Family, Friends & Lovers

MONDAY, JANUARY 4 @ 7:00PM & 10:00PM

The Emmy Award-winning team of Vulcan Productions and the producers of NOVA have created a three-part series that explores improving our social relationships, learning to cope with depression and anxiety, and becoming more positive, resilient individuals.The series was produced by Kunhardt McGee Productions.

Harvard psychologist and best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, Professor Daniel Gilbert, talks with experts about the latest science on what makes us “tick” and how we can find support for the emotional issues we all face.

Each episode weaves together the compelling personal stories of ordinary people and the latest scientific research along with revealing comments from celebrities like Chevy Chase, Larry David, Alanis Morissette, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Richard Gere.

The first episode, Family, Friends & Lovers, looks at the importance of relationships and why they are central to our emotional well-being.

We meet a young boy adopted from a Russian orphanage, whose story illustrates how a lack of attachment in infancy fundamentally shapes his ability to build relationships for years to come. We meet the young parents of newborn twins, a couple in therapy for a troubled marriage, a teenager who was bullied with tragic consequences, two women grappling with the stress of workplace conflicts and other characters. Through their stories we achieve a better understanding of the importance of social connections and relationships.
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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 29 @ 7:00PM & 12:00AM

Join researcher and author Rachel Simmons as she examines the challenges facing young women as they surf the waves of 21st century adolescence. Girls growing up in America today have more opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers ever imagined. They do well in school; by fifth grade they’re equal to boys in math and science, and they’re significantly better at reading and writing. They have more career choices, more flexibility in family roles, and more female role models in positions of political power.

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From Vienna: The New Year’s Celebration 2010

FRIDAY, JANUARY 1 @ 7:00PM , 10:00PM & 12:00AM

Stage, screen and recording legend Julie Andrews rings in the new year as she hosts From Vienna: The New Year’s Celebration 2010 on Friday, January 1, on THIRTEEN’s Great Performances on PBS Joining her for the annual Vienna Philharmonic holiday extravaganza will be celebrated conductor Georges Prêtre, who will lead the orchestra in a sparkling program of Strauss Family waltzes, marches and polkas. The telecast marks the second appearance for Andrews as host and also for Prêtre as conductor of the program, beamed around the world to an estimated 1.2 billion viewers from the Musikverein, the gilded hall that houses the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Also featured are dance sequences performed live on location at Vienna’s magnificent art history museum by members of the Vienna State Opera and Volksopera ballet, with guest appearances by Paris Opera Ballet principal soloists Nicholas Le Riche and Eleonora Abbagnato, choreographed by Renato Zanella and costumed by world renowned fashion designer Valentino.

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New York Philharmonic New Year’s Eve: Hampson, Gershwin, Copland & Broadway

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31 @ 6:00PM, 9:00PM & 11:00PM

A tradition almost as venerable as Live From Lincoln Center itself is our live coverage of the New York Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Eve concert. The next installment in that tradition will take place on Thursday evening, December 31, when once again our cameras and microphones will be in place in Avery Fisher Hall to bring you the drama and excitement of the first Philharmonic New Year’s Eve concert to be conducted by the orchestra’s new Music Director, Alan Gilbert.

Maestro Gilbert is only the second American-born conductor to head the Philharmonic (the first was Leonard Bernstein), and quite appropriately he has chosen a program made up entirely of music by American composers. The Philharmonic will play two seminal works in the American orchestral repertory: the Suite from Aaron Copland’s ballet “Appalachian Spring” and George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” They will be joined by the newly-appointed first Artist-in-Residence of the orchestra, the great American baritone, Thomas Hampson, who will sing a group of Copland’s settings of Old American Songs along with a collection of some of the greatest songs by Cole Porter.
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WHAT DARWIN NEVER KNEW

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 @ 6:00PM & 11:00PM

Earth teems with a staggering variety of animals, including 9,000 kinds of birds, 28,000 types of fish, and more than 350,000 species of beetles. What explains this explosion of living creatures”1.4 million different species discovered so far, with perhaps another 50 million to go? The source of life’s endless forms was a profound mystery until Charles Darwin brought forth his revolutionary idea of natural selection. But Darwin’s radical insights raised as many questions as they answered. What actually drives evolution and turns one species into another? To what degree do different animals rely on the same genetic toolkit? And how did we evolve?

“What Darwin Never Knew” offers answers to riddles that Darwin couldn’t explain. Breakthroughs in a brand-new science nicknamed “evo devo”” are linking the enigmas of evolution to another of nature’s great mysteries, the development of the embryo. NOVA takes viewers on a journey from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic, and from the explosion of animal forms half a billion years ago to the research labs of today. Scientists are finally beginning to crack nature’s biggest secrets at the genetic level. The results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin’s insights while revealing clues to life’s breathtaking diversity in ways the great naturalist could scarcely have imagined.

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AMERICAN MASTERS

SUNDAY, MAY 20 @ 11:03PM

Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, is an almost universally recognized name.  Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th century Concord, is firmly established.  Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and Transcendentalists, the intellectual protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker, with democratic ideals and progressive values about women – a worldly careerist of sorts.  Most surprising is that Alcott led, anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life not discovered until the 1940s.  As Barnard, Alcott penned some thirty pulp fiction thrillers, with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts – a far cry from her better-known works featuring fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and impish children.

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CHRISTMAS IN YELLOWSTONE

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19 @ 9:00PM

NATURE presents Christmas in Yellowstone, a breathtaking look at wintertime deep within America’s first national park.
Stretching across more than 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho is one of the greatest expanses of unspoiled nature and wildlife anywhere on Earth, Yellowstone National Park. Designated America’s first national park in 1872, Yellowstone now receives almost three million visitors each year. Yet only a small fraction of those who glimpse the park’s stunning vistas, geological wonders, and animal residents do so during the winter months, a time when nature’s in hospitality is matched only by its serenity.
NATURE follows in the snowy footprints of Yellowstone’s red foxes, spies on the predatory warfare of wolves and elk, and climbs into the den of a grizzly bear that gives birth to two cubs while deep in hibernation. In addition to mesmerizing footage of landscapes and wildlife, trail alongside author and photographer Tom Murphy, who has been coming to Yellowstone for the past 26 winters, camping and photographing amid the silence and solitude of the park. And go behind the scenes with filmmaker Shane Moore to find out how he kept up with Murphy during an at times harrowing trek, reminiscent of the legendary John Colter’s first journey into the park nearly two hundred years ago.

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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 25 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM

L.A. HOLIDAY CELEBRATION 2009 is the “best of” of the six-hour live L.A. County Holiday Celebration broadcast from Los Angeles’ Music Center in December 2008. The one-hour highlights version of this Emmy-nominated music and dance spectacular mixes traditional, contemporary and offbeat holiday entertainment. That holiday staple “The Nutcracker” meets street dance as Antics Performance does a hip hop take on the first act Christmas Eve party and battle with the Mouse King. Backhausdance similarly transforms the “Nutcracker” Snow Scene: ballerinas in white tutus are replaced by modern dancers in ski wear gamboling in the snow. The natural beauty of the holiday season is also the backdrop of DreamDance II’s “Ladies in the Snow,” inspired by the elegance of Chinese dance of the Han dynasty.

Among the critically acclaimed artists spotlighted in the show are two who made their mark on reality television: Melissa Sandvig, the “Naughty Ballerina” from “So You Think You Can Dance” Season 5 and member of the company Motion Tribe, solos in a mesmerizing aerial performance, and Celtic Spring, from the first season of “America’s Got Talent,” offers trademark high intensity fiddling and Irish step dance.

L.A. Holiday Celebration was produced by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. For more Holiday Celebration information, visit www.holidaycelebration.org.

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Faith Hill, Joy to the World – A Soundstage Special Event

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 24 @ 6:00PM & 9:00PM

Working with producers Dann Huff and Byron Gallimore, engineer Allen Sides and Grammy-winning arranger David Campbell, Faith Hill has crafted a one-of-a-kind Christmas record with Joy to the World, freshly conceived yet anchored in tradition. It is a loving tribute to both the spirit and the music of Christmas, one that pays homage to the classics.

Recorded over a two-year period, the album features reworked classics along with the only original song on the track and her single, “A Baby Changes Everything.” The arrangements are diverse. From the big band orchestration of songs like “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, “Winter Wonderland” and “Holly Jolly Christmas,” to the a cappella “The Little Drummer Boy” and the Appalachian feel of “Away In A Manger.” The CD opens with “Joy To The World,” and, says Hill, “From the very first note you hear, I wanted it to be joyous. I wanted to give you (the listener) the impression of what the song meant before a word was ever uttered.”

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