An accidental slip by TODAY's Craig Melvin revealed some exciting and unexpected news about cohost Jenna Bush Hager.

Fans chanted Randy Travis' name as they welcomed to the stage with a standing ovation as he kicked off his "More Life" tour.

On the morning of Sept. 26, 1960, a 26-year-old man from the dairy farms of Wisconsin walked up North Michigan Avenue toward Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago. He was about to begin his first day at WGN Radio, one of the most powerful stations in America, and he was terrified. “I walked into the studio, and I thought, ‘I’m working with some big names at a big radio station, veterans, and they’re going to ignore me!'” he would later recall. They did just the opposite. Over the next six decades, so did the rest of the country. Orion Clifford Samuelson, the broadcaster whom Paul Harvey once said could have served as secretary of agriculture under any of three presidents, and whom admirers took to calling “the Elvis of agricultural radio,” died on March 16 at his home in Huntley, Illinois. He was 91. Orion Samuelson stands in the Channel Earth studios on April 22, 1997, in Chicago. (Peter Barreras/AP) Samuelson was born on March 31, 1934, on a dairy farm near Ontario, Wisconsin, where his grandparents had settled because the rolling hills reminded them of Norway. He was raised expecting to take over the family operation, but a childhood leg disease made heavy farm work impossible and left him unable to walk for a substantial part of his adolescence. Confined largely to the farmhouse, the young Samuelson found a companion in the radio, listening to World War II news broadcasts each evening, absorbing not just the news but the power of a voice that could travel from a studio to a kitchen table a thousand miles away. After high school, he considered becoming a Lutheran pastor before settling on six months of radio school in Minneapolis. He cut his teeth in Sparta, Wisconsin, first as a polka disc jockey — perhaps this explains the natural warmth that would later make him such an effective broadcaster — then moved to WBAY Radio and television in Green Bay, where he began covering agricultural programming. When a job opened at WGN, Samuelson applied, got the position, and made his way toward Tribune Tower. He first appeared on the air at WGN at “milking time,” 5 a.m., a schedule that suited a man raised on a dairy farm. Three years into his tenure came the moment that seared itself into Chicago broadcasting history: Samuelson was the staffer who read the news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on WGN’s airwaves. He would carry that weight, and that sense of responsibility, for the rest of his career. Hundreds of farm families gather under at tent at FarmFest in Redwoods Falls to listen to an Orion Samuelson live broadcast of the Linder Farm Network Noon Hour Ag Jamboree in 1999. (Erry Holt / Star Tribune via Getty Images) What followed across six decades was a career of genuinely staggering breadth. Samuelson interviewed nine presidents, broadcast from all 50 states, shook hands with Fidel Castro in Cuba, met Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, and traveled alongside the Secretary of Agriculture and the Prime Minister of India to visit the Taj Mahal. He hosted “Top O’ the Morning” on WGN-TV during the 1960s and, from 1975 to 2005, “U.S. Farm Report,” a weekly television newsmagazine syndicated across 190 Midwest stations. He also found time, along the way, to record an album of polka novelty songs. His weekly “Samuelson Sez” commentary became as dependable a feature of Midwestern life as a weather forecast. What made Samuelson remarkable was not merely his longevity or his rolodex of world leaders, but his gift for bridging two worlds that rarely spoke to each other. His longtime co-host Max Armstrong called him “an agvocate before it became fashionable,” someone who could explain corn basis prices and beef demand to a suburban Chicago housewife as fluently as he could to a farmer in overalls. His governing conviction was simple, and he repeated it often enough that it became a kind of creed: If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture. Samuelson held the same position at the same station for 60 consecutive years, a feat in American broadcasting second only to Vin Scully. In 2003, he was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, and it was Harvey himself who presented the award at a black-tie dinner in Chicago on the night of a lunar eclipse. Harvey’s opening line: “Even the moon hides its face when we honor Orion Samuelson.” His retirement broadcast on Dec. 31, 2020, closed out exactly 60 years on the air at WGN. He had published his autobiography eight years earlier under the title You Can’t Dream Big Enough, which, for a kid who couldn’t walk and couldn’t farm, turned out to be as apt a title as any broadcaster ever chose. Near the end of his life, when asked what he most wanted to be remembered for, Samuelson gave an answer that was, characteristically, not really about himself at all. LOU HOLTZ, 1937-2026  “If anything I want to be remembered for, I guess it would be for helping people understand that there are no differences between them and people on the farm or ranch,” he said. They all want to do the same — make the best food available, the most nutrition available, at a cost that people can afford.” A farmer, he liked to remind his listeners, buys everything retail and sells everything wholesale. He spent 60 years making sure the rest of us understood what that meant. Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Find him on X @DanRossGoodman.

One of the surest signs of the passing of one epoch to another is that ordinary features of the earlier era come to be regarded, in the later era, as quaint or novel.  I was reminded of this while watching Alex Ross Perry’s recent documentary Videoheaven, which, using a trove of archival footage, film clips, and fun narration by actress Maya Hawke, engagingly explicates the origin story and larger meaning of the video rental store. For those of us even slightly over the age of 40, such establishments were about as unremarkable as car washes or haircut establishments promising service in mere minutes. But in its length of nearly three hours, Videoheaven, which is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, suggests that large segments of the population have become unacquainted with its subject. What does it mean that Blockbuster Video and its ilk have evidently become as distant a cultural memory as Woolworth’s or the A&P? Blockbuster employee Mat Wangrow arranges DVD’s on a shelf inside a Blockbuster Video store January 6, 2003 in Park Ridge, Illinois. (Tim Boyle/Getty Images) To start with, the video store must be considered in continuity with a far more venerable institution: the library. Both are premised on the notion that Americans’ desire to share resources is greater than their impulse to hoard possessions. To borrow a book or rent a movie is an admission that only a finite number of copies of said book or movie exist, and that it is right and proper that they should be meted out on a first-come, first-served basis among members of a community and promptly returned to start the process all over again. There is a reason why not returning a library book invites a special sort of societal censure: The delinquent borrower is withholding a common cultural treasure of which he has no claim. The renter who delayed the prompt return of his VHS tape of Casablanca was no different from the person who kept Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being out of circulation: They were claiming as their own things to which every card-carrying video store patron or library member had a right. In the case of libraries, this arrangement always hung by a bit of a thread. Even if we have not always had Amazon, we have always had bookstores, and a reader who had concluded that he must, simply must, get and keep his hands on a particular book was always free to simply buy it — thus defeating libraries’ admirable ethic of sharing. Even so, the continued use and relevance of libraries suggests not only that some readers remain economically sensible — that they would rather borrow than buy books — but that many embrace the “share and share alike” philosophy the institution imparts. The same was true for video stores, which, to be fair, did offer a unique form of ownership, albeit temporary. In the 1970s, when video stores commenced their takeover of the American landscape, movies were not something to be picked off a shelf, dropped into a bag, and stuffed into a VCR, as the first VHS tapes were. Instead, movies were events, not commodities: They were released on certain dates at select venues — even if those venues numbered many hundreds or thousands of theaters — with no expectation that they could be viewed at will in the home. In that sense, the development of VHS tape technology permitted the temporary acquisition of movies, but everything about the scheme was engineered to put the emphasis on “temporary”: Movies were rented, after all. Sometimes they were rented again and again, but they were always put back into circulation.  The idea of owning a movie, of taking permanent physical possession of it, was strangely foreign to those of us who came of age during the video store era. I still remember my mother’s feelings of joy and shock when she learned that her favorite movie — Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr — was available on VHS from our local video store in the very late 1980s. She was ecstatic that she could again watch a movie she had likely not seen in its entirety since it played in theaters in 1957, but she was taken aback when the proprietor told her the cost of the tape, which, in my very foggy memory of hearing about this episode, was upwards of $80 and maybe even closer to $100. That is because, back then, many tapes were given price points that would seemingly only be attractive for video stores to buy and then rent to customers. I believe the proprietor did sell my mother a copy of An Affair to Remember, but she had an acquisitiveness about that particular title that was rare, thankfully, for my father’s pocketbook. Most of the time, my family played along with the understanding that movies belonged at the video store — itself a form of liberation, in the sense they ceased being the domain of the theaters — and were only marched home for a few days at a time. The video store, then, was a kind of collective in the best, most capitalistic sense of the term: a place where we stood in line and took our turn for the privilege of spending time in the company of a great movie. It was not a drag to go there but a treat, like eating out on a Tuesday night, or going to a ball game on Friday. The only drudgery was setting up a membership at a new store. That’s why stores encouraged loyalty — you were either a Blockbuster family or a Hollywood Video family, in my experience.  The largest and best video stores crowded their squatty shelves with movies. There sat row upon row of rectangular VHS covers — hallowed out and made stiff with Styrofoam — that were parked in front of the actual tapes to be brought to the front and checked out. Although new releases were represented in abundance, generally arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelving on the back wall, aspiring cinephiles such as myself knew that the glories were found in the interior shelves, which were usually broken up by genre. This is where the classics, oddities, and those new-ish releases that were no longer completely new were housed. Hunting for a title could be difficult, especially if someone sought to consume, as I often did in those days, a representative sampling of a director’s work. If I wished to see every major Woody Allen movie, I could not simply go to the nonexistent Woody Allen shelf, but do the work of picking out what the store had on hand and where it might be. Annie Hall would likely be stocked under comedy or Oscar winners, but would Hannah and Her Sisters be in comedy or drama? How about Radio Days? Would I have to go to a competitor to find the comparatively obscure Shadows and Fog?  Decades before AI was considered anything but the evil computer character HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, video stores encouraged their patrons to function as their own search engines and become familiar with their filing system and nooks and crannies. How often was I compelled to scan a shelf several times in search of a particular rarity: Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout or a rare Robert Altman extravaganza. Video store runs rewarded attentiveness and patience. I still remember the thrill of finding such a title, checking expectantly to assure that an actual copy sat behind its cover, and marching to the checkout to make it temporarily mine. These finds would be carted home like so much loot. The smart clerks — or the ones seeking career paths that would resemble that of Quentin Tarantino — would comment on my artier choices.  No one who subsists on streaming services can know the pleasures of video store browsing, despite the obvious advantage streamers have over brick-and-mortar stores in terms of content available. Yet, it is well known that an abundance of choice can impede the making of a choice. To pick from among the dozen or so Ingmar Bergman movies that my Hollywood Video stocked in the late 1990s was doable. The stock was small enough to be judged and prioritized: Let’s rent The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander first as a duo — an early Bergman classic, a later Bergman masterpiece — and then, to mix it up, tackle the lesser-known After the Rehearsal next time. But when the Criterion Channel makes available essentially every important Bergman production, how does one begin to even sift through the options? Especially when, if a choice is made, it can be unmade by hitting “stop”? Another advantage of the video store monopoly: A movie, once rented, demanded to be watched. Mistake or not, it should at least be put in the VCR. THE CULTURAL DOMINANCE OF CHUCK NORRIS  I use the term “monopoly” intentionally. Clearly, the end of video stores counts as a win for individual movie-watching freedom. Our choice of what to watch and how long we give ourselves the option of watching it has been taken from Blockbuster and given to us. But if our current state of instant availability and easy access is so great, why is there an audience for Videoheaven? Perhaps we secretly crave what the video store asked of us: effort to go there, a willingness to accept what it had in stock, and a spirit of sharing its treasures. I cannot say that I ever made a friend in a video store, but each time I rented a film I came to especially admire or love — Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — I returned it hoping that the next person who encountered it would react as I did. I was paying the VHS tape forward, at least until it wore out. It is too bad (and not a little ironic) that Videoheaven, which captures this whole world so well, can only be seen on streaming.  Over the years, but especially as renting went the way of the dodo, I admit that I myself have acquired an inordinate number of movies on DVD, Blu-ray, and now 4K. I, too, have become guilty of storing up movies. But with Blockbuster and the like being so very far in the rearview mirror, maybe it is time that I open my own video store. Seven-day rental windows, anyone?  Peter Tonguette is the film critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.

An amusing game when watching bad television is to imagine how many performers passed on a role before the actual lead came on board. In the case of Kerry Washington and Apple TV’s Imperfect Women, my guess is that the list stretches to the dozens.  Despite her limitations as a screen performer, the one-time star of ABC’s Scandal is not the worst thing about Apple’s new show. That designation belongs to the writers, who spend much of the eight-episode limited series displaying an odd unfamiliarity with the conventions of drama. Whole scenes and characters amount to nothing, blanks in a narrative gun. An early episode makes much of an ensemblist’s “pain” but never shows us an example, leaving viewers to flounder in abstraction. If, as seems increasingly clear, streaming services need murder-of-the-week programming simply to keep the lights on, the least they could do is make such shows with care. Imperfect Women represents instead the utter exhaustion of the genre. The series is thoughtless, boring, unsexy, and punishingly dumb.  Washington plays Eleanor Bouchet, a nonprofit executive in present-day Los Angeles. When, 15 minutes into the pilot, Eleanor’s friend Nancy (Kate Mara) is found killed, our heroine must turn to the pair’s other confidant, Mary (Elisabeth Moss), for support. Can the two women, working together, solve Nancy’s murder? Or will long-buried secrets thrust the deceased’s “soulmates” into the investigative spotlight?  Elisabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and Kate Mara in “Imperfect Women.” (Courtesy of Apple TV) Poor acting abounds in the five episodes now available for streaming. Mara, beautiful but vapid, plays Nancy in flashback with a flattened affect meant to signal inner depth. It doesn’t. After nearly a decade on The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss is now incapable of any emotions beyond smugness and dismay. As Nancy’s husband, Robert, For All Mankind’s Joel Kinnaman brings his usual bro-ish energy, but has no chemistry with anyone else onscreen. Even Jackson Kelly, so good as a possible mass-casualty shooter on Season 1 of The Pitt, disappoints as Mary’s troubled teenage son. Then again, perhaps I’m just reacting to the script. If Kelly’s character isn’t hiding something, there is literally no reason for him to exist.  A well-cast lead might have seasoned this mess of pottage. Washington, locked from birth into an expression of pouty agitation, does no such thing. Like Moss’s Mary, the 49-year-old Eleanor clearly knows more than she’s letting on, a fact that produces not suspense but annoyance. Someone in this group is lying. Perhaps everyone is. Tune in next week for another hint or two about why.  Imperfect Women contains no subtlety, no real surprises. Yet even its predictable beats are amateurish, driven by thesis-statement dialogue (“Anger isn’t the opposite of love”) and paint-by-numbers bedroom fumbling. Yes, the show’s erotic scenes are bad, as well: a straining calf here and an “artfully” out-of-focus fireplace there. I would say that the production feels at times like a middling season of Beverly Hills, 90210, but that verdict would give the reader false hope.  Why spend 800 words abusing a show that could be dismissed in two (“Don’t watch”)? The answer is that Imperfect Women wears, beneath layers of inanity, an ideology as prickly as a hair shirt. At least since Desperate Housewives, ABC’s eight-season saga of murderous frenemies, television has advanced the notion that female camaraderie inevitably produces crime scenes. (See also: Big Little Lies, Bad Sisters, Yellowjackets, and several other shows I’m likely forgetting.) Call the phenomenon “homicidal feminism” if you like, but don’t imagine for a moment that two or more women will be allowed so much as a stroll by the river without a body floating by. Men never have this problem.  Imperfect Women is both the worst and the most cynical of these productions. Fundamentally avaricious and needy, Eleanor, Mary, and Nancy ignore and betray one another with tiresome repetition. Though the trio speaks frequently about the depth of their devotion, viewers see little evidence that they like one another at all. By Episode 4, having placed Eleanor in Nancy’s husband’s bed and telegraphed a second infidelity “reveal,” the series has rejected the possibility of loyalty conquering lust entirely. Were this merely the usual sexual-liberation bunkum, we might roll our eyes and change channels. Unhappily, Imperfect Women has in mind a project even more insidious.  REVIEW: ‘PARADISE’ FOUND  One needn’t be a member of the Edmund Burke Society to recognize that the Left always and everywhere despises the “little platoons” that insulate citizen from state. A man in a faithful marriage — a woman with a friend — has something private on which to lean, a fact that mitigates both their fidelity to and dependence on centralized authority. In Imperfect Women’s universe of ideas, all of these relationships are fraudulent. Each one of us stands naked before the regime. Throw in a dash of misogyny — the show’s female creators plainly hold women in low regard — and one is left with a serious contender for worst dramatic series of the year.  If Apple’s latest has a redeeming factor, it is that its stupidity is so immediately evident that few viewers will take more than a few steps into the morass. The critic, of course, is less fortunate. Tell the world my story?  Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.