationships in the studio. But the music continued to compel everyone forward. As a result, music fans got to find solace in some of the greatest roots recordings ever made.

The docuseries’ executive producer Michele Smith commented on the artists’ legacies in a recent phone conversation.

“Those artists were just teenagers who had a love for the music,” she says. “[They] just wanted to be heard. What they did not know at that time was they were forging a path to history. They were working, they did know that what they were doing was technically illegal in the Jim Crow South. … They were young people who just wanted to make music. And they did a whole lot more than that. Their music, to this day, will … outlive all of us. It’s globally renowned and it’s some of the best R&B soul music out there, sampled by young people today.”

Being able to watch this music get made is certainly one major draw of the series. Isaac Hayes and the Bar-Kays developing the “Theme from Shaft”; Sam & Dave rolling out “Soul Man” for a live audience the first time; and Otis Redding onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In interview clips, STAX alumni recall how out-of-place Redding and his band were – sober and polished in their well-pressed suits – among the mostly white hippie, dropped-out crowd. Recognizing the one thread that connected him with his seemingly polar-opposite audience, Redding started his set by asking, “This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we?” The crowd roared, so he closed his eyes and lit into “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” with a passion and emotional clarity that was absolutely intoxicating.

“Otis Redding hit the stage,” recalled trumpet player Wayne Jackson. “All those hippies got quiet. They ain’t seen anything like us.”

Though that was the truth, it often was in those days of STAX artists making the rounds with their groundbreaking sound. But, certainly, nobody present for any of it – no matter if STAX was on its way up or its way down – would ever forget the way the music turned their soul.

Watch STAX: Soulsville USA via MAX.

Images courtesy of HBO.

The Righteous Gemstones Keep “Misbehavin'”

Posted on by Editor

Halfway through the first season of HBO’s megachurch comedy The Righteous Gemstones, the show devotes an entire episode to a flashback, showing how the family of Bible-thumping televangelists came to be so hilariously dysfunctional. The episode culminates in a live performance of a song called “Misbehavin’,” by siblings Aimee-Leigh (played by Jennifer Nettles) and Baby Billy (Walton Goggins). They’d been a child singing act years ago, and this countrified tale of juvenile hijinks was their biggest hit. They still remember every lyric and every dance move decades later.

The song would pop up two more times during the season, in different arrangements from different times: one from the 1960s, another from the ‘80s, and finally one in the present day. It threads through the series to present a very basic moral to the story: When you misbehave, bad things happen. But this version with Goggins and Nettles is the one that ended up going viral, a hit among fans of the show and newcomers alike who couldn’t get it out of their heads — especially that line about “running through the house with a pickle in my mouth.” It’s arguably the greatest moment on television in 2019.

“Misbehavin’” was written by the show’s creator Danny McBride, actress Edi Patterson, and composer Joseph Stephens, whose attention to detail ensured that many viewers would think the song had been around for ages. A North Carolina native who briefly studied classical guitar before discovering rock & roll as a teenager, Stephens took film classes in college and scored his friends’ student films.

“I’ve never had any formal training in music, outside of when I was a kid learning classical guitar,” he says. “I never took piano lessons or anything like that.” That approach, however, has kept him versatile. He plays an array of instruments for a diverse range of projects — many of them starring his old friend McBride, including Vice Principals and The Legacy of a White Deer Hunter. “I pride myself on being somewhat versatile, and over the years I’ve taken on jobs that asked for a lot of things that seemed outside of my wheelhouse. But that’s fun for me.”

For our latest installment of Roots on Screen, Stephens spoke to the Bluegrass Situation about writing music for church, using clog dancers as percussionists, and, most importantly, never scoring the joke.

BGS: The Righteous Gemstones is set in a South Carolina megachurch, where of course music is going to be very prominent. How familiar were you with that kind of setting?

Stephens: I went to church as a kid, and I was fascinated by big organ. I went to a Methodist church that had this massive organ built into the room. I would go back to that as a touchstone for Gemstones. I actually started using a big church organ, playing with some of the bass pedals in ways that sounded cinematic and less traditional. I was using different plug-ins and effect to mangle the sound and change it around so that it sounds big and gross at times and other times sounds really pretty and maybe spaced out. I wrote a bunch of music that I gave to Danny and the writers as they were putting the show together, just kind of formulating ideas. Danny knew he wanted to do some choir stuff, so I was exploring that as well.

Joseph Stephens

Music seems like a big part of what McBride does. There are always unexpected music cues in his shows that suggest a very deep knowledge.

Technically, these are comedies we’re making, but we both tend to gravitate toward treating it like dramatic material. So I rarely ever score a joke. I’m always trying to score the drama of the situation and letting the absurdity of what they’re doing carry the comedy. The music shouldn’t point at the joke. We treat it like a Coen Brothers movie or something heavier.

In Vice Principals we would literally score a comedic scene with ‘80s horror movie music, just to play with the unusual side of what music can do for comedy. Danny pushes me to do something different all the time, but it’s rarely ever like, “Let’s make comedy music.” It’s more like, “Let’s make music that we find interesting.”

That points to something I’ve been thinking about regarding Gemstones and how it walks a really fine line. You’re finding humor in this setting, but you stop just short of making fun of the characters’ faith. You’re not exploiting the church for cheap laughs.

When Danny first pitched me the idea, I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out. It’s dicey to make a show that’s set in this heavily religious background, especially when you’re filming it in the Deep South. It seemed a little risky. But I had faith that they would find a way to do it right. And when I started reading the script, I was so pumped because it turned into something different. It turned into this absurd family drama.

The show is about this family and the degree to which the wealth and success they’ve enjoyed have turned them into monsters. It’s not really about their religious background. That’s just their job. It’s not about what they do. It’s more about what they’ve become and how they got there. I think John Goodman’s character in particular had better intentions, and we’ll see how much of that gets touched on in the future. I don’t think they knew how to handle their success — or losing their mother. The glue that held them together was lost, and now they’re just coming apart. No one’s there to give them much guidance, so they just turn into beasts.

Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles in The Righteous Gemstones

And a scene like “Misbehavin’” seems to carry some of that weight, despite being hilarious. It really speaks to how those two characters relate to each other, and there’s something desperate in the way these adults perform this juvenile song.

Danny and I always say that “Misbehavin’” became the soul of the show, because it captures everything the show is about: Doing bad things can lead to trouble. But it’s playful. You’re supposed to feel that these siblings are enjoying themselves and having fun with the song. It’s supposed to feel innocent and joyful, but also weird and a little left-of-center.

It also had to sound legit. It had to feel like it’s something that actually existed in the world at some point. Once we created the song, it just overtook everybody. When they filmed that scene with them singing it, everybody was singing along off-camera. It became a mild obsession for a lot of us.

And those two actors — Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles — have so much chemistry. What was it like recording with them?

They really did kill it. The sessions were a lot of fun, even though they didn’t do them together. Jennifer is such a pro, so she did her part in minutes. She banged it out and that was that. But Walton was way more methodical and really wanted to get into character. And then he had to shift gears and do a different version of the song when his character is much older. He and Edi did their version together, which is very different from the ‘80s version.

 

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What kind of research did you do for the song? Were you going back and finding older examples of juvenile Christian music?

When I was thinking in terms of instrumentation and when I recorded all the music, I was constantly referencing the Carter Family and Johnny Cash. It was fun to explore the way their vocals were mixed and the way their instruments were mixed. I was listening to a lot of their music just trying to figure out how they got a particular sound or whether they were putting autoharp and guitar in the same channel, just hyper-analyzing all of it.

But in terms of writing, there wasn’t really any research. I knew it was going to be somewhere in the world of Johnny Cash, with a traditional chord structure, two minutes long, two verse and a chorus and an instrumental break. The structure was going to be pretty standard. It all came together pretty fast and very easily. But I didn’t really reference any children’s music at all. It was always Johnny Cash and the Carter Family, and maybe the Collins Kids. But it wasn’t a children’s song – more like a country song that had been made famous by kids.

And there are three versions: There’s the version the kids recorded in the ‘60s, the version we see them perform in the ‘80s, and another version from the present day. Was it challenging to rearrange the song three different times for three different eras?

It was definitely challenging the whole way ‘round. We had to audition a bunch of kids and then go out to California to record them. That version had to sound one way, and then we have another version that needed to sound somewhat authentic to the ‘80s, like a live band on a church TV show would sound. And then we had to do a modern bluegrass version. And they had to be fast so they could do some legitimate clogging during the interludes.

That was tough to work out knowing that it was going to be filmed live and needed to be convincing. We didn’t want to do it in a way that was too on the nose, though. For the ‘80s version, we knew we didn’t want it to sound like Fletch or something. It couldn’t be too ‘80s. But it’s really something you’re not supposed to notice. It’s just supposed to feel inherently legitimate.

Dance is such a big part of that first performance of the song. I feel like clogging in particular so rarely portrayed in any kind of mainstream media.

That became a big part of Walton’s character. We had a choreographer that came up with their dances, and when we were recording, I brought him and his wife in and set up this wooden stage. I had them clog and do some of the routines they’d rehearsed. I kinda orchestrated them, had them do different tempos to the click and record a bunch of sounds. A lot of what sounds like percussion on the show is actually them clogging. I used it in some of the score pieces.

There’s one cue near the end of the first season when the Gemstone kids are wondering what happened to Walton’s character. As they’re talking about him, you hear this percussive sound come in. It sounds like percussion, but it’s clogging. I wanted to remind the audience of that character, so that he would be kind of hanging around some scenes even though he’s not really on screen. That was fun because I was using these percussive rhythms that I wouldn’t normally go to.

A lot of viewers thought this was an actual song that had existed for fifty or sixty years. That sounds like maybe the biggest compliment you could get.

Totally. When the song first appeared on set, apparently a lot of the crew were confused about it. They couldn’t find it on Spotify and it didn’t turn up online. They were convinced that it was something that had existed before. And that’s when we were recording the version set in the 1980s, before we’d even unveiled the original version from the ‘60s. That version ended up getting posted online illegally, and someone sent it to my wife as proof that they had found the original. He thought he had found this old recording of these two kids singing it. He was like, “This is the original!” And my wife had to tell him no no no, that’s the “original” they recorded for the show.

Photo Credit: Fred Norris/HBO