■ The Pop Edition
September 20: Jericho Premieres, Bernthal Turns 50
Sophia Loren
1934 · TURNS 92
She became an international star in the 1950s and won the Best Actress Oscar for 1961's Two Women, the first performance in a foreign language to win the category. Decades later she's still working, still photographed, and still the standard people reach for when they say a certain kind of glamour doesn't exist anymore.
George R.R. Martin
1948 · TURNS 78
He spent years writing for television before A Game of Thrones landed in 1996, and it took HBO's adaptation to turn him into a household name well past genre fiction circles. He's famous now for two things simultaneously: building Westeros, and not finishing it.
Jon Bernthal
1976 · TURNS 50
He broke through as Shane on The Walking Dead, a role that made him TV's most sympathetic disaster of a man, before Marvel handed him the Punisher and let him weaponize that same coiled physicality. He's built a career on characters who feel one bad decision away from either redemption or ruin.
Kristen Johnston
1967 · TURNS 59
She won two Emmys playing Sally Solomon, the alien with zero patience for human customs, on 3rd Rock from the Sun. Her towering physical comedy made a show built on a fairly thin premise feel genuinely strange and funny.
Asia Argento
1975 · TURNS 51
The Italian actress and director grew up on European film sets and later crossed into American work with roles in xXx and Land of the Dead. She's also directed and written her own films, carrying her family's cinematic pedigree into a second generation.
PRIME TIME: Jericho Premieres
CBS put Jericho on the air on September 20, 2006, twenty years back, dropping a small Kansas town into silence and darkness after mushroom clouds appear on the horizon and nobody explains why. The pitch was simple and unnerving: no phones, no news, no federal government checking in, just neighbors deciding in real time whether to trust each other.
It never became a top-tier hit, but it built a fiercely loyal audience during a period when post-9/11 anxiety about infrastructure and government failure was still raw. CBS canceled it after one season, brought it back for a short second run after a nut-mailing fan campaign that got real media attention, then canceled it again — a sequence that made Jericho a case study in fandom leverage years before streaming platforms made reviving canceled shows routine.
Watching it now, the show reads less like a thriller and more like a snapshot of a specific American mood: distrustful of centralized power, curious about what self-sufficiency actually looks like, and willing to imagine the worst. Skeet Ulrich led the cast; the show's true legacy is arguably the fan campaign, which network executives still cite when they talk about audiences who refuse to let a cancellation stand.
THE MOMENT: Battle of the Sexes
On September 20, 1973, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in straight sets at the Houston Astrodome, in front of more than 30,000 people and a television audience estimated in the tens of millions. Riggs, a 55-year-old former champion, had spent months hyping the match as a referendum on whether women belonged on the same court as men at all.
King didn't treat it as a novelty exhibition. She trained specifically for Riggs's game, studying his lobs and drop shots, and won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 without dropping a set. The broadcast leaned into spectacle — she entered on a feather-adorned litter carried by shirtless men, a wink at the circus atmosphere Riggs had built — but the tennis itself was decisive and clean.
The match landed a year after Title IX passed, and it became shorthand for that moment's arguments about women's athletics in a way no court ruling could. It's been retold in documentaries and a 2017 feature film, and King has spent the decades since using the match's fame to push for equal prize money and coaching opportunities, turning one night of theater into a genuine lever for change.
1973Bobby Riggs's press conferences before the King match were nearly as widely covered as the game itself, full of lines he'd later half-walk-back.
1984The Cosby Show premiered the day before this one, on September 20, and would go on to dominate Thursday nights for most of its run.
19963rd Rock from the Sun's success this era helped make Kristen Johnston's larger-than-life comic style a template other sitcoms borrowed from.
2006Jericho aired opposite established Thursday competition, a scheduling fight that partly explains why CBS treated its ratings so cautiously.
2011George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons had spent the summer atop bestseller lists, feeding the frenzy that helped HBO's adaptation grow.
2017Battle of the Sexes, the feature film dramatizing the King-Riggs match, had opened in limited release days earlier and expanded nationwide that fall.
