Only a year on the air and Chicago’s “Upscale TV” is already enjoying the luxuries of its success—it just won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award for Best Direction on Sunday. As executive producer Laura Grochocki says, the show is “in search of the good life” and has recently been picked up by the local Fox affiliate. It covers “restaurants, nightclubs, retail stores [and] celebrity interviews,” Grochocki says, who cites one of her favorite episodes as one in which host Bill Kelly interviews Steven Spielberg, and then gives his own Oscar acceptance speech. “Bill does what you don’t expect him to do. He won’t hold back.” The show debuts on Fox December 9 and is bumping Jerry Springer from his Saturday night timeslot. Fox saw that “we were worth investing in and wanted to take us to the next level,” Grochocki says. So what does this mean for the future of the show? “We have to make a concerted effort to make it more imaginative. Nothing is scripted. We don’t want our audience to be spectators. We want to make the TV experience interactive.”
Streets of Chicago
Over the years, Chicago Tribune writer Rick Kogan has left his news-printed fingerprints all over Chicago, reporting on the mundane and miraculous in his “Sidewalks” column. Now, along with photographer Charles Osgood, Kogan puts his stories and Osgood’s photos into book form, releasing their tome, “Sidewalks: Portraits of Chicago.” Kogan began writing his column three years after becoming an editor to remind himself of the reporter’s life. Years later, this dedication to the art of journalism shaped the writing of “Sidewalks.” “It is the work of working journalists whose job it is, and has been, to cover the city,” Kogan says. Part of the reason why Kogan believes that “Sidewalks” is such a singular book is his partnership with Charles Osgood, which he compares to “scotch and soda; the combination of the photos and words are kind of intoxicating. We have a desire to tell stories about the so-called ‘ordinary people,’ the people we take for granted.” If his favorite place in the city—the middle of the Michigan Avenue Bridge—is any indication, Kogan will never tire of Chicago’s stories. Here, Kogan says, “you can touch the past, see the present and dream about the future.”
