■ The Pop Edition
September 18 in Pop Culture: Studio 60, Rush Hour, and Gandolfini's Birthday
Born On This Day
Frankie Avalon
1940 · TURNS 86
A Philadelphia teen idol who charted with pop hits before pivoting to the beach-party movies that defined a genre. He and Annette Funicello made a half-dozen "Beach Party" films together, and he later spoofed his own image in "Grease" as the Teen Angel.
James Gandolfini
1961 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 65 (DIED 2013)
A working character actor for years before HBO cast him as Tony Soprano, a role that reshaped what television dramas were allowed to be about. He resisted the celebrity that came with it, staying rooted in New Jersey even as the show made him one of the most studied performances on TV.
Jada Pinkett Smith
1971 · TURNS 55
She came up through Baltimore theater training before landing roles in "Set It Off" and "The Matrix" sequels, and later co-founded the production company that put "Red Table Talk" on the map. Her career has moved fluidly between studio action pictures and smaller, character-driven work.
James Marsden
1973 · TURNS 53
He broke through as Cyclops in the "X-Men" films, then spent the 2000s proving surprisingly game for comedy in "Enchanted" and "27 Dresses." More recently he's leaned into weirder, sharper roles in shows like "Westworld" and "Dead to Me."
Lance Armstrong
1971 · TURNS 55
He won seven consecutive Tour de France titles after recovering from testicular cancer, turning himself into a global symbol of comeback narratives and yellow LIVESTRONG bracelets. Those titles were later stripped following a doping investigation, one of the more dramatic falls in modern sports spectacle.
Prime Time
Twenty years ago today, NBC premiered "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," Aaron Sorkin's follow-up to "The West Wing" and, on paper, one of the safest bets in television. It had Sorkin's dialogue, Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as the leads, and a premise — the behind-the-scenes drama of a fictional "Saturday Night Live" — that critics compared favorably to "30 Rock," which premiered the same fall season on the same network.
The reviews for the pilot were strong. What followed wasn't: ratings slid steadily through the season, and NBC canceled the show after a single year, while "30 Rock" — cheaper, funnier, and less self-serious about the nobility of sketch comedy — went on to run seven seasons and win Emmys by the armload.
"Studio 60" has become a kind of case study in television programming: a show with pedigree, a recognizable premise, and a network's full backing that still couldn't find an audience, largely because it took its own subject matter — a sketch show — far more seriously than viewers were willing to.
Opening Weekend
"Rush Hour" opened in wide release on this date in 1998, and the pitch — a Los Angeles motormouth cop and a straight-laced Hong Kong detective forced to work together — could have been a shrug of a buddy-comedy premise. It wasn't, largely because Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan had genuine chemistry, and because Chan finally got a mainstream American vehicle that let him do his own stunts without the film treating them as a novelty.
Chan had already been a massive star in Hong Kong for two decades by this point; American studios had tried and mostly failed to translate that stardom for U.S. audiences. "Rush Hour" cracked it, becoming a sleeper hit that outperformed expectations and turned into a trilogy over the next decade.
It also cemented a template — the interracial buddy-cop comedy pairing an American star with an international action figure — that studios kept trying to replicate for years afterward, rarely with the same ease.
Meanwhile…
1965NBC premieres "Get Smart," the Mel Brooks and Buck Henry spy spoof that gave the culture "Would you believe..." and a shoe phone.
1970Jimi Hendrix dies in London at 27, one of the defining tragedies of the era's rock scene.
1970Aisha Tyler is born in San Francisco, later a comedian, "Friends" guest star, and "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" host.
1950Anna Deavere Smith is born in Baltimore, later known for one-woman docudramas and TV roles on "The West Wing" and "Nurse Jackie."
1974Rapper and actor Xzibit is born in Detroit, later the host of MTV's "Pimp My Ride."