The historic Obama administration is winding down and there will certainly be appropriate noting of its passage on TV. One such hour comes Monday with perhaps the longest name for a TV special in a while.
First Lady Michelle Obama Says Farewell to the White House -- An Oprah Winfrey Special airs at 7 p.m. on CBS, with an encore on Oprah's OWN cable network at 8 p.m. Wednesday.
One thing about the long title -- it serves as a synopsis for the event. This will be the 52-year-old Obama's final one-on-one interview inside the White House.
Taped in the first family's private residence, topics will include details about life in the White House, her eight years as first lady, the legacy she'll leave behind, raising two daughters and her plans for the future.
A native of Chicago, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's father was a city water plant employee and her mother a homemaker and later a secretary.
A good student, Robinson followed her older brother to Princeton University in New Jersey, where she majored in sociology and minored in African-American studies, graduating cum laude in 1985.
She went on to earn her law degree from Harvard in 1988.
Robinson met Barack Hussein Obama II in 1989 when he joined her Chicago law firm as a summer intern and she was assigned to be his adviser and show him the ropes. Their first official date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing.
"It was a cool date actually," Michelle recalled in a 2012 campaign video. "We spent the whole day together," beginning with a "nice long walk," followed by lunch beside the courtyard fountain at the Art Institute of Chicago and then the movie.
The couple married in October 1992. Daughter Malia Ann was born July 4, 1998, and Natasha (Sasha) followed June 10, 2001. Barack was elected to the Senate in 2004 and to the White House in 2008.
The Obamas moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on Jan. 20, 2009.
• The Sound of Music, 6 p.m. today, ABC. I wrote in Thursday's column about how the networks save episodes for May by filling in this time of year with holiday specials and marathons. We sort of have both with The Sound of Music.
Not exactly a Christmas film, the beloved family friendly movie has nonetheless become a holiday staple over the years and completely kills an entire evening of prime-time programming for the network.
That is, the 1965 film, which comes in six minutes under three hours, is studded with enough commercials to fill a full four hours on TV. That's an hour and six minutes of commercials -- about the same for three hours of TV dramas.
We all know the basics: A novitiate leaves her convent and becomes governess to widower Capt. Georg von Trapp's seven unruly children in Austria before World War II.
Stuff happens. There's lots of singing and Georg and Maria fall in love. If that's a spoiler, then you've been living under a rock for more than 50 years.
The film is rated TV-PG because there are some (possibly) provocative gowns; a gun is waved around at one point; at a party, cigarettes are smoked and there's booze being consumed; a bad thunderstorm and; worst of all, there are scary Nazis -- Nazis who chase the family toward the end.
British actress Julie Andrews stars as Maria, and Christopher Plummer plays retired naval officer Trapp. The best known of the child actors is Angela Cartwright as fifth child Brigitta. Cartwright, now 64, had starring roles in TV's Make Room for Daddy and Lost in Space.
The Sound of Music won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and for five years was the highest-grossing film of all time, replacing Gone With the Wind.
Trivia: For a 2015 TV special on the film's 50th anniversary, Andrews sat down with ABC News' Diane Sawyer and revealed five fascinating tidbits.
The 29-year-old Andrews was not yet a big star in 1965 and beat out Grace Kelly and Doris Day for the part of Maria.
Plummer was also a relative unknown and was chosen over Sean Connery and Richard Burton.
The famous opening scene of Maria spinning on the hillside ("The hills are alive with the sound of music ...") was shot from a helicopter and the downdrafts kept knocking Andrews to the ground.
Until the TV special, Andrews had never visited the real Trapp family home in Salzburg, which is now a hotel.
Unlike in the film, the Trapp family's escape from the Nazis in Austria was easy. There was no trekking over the Alps to Switzerland, they simply walked to the train station five minutes from home and traveled to Italy and then to America.
The TV Column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Email:
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Style on 12/18/2016