TV Talk at TCA: Andie MacDowell sees ‘Groundhog Day’ parallels in Hallmark series; PBS profiles ‘Gospel’

PASADENA, Calif. – Actress Andie MacDowell stars in Hallmark Channel’s “The Way Home” (9 p.m. Sunday), a multi-generational family drama in its second season about Kat (Chyler Leigh) and her daughter (Sadie Laflamme-Snow) who can travel between the past and present via a pond on the family’s land. They’re in search of Kat’s long-missing brother Jacob, whose loss of family matriarch that Del (MacDowell) has grieved for years, along with the recent death of her husband.

MacDowell’s character doesn’t know her daughter and granddaughter can time travel through the pond.

“My existence as Del on this show is about running the farm, saving the farm and my daughter doesn’t even know a lot of the stress and consequences I’ve had,” MacDowell said. “I don’t think it’s something that she has time to think about because she’s obsessed with finding Jacob and living this life that I’m not living.”

That’s not unlike in the Western Pennsylvania-set 1993 movie hit “Groundhog Day” where MacDowell’s TV news producer Rita doesn’t know Pittsburgh weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) keeps going back in time and reliving the same day over and over again.

“I was the grounding source in that story, so I guess I am the grounding source in this particular story,” MacDowell said. “I’m the one with two feet on the ground because I was definitely that in “Groundhog Day” as well. Everybody’s just bouncing off of me and I don’t know that anything is happening.”

When it premiered its first season in January 2023, “The Way Home” was a risky proposition for Hallmark Channel, which is best known for girl-goes-home-rekindles-romance-with-boy rom-com movies rather than intricate, time-traveling drama series. But that risk was rewarded.

Last month’s second-season premiere of “The Way Home” was the most-watched entertainment cable program the day it debuted in households with total viewers women/persons 18+ and 55+.

“It’s definitely an expansion and a broadening of what we’ve done in our content programming in the past,” acknowledged Hallmark Media senior vice president of development Laurie Ferneau during Hallmark’s portion of the Television Critics Association winter 2024 press tour. “This show has time travel, it has a pond portal, it has all those elements, but at the core, it’s still about love and family and friendship and connection.”

Series co-creator Alexandra Clarke (“Heartland”) said the show’s time travel is more of a means to an end.

“It becomes a bit of a tool for healing within a family and that was always our goal,” Clarke said. “Time travel is just there to help understand generational trauma, family dynamics and bring a family back together, which, at the end of the day, is what Hallmark is [about].”

MacDowell, 65, said she was drawn to the series because of its focus on women in three generations.

“I’m really impressed that Hallmark is giving — my character, in particular, because I represent women of a certain age — the opportunity to show women that I’m not a cliché character,” MacDowell said. “I’m not [playing] your typical older woman [character]. I’m multifaceted and strong and interesting and dynamic. So, that’s been rewarding for me. … The pond adds this excitement and it’s a wonderful tool for storytelling, but at the heart of the show it is about these very well-written characters that people attach themselves to.”

‘Gospel’

PBS’s new four-hour docu-series “Gospel” (9-11 p.m. Feb. 12 and 13, WQED-TV), hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (“Finding Your Roots”), grew out of Gates’ 2021 PBS program, “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song,” which, like “Gospel,” counted Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris among its directors.

“In that series, we really looked at the institution of the Black church,” Harris said in a Zoom interview last month. “And there were a lot of these stories that we touched on but couldn’t go into that much depth.”

For “Gospel,” Holman and Harris look for tent poles in the story of American gospel music – songwriter Thomas Dorsey, singer Mahalia Jackson – and then looked beyond them for stories that haven’t received as much attention, including that of gospel singer Sallie Martin, who proved to be a savvy businesswoman, even starting her own music publishing business to help popularize Dorsey’s music and the songs of other gospel artists.

The series focuses on Chicago as the birthplace of gospel music and doesn’t get into the influence of Pennsylvania’s Charles A. Tindley, a Philadelphia minister and gospel music composer, who Holman said was one of those “cutting room floor stories” they just didn’t have time to include.

Harris said in researching gospel music she was surprised by the degree of musicianship involved in creating gospel songs.

“I think there is often this assumption that gospel singers or Black preachers just get up to the mic and just wail, that they have this innate ability to sing,” she said, “and what we really learned is that this is a craft that is honed over many, many years of rehearsal and training.”

In advance of “Gospel” airing next week, PBS will televise “Gospel Live!” (9 p.m. Friday, WQED-TV), a concert honoring the legacy of gospel music.

Renewed

Fox renewed comedy “Animal Control” for a third season ahead of its 9 p.m. March 6 season two premiere.

AMC ordered a third season of the anthology “The Terror,” this one based on the novel “Devil in Silver” by Victor LaValle about a working-class man wrongfully committed to a psychiatric hospital. Chris Cantwell (“Halt and Catch Fire”) will write and executive produce.

Sometime later this year, WE tv welcomes back “The Braxtons,” who previously starred in “Braxton Family Values.”

Peacock renewed reality competition series “The Traitors” for a third season.

Channel surfing

AMC’s “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire” returns for an eight-episode second season May 12. … AMC will develop a third potential series in the Anne Rice Immortal Universe about The Talamasca, a secret society featured in several Rice novels.