• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees The Doobie Brothers are joining with singer and songwriter Michael McDonald for a 50th anniversary tour next year. McDonald, who sang with the band starting in 1975 before starting his own solo career, surprised fans at The Doobie Brothers concert with a performance of "Takin' it to the Streets" on Monday in Nashville, Tenn., at the Ryman Auditorium. Formed in Northern California, the group featured harmonies backed by the finger-picking style of guitarist Patrick Simmons paired with the R&B guitar playing by Tom Johnston, who also sang lead. They had hits with "Listen to the Music," "Long Train Runnin'" and "China Grove." They earned two Grammys with McDonald for "What a Fool Believes" and "Minute By Minute." The tour will begin June 9 in West Palm Beach, Fla.
• Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt thought long and hard about whether to do a reboot of Mad About You, the NBC sitcom staple of the '90s set inside the Buchman family bubble. "We had 20 years of lunches where we said, 'Absolutely never, ever.' It was the worst idea," recalled Hunt, who played Jamie Buchman to Reiser's Paul. Reiser added during a recent interview: "It was a joke." But today, the Mad About You redux will debut on Spectrum Originals as a limited series available exclusively to the telecommunications conglomerate's on-demand subscribers. The series ended in 1999 after seven seasons with a two-part finale that did some time-hopping of its own. Janeane Garofalo played Jamie and Paul Buchman's only child, Mabel, who was seen all grown up when she narrated 22 years into the future to end the show. The new show picks up as an anxiety-prone Mabel (Abby Quinn) heads off to college, unraveling Jamie in the apartment where the Buchmans continue to live in downtown New York, just five blocks from Mabel's New York University dorm room. It was that seamless timing, with Mabel's emerging adulthood, that got the two stars thinking they could do it all over again. That and the fact that some shows in recent years have rebooted with a shred of dignity, including Will & Grace and Roseanne, which became The Conners. "We did everything we wanted to do and finished," said Reiser, who created the series with Danny Jacobson. "Then we just -- would we? I mean, people want us to do it. It would be crazy, right?'"
A Section on 11/20/2019