Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen answers reader questions every Wednesday at TribLive.com in a column that also appears in the Sunday Tribune-Review.
Q: I see the KDKA-TV weather girl Kristin Emery is wearing a ring on her left hand. Did she just get married? Curious minds like to know.
— Betsy, Sewickley Township
Rob: While I don’t generally entertain super-personal questions, my philosophy has always been, if it’s a question derived from what people see on TV, then it’s fair game. Viewers notice wedding rings — or their disappearance — on TV.
Emery was gracious to respond, saying, “Yes, that is my wedding ring! My husband, Craig, and I will celebrate our second wedding anniversary this June and we still feel like honeymooners! We were friends for a few years then dated for six years before tying the knot. He is a wonderful man and I am very happy and blessed!”
Q: Why is Lauren Velez from “Dexter” now going by Luna Lauren Velez in “American Rust: Broken Justice”?
— Justin, Squirrel Hill
Rob: I wondered that very thing so I asked her about it in my “American Rust” season two interviews (you can see the video here).Turns out she’s always gone by Luna among friends, family and co-workers, which makes this name change similar to WPXI-TV’s Lonni Rivera/Yolanda Hawkins.
“I just decided to legalize it,” Velez explained. “I wanted to change it when I was a teenager but I’d done a play and everyone was like, ‘You can’t, you’ll ruin your career!’ so when I finished ‘Dexter,’ I didn’t speak to anyone for a year in showbiz, I took a real hiatus and I didn’t hear ‘Lauren’ even once and I decided, yeah, I think I’d like to just go by Luna.”
Q: My husband and I were looking forward to the second season of “American Rust,” but we stopped watching after the second episode because almost every scene is filmed in the dark, making it impossible to decipher the characters and the settings.
We acknowledge that it is supposed to be a depressing show about downtrodden characters in decaying towns living dark-themed storylines. But why is almost every scene filmed in the dark wherein it is impossible to follow the actors?
— Iris, via email
Rob: I did not have that same experience. I found season one dark – visually and thematically — but season two was brighter and lighter in both senses. I wonder if Iris tried adjusting the brightness, contrast or other settings on her TV set?
Even with a perfectly calibrated set, viewers sometimes complain these days about low levels of light in some prestige TV series, most notably an episode of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.” So I asked the “American Rust” showrunners in an interview last week about how they decided on a lighting tone for the series.
“Radium Cheung, who was our brilliant director of photography and directed two episodes this season, is one of the best in the business,” co-showrunner Adam Rapp said. “In my mind, [the show is] like a ‘daylight noir.’ And I love that about it. And so when we’re in a room to see a profile, silvered and half in silhouette, I think its really artful. I know that there are some scenes that look like ‘The Godfather’ in terms of lighting. And I really love that. I think its a gives a rich texture and a psychological, interesting level of light for our show and a language for our show. I think some people need to turn up the contrast on their TV. But I think its part of what we were committing to, this dark story that does have light in it, that has humor in it.
“But when they’re inside Del’s cabin, for instance, at times its very dark. Its when you’re in a cabin at night and you don’t have a lot of outside light coming in, you’re half in the dark and we wanted to tell the truth of that. I really love in episode one when Del is in his apartment in Pittsburgh and there’s that kind of red light soaking in through the window and he’s in profile. I find that to be incredibly cinematic. And it tells a psychological story. He’s seeing his own reflection in the window. And that’s all very, very carefully calculated by Radium and his crew. And I was very proud of that.”
