You have questions. I have some answers.

Q: Am I the only viewer who is totally bored by “Survivor”? Are its ratings still good? Each season seems the same -- same location, same challenges, same "twists," etc. It's hard to believe anyone still watches the show.

A: I’m not the best person to judge the current season of “Survivor,” since I hit my boredom threshold with the show years ago and have not watched it since. The ratings remain good enough for CBS to renew the show for the 2026-27 season. (The finale of the current, 50th season is coming on May 20.)

Q: Reading your column about agricultural shows on early morning television, I remembered two other early shows. “Continental Classroom” and “Sunrise Semester” were broadcast first thing in the morning in our small town near Cincinnati in the late '50s. I was in first and second grade then, so I don’t remember the topics, but I do remember the shows.

A: The shows you remember, as their names indicate, were educational shows. According to the book “Total Television,” “Sunrise Semester” offered college-level courses taught by New York University faculty. It began as a local show in New York City in 1957, then aired on the CBS network from 1963 to 1980, including in summers (as “Summer Semester”). Les Brown’s “Encyclopedia of Television” says for-credit courses included “Twentieth Century American Art,” “The Meaning of Death” and “History of African Civilization.” NBC series “Continental Classroom” (1958-64) was a similar program, “Total Television" says, starting with a physics course. Later classes included chemistry and math.

Q: As a 67-year-old, I also remember getting up early Saturday mornings as a child and watching “Modern Farmer.” But the main reason for watching was for what came next: the stop-motion animation show “Davey and Goliath.” Even with its religious overtones, I loved the way Davey interacted with Goliath, his dog. That is one of my fondest memories of my early childhood.

A: Referring again to Les Brown’s book, we find that “Davey and Goliath” was a series of 15-minute episodes “usually dealing with moral questions … (and) produced by the Lutheran Church in America and offered free to stations for public service use” beginning in 1961. Davey was a 10-year-old boy and Goliath his talking dog “whom only Davey can understand.” Made mostly in the ‘60s and ‘70s (with several later specials), some places to find it today include DVD releases, Hoopla, Plex, YouTube and Internet Archive.

Q: I have been noticing that there are some commercials that repeat several times within minutes of each other. The commercial will play, then another commercial plays, then the first commercial plays again. Sometimes the commercial repeats itself immediately after it plays the first time. Is there a reason for this? Are companies purposely purchasing broadcast time so that their commercials are repeated like that? It gets to be quite annoying. When did this practice start to happen on a regular basis?

A: I have seen discussions of this going back more than 20 years, with some observers thinking it is much older than that. While sometimes there are technical issues leading to back-to-back showings of the same ad, it can also be a deliberate marketing tactic designed to make you aware of a product through repetition. One term for that is pummeling — which certainly describes how it made you feel.

———

©2026 Tribune News Service. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.