E6 FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2020 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
During the coronavirus
crisis, the Los Angeles
Times is making some
temporary changes to our
print sections. The prime-
time TV grid is on hiatus;
highlighted listings will
continue.SERIESMacGyver(N) 8 p.m. CBS
The Blacklist(N) 8 p.m.
NBC
CharmedThe Charmed
Ones (Melonie Diaz, Made-
leine Mantock, Sarah Jef-
fery) join forces with Parker
(guest star Nick Hargrove).
8 p.m. CW
Shark Tank8 p.m. (N) ABC
Great PerformancesVival-
di’s “The Four Seasons.” 8
p.m. KOCE
Hawaii Five-0Danny
(Scott Caan) is abducted
and wounded in an attempt
to get the cypher Steve’s
(Alex O’Loughlin) mother
left him in the series finale
of the crime drama. 9 p.m.
CBS
Dateline NBC(N) 9 p.m.
NBC
Dynasty(N)9 p.m. CW
20/20(N) 9 p.m. ABC
Blue Bloods(N)10 p.m.
CBS
Dishing With Julia ChildIn
this new six-part series,
nine of the most popular
chefs in America gather to
watch episodes of Child’s
seminal TV series “The
French Chef.” 10 and 10:30
p.m. KOCE
High Maintenance(Season
finale) 11 p.m. HBOCORONAVIRUSCoronavirus Pandemic(N)
10 and 11 a.m. CNN
Coronavirus Update(N)
Noon CW and 7 p.m. CW
Pandemic: What You Need
to KnowNoon ABC
White House Coronavirus
Task Force Briefing2 p.m.
CSPAN
Coronavirus Crisis(N) 7
p.m. FoxTALK SHOWSCBS This Morning(N) 7
a.m. KCBS
TodayCoronavirus. (N) 7
a.m. KNBC
Good Morning America
(N) 7 a.m. KABC
Good Day L.A.(N) 7 a.m.
KTTV
The View(N) 10 a.m. KABC
The TalkDr. Mehmet Oz;
Sebastian Maniscalco. (N) 1
p.m. KCBS
The Kelly Clarkson Show
(N) 2 p.m. KNBC
The DoctorsSurviving a
pandemic. (N)3 p.m. KCOP
Washington WeekCo-
ronavirus; Trump adminis-
tration response; responses
in cities and states:
Yamiche Alcindor, PBS;
Peter Baker and Sarah Kliff,
the New York Times; Ger-
ald Seib, the Wall Street
Journal. (N) 7 p.m. and 1
a.m. KOCE
Real Time With Bill Maher
Virtual interview guests
include Mayor Eric
Garcetti; Max Brooks; Seth
MacFarlane; Willie Nelson;
Democratic presidential
candidate Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-Vt.). (N) 10 p.m.
and 11:35 p.m. HBO
The Issue Is(N) 10:30 p.m.
and 1:30 a.m. KTTV
Amanpour (N)11 p.m.
KCET; 1 a.m. KLCS
The Tonight Show Star-
ring Jimmy FallonMiley
Cyrus; Lady Gaga; Lewis
Capaldi performs. (N) 11:35
p.m. KNBC
NightlineCoronavirus. (N)
11:35 p.m. KABCMOVIESBlinded by the Light(2019)
8:45 a.m. HBO
X-Men: Days of Future
Past(2014) 9:30 a.m. FX
Glory(1989) 10:10 a.m. Epix
Captain Underpants: The
First Epic Movie(2017)
12:30 p.m. FX
Ferdinand(2017) 2:30 p.m.
FX
Bumblebee(2018) 6:05 p.m.
Epix
Kung Fu Panda 2(2011) 7
p.m. NickelodeonKaren NealKaren Neal/CBS
THE SERIES FINALE
of “Hawaii Five-0” airs
on CBS. Alex O’Loughlin
plays Steve McGarrett.TV Highlights
In the 5½ years since Sam
Hunt released “Montevallo”
—the triple-platinum 2014
debut on which he fused
country music and hip-hop
more naturally than any
singer before him — virtually
all of Nashville has crowded
onto his bandwagon.
But extraordinary times
can do funny things to ex-
traordinary people. Asked
this week how he’s been
amusing himself while
cooped up with his wife at
home during the co-
ronavirus pandemic, Hunt
laughed.
“Like everyone else, we’ve
been watching ‘Tiger King,’ ”
the Georgia native said of
the Netflix docuseries
quickly approaching “Old
Town Road”-level cultural
ubiquity. “I had to check and
make sure Joe Exotic wasn’t
somebody I knew down the
road from where I grew up.”
On Friday, Hunt, 35, will
release his new record,
“Southside,” into a musical
environment that Lil Nas X,
Breland, Blanco Brown and
others would tell you Hunt
helped shape. And though
he’s still blending hand-
played instruments with
head-nodding beats, the al-
bum also emphasizes Hunt’s
traditional songwriting tal-
ent in tunes inspired by his
relationship with Hannah
Lee Fowler, whom he mar-
ried in 2017 after a decade of
on-and-off romance. “I
thought I wanted my free-
dom / I told myself I’d have a
ball,” he sings on “2016,” a
stirring acoustic ballad
whose title points to one of
the couple’s off periods, “But
it turns out going out and
chasing dreams and lonely
women / Ain’t freedom after
all.”
The singer checked in
over the phone from his
place near Nashville, where
he posted a video on Insta-
gram the other day that
showed him riding a motor-
cycle, trailed by several dogs,
through a wide, grassy field.
“We’re outside of town a
good ways,” he said. “We live
in this old-style wood cabin
—not a whole lot going on
out here. Fortunately, we
have a little room to get out
of the house and enjoy the
sunshine on the nice days.”In some of these celebrity
quarantine videos, you get
a real sense of how lavish
folks’ homes are. Your
cabin looks pretty rustic.
You could say that. My
wife and I are more like
minimalists than anything
else, partly because we can’t
keep up with much more
than the few things we need.
We’ve been living here for
about six months. We don’t
have TV, so there’s not much
to watch, but we can stream
stuff on our phones.Anything besides “Tiger
King”?
The new season of
“Ozark.” Then I go down my
YouTube rabbit holes: con-
spiracy documentaries or
some random lecture from
some professor somewhereabout something I’m way
underinformed on.That Instagram clip also
showed you and your wife
playing some music. Is that
typical for you guys?
It’s not. I’ve played more
music for fun in the last two
or three days than I have in I
don’t know how long. I never
pick up my guitar unless I’m
going in to write or going on
the bus. But after about Day
4, I felt far enough removed
from any sort of work obliga-
tion that I felt the urge to
pick it up and start playing.
My wife plays a little piano,
so we just mess around to
pass the time.You’d already been lying
relatively low over the last
couple of years while you
made this new album. Were
you well prepared for
enforced homebody-dom?
Yeah, but after spending
last year around the house
and a good bit of the year
before, I will say I’m getting
antsy. I think I overcor-
rected for the three or four
years I toured my first
record.Any second thoughts about
releasing this one amid a
global health crisis?
I guess I’m looking at the
next year, year and a half
more than I am the next two
weeks or months. I’ve al-
ways felt like if I have music
that I’m going to put out
and it’s ready, I don’t want
to sit around and wait for
the perfect time. I’d rather
put it out immediately.Last year’s Stagecoach
festival was one of the few
shows you played in 2019,and it surprised a lot of
people. You covered
Waylon Jennings and
Brooks & Dunn; it was
rootsier than many
expected.
I think I was feeling a
little nostalgic during that
time. I was listening to the
country music I grew up
listening to — wearing my
boots more than my Jor-
dans, I guess you could say. I
hadn’t really stopped to look
back and reflect until about
two years ago. That’s when I
started to lean back into the
country side of my influ-
ences. But also, when I put
out my first record, we wer-
en’t as inundated as we are
now with urban music and
with beats. Now everything
is influenced by hip-hop; we
hear it in all music now.What did you think the first
time you heard “Old Town
Road” or Breland’s “My
Truck”?
It felt like a natural pro-
gression when you consider
the taste of a contemporary
country music fan — the
fact that we all listen to all
types of music. But my
thought was, wouldn’t it be
something if we had songs
like this that were written
from the perspective of
somebody who had even
more insight into country
music in terms of the tradi-
tion and the culture and the
language and the songwrit-
ing? The melodies and the
phrasing and the beats — all
that was there in those
songs, and that’s what
makes you feel something.
But if you combine some of
the more traditional Nash-
ville storyteller approach
with something like that, Ifelt like it could be even
bigger. Not that you could
get any bigger than “Old
Town Road.”Bigger, no. But deeper,
maybe.
For this record there had
to be some other place that I
had to try to find. The pro-
duction wasn’t as important
to me anymore. It was more
about being more vulnera-
ble and personal than I have
in the past.You feel you got there?
I don’t know. I’m really
happy with this record, but
whether I can do better
going forward — whether I
can beat it, whatever that
even means — I’m not sure.
This is what I got.Did it feel different to write
about your personal life
given that listeners now
know things about you and
people close to you? Do you
give people a heads-up?
I make sure that I always
play the songs for anybody
who might feel like they’re a
part of them. My wife, she’s
a really authentic person. I
can be a chameleon in a lot
of ways; I can kind of adapt
to whatever situation I’m in.
But she just is who she is,
and she can’t fake it. She
likes the idea of me putting
out songs that are more real
instead of songs that give
the impression we’re living
this lifestyle of no worries.“Babe, this song makes us
sound too happy.”
Right — which is kind of
how I would normally lean.
She encourages me to reveal
a little more than I other-
wise would.Sam Hunt is getting personal
‘Southside,’ the
country star’s latest
album, reveals a more
introspective artist.
MIKAEL WOOD
POP MUSIC CRITIC
THERE WILL BEno Stagecoach gig this year for Sam Hunt, seen above last April, but he didn’t blink at releasing his new album now.Allen J. SchabenLos Angeles TimesDemocratic Republic of the
Congo; and Dr. Syra Madad,
the infectious disease spe-
cialist preparing New York’s
municipal hospitals for the
next pandemic.
Scientists and health-
care workers are the story’s
heroesbut there are also an-
tagonists: One story line fol-
lows Caylan Wagar, a home-
schooling mother of five and
anti-vaccine activist in Ore-
gon who, in the midst of a
historic measles outbreak,
fights against stricter immu-
nization laws. The docu-
mentary shows how a con-
stellation of distinct forces
including a growing distrust
of scientific authority, global
instability and a lack of fund-
ing for public health infra-
structure makes us more
vulnerable to a deadly new
disease.
Filmed over the course of
the 2018-2019 flu season,
“Pandemic” is full of what-if
scenarios — many involving
Madad’s work in New York
City — that have now come
to fruition. Minutes into the
first episode, a team of medi-
cal workers covered head to
toe in protective gear run
through a simulation to test
their readiness for a major
flu outbreak in the city.
Madad, who is overseeing
the drill, warns them: “If
you’re not protected, if you
can’t protect yourself, then
how are you going to protect
others?” Later, she lays out a
hypothetical scenario in
which a single traveler arriv-
ing by plane in New York City
could trigger an overwhelm-
ing outbreak that would,
within weeks, incapacitate
the city. She’s also seen
pleading with politicians
about resources for pan-
demic preparedness. Sound
familiar?
“The work of prevention
and preparedness — it’s
challenging to make that
real to people before the bad
thing happens and makes
people care about it,” says
Fink.
Isabel Castro, one of the
series’ directors, recalls the
apathetic response she got
from friends and family
when she told them aboutthe project she was working
on. “Everyone would be like,
‘Oh you’re making a show
about the flu?’ They would
talk about it dismissively
and I would be like, ‘No, this
is a big deal.’ So it’s very sur-
real for these same people
now to be watching the show
and to be like, ‘Oh my God. I
can’t believe it happened in
our lifetime.’”
Production wrapped a
few months before the co-
ronavirus outbreak began in
China. Ironically, it was a
relatively mild flu season in
the United States, but even a
mild flu season is enough to
overwhelm Holly Goracke,
the only doctor at a hospital
in Jefferson County, Okla.“We didn’t want the flu
season to be bad,” says Cas-
tro, “But at the same time it
was difficult because we
were talking about all of
these worst-case scenarios
and then not necessarily
seeing it on the ground.”
Still, Castro adds, “I remem-
ber feeling a growing para-
noia over the course of film-
ing.” Director Doug Shultz
documented an outbreak of
H1N1 in Rajasthan, India.
He had to wear a mask while
filming doctors and patients
in crowded isolation wards.
“It’s very strange [to] look
back and see that we sort of
took this trip through ex-
actly what is happening
right now,” he says.One memory has stuck
with Shultz even though it
didn’t make the final cut of
the documentary: He fol-
lowed hospital workers as
they took buses to poor
areas of the region and put
on plays to teach proper
hand-washing techniques
and other basic hygiene to
children.
“I keep being haunted by
that,” he says. “I feel like
those lessons are going to be
around for a long time, for all
of us.”
The filmmakers have
been in touch with the scien-
tists and healthcare workers
profiled in “Pandemic,”
nearly all of whom have
trained their efforts on fight-
ing the coronavirus out-
break. Castro says she’s got-
ten text messages from Flis,
a retired nurse who has 16
years of working with venti-
lators and is contemplating
returning to the border.
Glanville has reoriented his
focus to the coronavirus and
says his company has made
strides toward a cure.
Madadhas been on the front
lines in New York City.
For her part, Fink is not
exactly surprised to witness
the most dire predictions in
the documentary come true.
“It’s strange to hear people
saying, ‘Oh my God, we ne-
ver could have imagined it.’
The experts were very aware
this could happen at any
time.” But, she concedes, “It
feels different to be in it than
to imagine it.”Netflix series predicted a pandemic
[‘Pandemic,’from E1]
NETFLIX’Sdocuseries issues warnings about the risk of a new respiratory virus.Netflix