James H. Rosenfield Sr., the longtime media executive and former executive vice president of CBS Broadcast Group, died on September 26. He was 97.

Rosenfield rose from an account executive in television network sales to President of the CBS Television Network and ultimately Executive Vice President of the CBS Broadcast Group, with responsibility for the network’s key operating divisions, including CBS Television Network, CBS News, CBS Entertainment and CBS Sports.

Early in Rosenfield’s career, William S. Paley gave him responsibility for the network’s sales relationship with Grey Advertising, an assignment that helped propel his rise through CBS.

Of his time as EVP, Rosenfield said, “One of the things that I understood in this business was that there are two [types of] people who exist side by side: creative people and suits. And I was a suit.”

It was that understanding, he said, that allowed him to work with the creatives at CBS, including the man who led CBS Entertainment through most of the 1980s, Bud Grant.

“The creative department wasn’t thrilled that they were reporting to this suit from New York,” recalled Rosenfield. “And I said to [then President of CBS Entertainment] Bud Grant, who I had known for many years, ‘I am not going to interfere with your decision-making process in creating the schedule…You are the creative guy and I am the suit.’”

The result was hit shows like Murder She Wrote and Newhart.

Rosenfield retired from CBS in 1985.

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He went on to become president at JHR associates, where he consulted with traditional and new media companies, including broadcasting, cable, interactive, internet and games.

He also served as president of the International Radio & Television Society (IRTS), chairman and board member of the Advertising Council, and on the boards of Internews International and Salon Media, among others. He was also a lifetime fellow of the International Council of the Television Academy.

Rosenfield is survived by his partner, Charlotte Rosenblatt; his daughter, Laurie Rosenfield, and son-in-law, Peter Falk; his son, Jim Rosenfield Jr., and his wife, Dana Conroy; his grandchildren, Jamie, Kitt, Kristen, Kerrin and Kendall; his five great-grandchildren; his sister-in-law, Clare Rosenfield and his nieces and nephews. He was pre-deceased by his wife of 57 years, Nancy Stenbuck Rosenfield and his brother, Dr. Allan Rosenfield.

A funeral Service will be held at 11am on Wednesday, September 30th at Riverside Memorial Chapel, 180 W 76th St. NY NY. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Rosenfield’s memory to The Reisenbach Philanthropies.

Prime Video is picking up the pace on its Reacher renewals, handing its flagship drama starring Alan Ritchson a Season 6 pickup just 12 days after the Season 4 finale and four months after the early Season 5 order — the first time the show has received two renewals in the same year.

The expediency helps the series, developed by Nick Santora based on Lee Child’s books, to stay on an yearly cadence. Season 5, which already had been largely written at the time of the May green light, started production in late July in Toronto, ahead of Season 4’s Aug. 12 premiere. It is based on “Make Me,” the 20th book in Child’s series. It has not been determined yet which novel will serve as source material for Season 6. (Ritchson, who also is an executive producer on Reacher, recently revealed on social media that “Die Trying” is his favorite book in the franchise, and that “I had it approved until someone got re-elected”)

The renewal comes as Season 4 of Reacher has amassed 66 million viewers globally in its first 28 days on Prime Video, per Amazon, defying the recent downward streaming viewership trend by surpassing the Season 3 performance.

Seasons 2, 4 and 3 of Reacher (in that order) rank as the top 3 most-viewed returning seasons of all time on Prime Video, with Seasons 2 an 4 among the top 5 most-viewed seasons of any original series in the platform’s history alongside the first seasons of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Fallout.

Per Amazon, more than half (58%) of Reacher’s Season 4 audience is based internationally, with outsized performance in the U.K., Germany, and Brazil.

The season has been big in the U.S. too; it just logged its fifth consecutive billion-minute weekly viewership tally on Nielsen’s weekly streaming rankings with 1.18 billion minutes, finishing No. 1 in four of the five weeks.

“Reacher hits hard,” Peter Friedlander, Head of Global Television, Amazon MGM Studios, said. “What Lee Child has built and Nick Santora and his creative teams have brought to life is, simply, incredible. Alan Ritchson is Jack Reacher — he’s delivered a performance that has captivated audiences around the world. Together with our partners at Paramount Television Studios, we couldn’t be more excited to continue this journey. Reacher is a truly iconic series, and we’re thrilled to be on the ride with this extraordinary cast and crew for Season Six.”

Produced by Paramount Television Studios and Amazon MGM Studios, Reacher is written by Santora, who executive produces and serves as showrunner. In addition to Santora, Child and Ritchson, the list of executive producers include Don Granger, Scott Sullivan, Mick Betancourt, Lisa Kussner, Sam Hill, Amy Pocha & Seth Cohen.

In Season 4, based on Lee Child’s “Gone Tomorrow,” a chance encounter with a distraught stranger on a subway goes horribly wrong, drawing Jack Reacher (Ritchson) into a complex and deadly game that pits him against ruthless foes from the highest echelons of power. The season’s cast includes Chris Marquette, Sydelle Noel, Agnez Mo, Anggun, Kevin Weisman, Marc Blucas, Kevin Corrigan, and Kathleen Robertson.

Iconoclastic Mexican director Carlos Reygadas continues to test the boundaries of cinema, and the patience of many a viewer, in his latest audaciously executed head trip, Heil Jupiter!

Making its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, this highly experimental and exhausting experience hops across several continents, time periods and languages — including an invented one used for many dialogue scenes — as it follows four friends whose lives go from heavenly to hellish over the course of 158 minutes. Who these people are and what they’ve even doing seem to matter less to Reygadas than plunging us into visceral scenes of sex, authoritarian violence and head-scratching surrealism taking place amid lots of breathtaking backdrops shot across the globe. There are definitely some unforgettable images in Heil Jupiter!, but good luck trying to make heads or tails of them.

The Mexican auteur started off in the early aughts with a trio of strikingly directed arthouse flicks (Japón, Battle in Heaven, Silent Light) combining a form of minimalist realism with something more animalistic and otherworldly, as if the work of Robert Bresson had been rejiggered by Terence Malick. For his fourth feature, Post Tenebras Lux, Reygadas took a major detour toward the avant-garde and the personal, in a move that garnered him some detractors while pleasing his more hardcore fans. He went even further with 2018’s Nuestro tiempo, which felt much more self-indulgent than exploratory.

In terms of pure brazenness , Heil Jupiter! marks another leap forward for the director, who has crafted a movie that showcases his trademark visual inventiveness during nearly three hours of head-scratching nonsense. This could again please Reygadas’ diehard followers, while others will be left baffled by a film that seems to be making things up as it goes along. At best, this boldly immersive effort will find a home at other festivals and in one-off screenings, whereas general indie distribution seems unlikely.

The movie kicks off with a bunch of abstract colors and shapes flashing on screen for a while, as if we were watching an animated Rothko painting or being brainwashed à la The Parallax View. Reygadas then hurls us into the sea during a long shot of waves hitting the camera, until he finally cuts away to reveal a band of amigos — Lina (Neli de la Rosa), Milu (Alexis Sánchez Alonso), Tzina (Flor de León) and Said (Alexis Said Villa de León) — embarking on a fun-filled and rather graphic foursome by the seashore. The lengthy opening sequence ends with the camera literally descending into one of the guy’s butts and then up into his bowels, which could be read as a metaphor for this entire project.

Shot by a handful of cameramen, with Daniel Valdés Serrano receiving top credit, Heil Jupiter! shares a similar look to Reygadas’ recent features, using a box-like 1.33:1 frame and short focal lengths to give everything an experiential, you-are-there quality. Sometimes the images are blurred along the edges, while other shots seem to have been manipulated using CGI. The soundtrack is filled with layered mixing punctuated by the occasional burst of operatic or choral music (the score is credited to ten people, including Reygadas).

It’s worth emphasizing the film’s imagery because it’s otherwise hard to discern anything resembling a plot. After the opening orgy, we cut to fighter jets flying over snow-capped peaks in search of a “Mysterious Earth Sound.” Then we’re inside a cave lighted by campfire, where we see Lina and Tzina giving each other manual pleasure while other semi-naked folks dance around them. Then we’re in Poland, where the bodycam of a local cop reveals a raid on an immigrant family that includes Tzina, who now has several children. Later, she’s brought in a police car to a nearby pond, strapped to an excavator and dunked into the water as a crowd of anti-immigrant protestors cheer on the public execution.

The other characters don’t fare much better in a film that takes us from the ecstasy of sexual freedom to scenes of torture, humiliation and degradation, including one long sequence set in a meat factory specializing in human body parts. Much of the closing reel of Heil Jupiter! focuses on a trial during which Lina is accused of witchcraft by the Mexican authorities, in extended dialogue scenes shot like they’re on Court TV. Excuse me, but what hell is going on here? (Emphasis on hell, which describes the general mood during much of the film, even if the ending offers up a semi-surreal form of hope.)

In the press notes, Reygadas claims he was “seeking out images and sounds, all undefined, without structure but clearly trembling together.” That’s probably a good summary of what he’s accomplished here, because one would be hard pressed to make sense of this unrestrained mess of a movie. That doesn’t mean Heil Jupiter! lacks a certain power, especially during some of its more visually absorbing moments, but taken as a whole — and a long one at that — it leaves you feeling submerged, indundated and tiredly washed ashore, just like in its neverending opening shot.