The New Year will bring the Triad to national television audiences in two different shows.
Starting on Jan. 10, the History Channel will air Madhouse, a 13-hour series about drivers at Bowman Gray race track. The episodes were taped between April and August of 2009.
Grant Kahler is one of the executive producers of the show. He became a fan of racing while attending Wake Forest University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications in 2001.
"I first went to summer school down here, and I didn't miss a race for three years," he told me in 2008, when he was in the area taping test footage for the series. At the time it was tentatively named Tobacco Road.
Kahler, a producer who had worked on music videos and documentaries, brainstormed with his partners about doing a show about the racing circuit, and went to the stadium for approval to shoot there.
"There's this kind of male soap opera that comes along with these short tracks," Kahler said at the time.
The series was shot with dozens of local residents in crew positions, according to Rebecca Clark, the director of the Piedmont Triad Film Commission.
The Triad will also be featured in an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that was taped in Lexington in November.
In it, hundreds of people came together to help build a new home for the Creasey family.
The episode will be shown on ABC on Jan. 31, according to a network spokesman.
Time Warner Cable will add several new stations to its high-definition digital-cable lineup on Wednesday.
Two of the channels are part of the digital tier: History International HD (channel 598), a spinoff of the History Channel that has a global focus, and RFD HD (channel 599), which focuses on rural America, agriculture, music and entertainment.
For more information on the channel lineups, go to www.historyinternational.com and www.rfdtv.com, respectively.
Showtime subscribers will have two new HD channels, Showtime Showcase HD (471) and Showtime Extreme HD (472), both of which are high-definition versions of existing channels.
Cinemax subscribers will also get high-def versions of two channels, MoreMax HD (460) and ThrillerMax HD (462).
The offbeat Fox comedy-drama-musical Glee has become a hit in its short half-season to date.
The show will return with new episodes in April. But until then fans can catch up on previous episodes with Glee: Season 1, Vol. 1: Road to the Sectionals, a four-DVD boxed set with the first 13 episodes of the show and plenty of extras, including audition footage, behind-the-scenes featurettes and an extended cut of the pilot episode.
Also new on DVD is Spaceballs: The Totally Warped Adventures, with four episodes of a short-lived animated version of the Mel Brooks sci-fi spoof.
Brooks reprises his film role as wise alien Yogurt, with Daphne Zuniga and Joan Rivers also providing voices for the characters that they played in the film.
The series ran on cable channel G4.
tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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