TV Talk: ‘Repairing the World’ tells stories from aftermath of Tree of Life attack
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Oakland, Calif.,-based filmmaker Patrice O’Neill began chronicling community responses to hate more than 25 years ago. When she heard about the 2018 assault on Squirrel Hill’s Tree of Life synagogue, she realized her Not in Our Town team had more work to do.
“Repairing the World: Stories from the Tree of Life” (9 p.m. Oct. 26, WQED-TV), which screened at the Pittsburgh Jewish Film Festival in 2022, filmed over three years and focuses largely on the community response. (Last year’s HBO documentary on Tree of Life was more about the attack and online hate that motivated the gunman.)
“It wasn’t the horrific nature of the attack that drew us to Pittsburgh. It was the profoundly moving response,” O’Neill said in a phone interview last week. “That night (of the attack) high school students organized a vigil at Forbes and Murray. … It was so inspiring to see the response of the Jewish community to say, ‘We’re not going to be afraid to worship. We’re not going to be afraid to be together.’ And to have young people lead that, it was an example of everything that we try to emulate.”
O’Neill began covering community responses to hate in 1995’s half-hour documentary, “Not in Our Town,” about hate incidents in Billings, Mont.
More films followed, including 2011’s “Light in the Darkness,” about a series of attacks on Latino residents in Patchogue, N.Y.; 2011’s “Class Actions,” about college students standing up against racism and antisemitism; and 2014’s “Waking in Oak Creek,” about a white supremacist’s murder of six Sikh worshipers.
“Repairing the World” also shows how the Jewish community helped others on the receiving end of hate, including Pittsburgh’s Asian-American community in the face of the pandemic. Marian Lien, director of Education for Inclusion and Global Awareness at St. Edmund’s Academy, describes how while shopping at a market a stranger told her she “should be shipped off with the virus back to China” while shopping.
“We’re redefining the term neighbor so it’s not just someone who lives next to you but it’s someone who you actually have a moral responsibility toward and who has a moral responsibility towards you,” Rabbi Ron Symons, founding director of the Center for Loving Kindness at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, says in the film.
“The commonalities that lead us to a story is a reckoning in a community saying, ‘We need to understand how this happened, and we need to act together to make sure it doesn’t happen again and to stand with our neighbors,’” O’Neill said. “There are so many things that are unique about Pittsburgh: We have never seen this broad-scale citywide response like we were seeing in Pittsburgh.”
Local chef exits ‘Hell’s Kitchen’
In the Oct. 19 episode of Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” chef Mattias Butts of Ross got sent packing.
Butts was on the chopping block in the Oct. 12 episode but he managed to avoid elimination. (“Mattias, you’re on thin ice,” host Gordon Ramsay said. “In fact, it’s so thin, I can hear the ice cracking!”)
In this week’s episode, Butts got good marks for a pizza he made early in the episode but then Ramsay complained his lobster was raw during dinner service.
“Tonight the ice broke wide open and you fell through,” Ramsay said. “You are not ready to become my head chef.”
A tearful Butts acknowledged his mistakes and said, “This is a life-changing opportunity for me, and I wanted to come home a winner.”
‘Little Bird’
Native representation in prime time made strides in recent years thanks primarily to FX’s “Reservation Dogs” and AMC’s “Dark Winds.” Add PBS’s Canadian import “Little Bird” (11 p.m. Oct. 29, WQED-TV) to the list even if it’s not quite on par quality-wise with its predecessors.
The six-episode series follows twentysomething law student Esther Rosenblum (Darla Contois) as she embarks on a search for her birth family after a disastrous 1985 engagement party where her future mother-in-law expresses racist sentiments about Esther (“She’s one of the good ones. … That’s a compliment!”).
The story begins in 1968 on the Lone Pine reservation in Saskatchewan as a 5-year-old Esther — then known as Bezhig Little Bird (Keris Hope Hill) — is taken from her birth family as part of a 1960s-1980s unjust Canadian government policy known as the “Sixties Scoop.” She’s adopted by a non-native family in Montreal headed by matriarch Golda (Lisa Edelstein, “House”).
Episodes hop back and forth between the ’60s and the ’80s as Little Bird goes in search of her family of origin.
It’s a fascinating, previously unexplored (as far as I know) premise for a dramatic series (with a great theme song, “I Remember You (Hey, Little Bird)” by Buffy Sainte-Marie). But stretching the story over six overly long episodes does the show no favors as it veers between taut drama and occasional lapses into obvious, stereotypical heroes and villains.
Kept/canceled
Canceled by Paramount+ after its first season, the animated series “Star Trek: Prodigy” will move to Netflix. Season one will stream on Netflix later this year with the show’s second season coming to Netflix in 2024.
Apple TV+ canceled “The AfterParty” after two seasons.
Netflix’s “Elite” returns for its seventh season this week; Netflix announced season eight will be the show’s last season.
Channel surfing
With Channel 11 sports anchor Alby Oxenreiter still out on medical leave, KDKA-AM/93.7-FM The Fan’s Shelby Cassesse is doing some freelance fill-in work for WPXI-TV’s sports coverage. … In advance of season two of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” (9 p.m. Oct. 29), PBS’s “American Experience” will offer free streaming of its 2018 nonfiction series of the same name beginning Oct. 24 at pbs.org and at youtube.com/@AmericanExperiencePBS. … Showtime will exit sports coverage (mostly boxing) at the end of the year.
Day One at the Double Ones!
I’m so excited to join the @WPXI sports team as a freelancer! You’ll see me helping out and filling in when needed. Glad to be working alongside friends and mentors in the industry! pic.twitter.com/jaGvZwSUxC
— Shelby Cassesse (@ShelbyCassesse) October 17, 2023