Every wonder what’s it’s like to be the opening act for some big superstar? After all, fans paid those skyscraper prices to see the star, not some unknown goon with a guitar.

That query will be answered when Keith Urban, Blake Shelton and Gretchen Wilson host a brand-new musical competition show called “The Road.” The series, premiering on CBS Sunday, Oct. 19, will feature 12 opening act competitors who must ride that bumpy road on a real tour bus to possible fame and fortune. All hopefuls will serve as openers for the legendary Urban.

The three country veterans (and several guest stars) will guide the competitors, and, along with a live venue audience, will determine who advances to the next city. In the end, only one will walk away with the grand prize.

Shelton, who served for 23 seasons as a coach on “The Voice,” says he first got the idea for the contest from his friend, Lee Metzger. “He said, ‘What do you think if we did a singing competition show where artists got to open for a superstar, and you get to film them out on the road, and they're competing by opening?’ And my first thing I said was, ‘There's no freaking way any superstar will ever allow that. That'll never happen.’”

But it did happen when fan favorite Urban agreed to head the spirited journey. “I really don't know who else could have done something like this,” say Shelton, “because he's got the experience with television, he's got the experience, the old-school experience with touring and playing the bars and the honky-tonks out there, and just coming up the old-school way.”

All three of the country stars on “The Road” came up “the old-school way.”

Urban remembers when he was one of those hopeful openers. “When I got to Nashville, after several years of just grinding and grinding it out, Kix Brooks was really the first artist that came and saw me play at this crappy place called Jack's Guitar Bar, with shag carpeting — probably should have been demolished many years before we were playing there,” he recalls.

“And he sat on the sticky shag carpet and watched our band play. And next thing I know, he was taking us out, opening for Brooks & Dunne, and we didn't have a record deal, we didn't have anything. He was one of the first guys that put his money where his mouth was and got us out there on the road.”

Gretchen Wilson, who serves as tour manager for “The Road,” says she’s still an opening act. “I don't mind to say so. It's all of those experiences that made the three of us, I think, so compassionate when it came to dealing with these contestants and these musicians. It wasn't like they were dealing with somebody who hasn't been there, and who hasn't walked every bit of every inch of every mile in their shoes.

“And so, while we were tough, and we were like, ‘This is how it is ... you gotta lace up them boots and just get out there and make do with what you got.’ It was coming from a place of love and experience and knowing that, sometimes, it just doesn't go the way you want it to go, but you still have to get out there and perform.”

Shelton recalls his “opener” days. “The first artist that I actually got an opening gig on a tour was a band called Lonestar. And I was opening for an artist named Jamie O'Neal, who was opening for Lonestar.

“At the time, I'd had one single, and it was just coming out on the charts. And I was given 20 minutes to perform in front of Jamie O'Neal. This sounds ridiculous, but I want to say (it was a) 3-foot stage. There was really no room. We were set up in a line. You'd normally set the drummer behind you, but it was drummer, bass player, guitar, me. It was so terrible!

“But we were just glad to have the opportunity. And there was a lot of nights where someone would come and say, ‘Hey, it’s set up, and it took longer than we thought. You have 10 minutes tonight.’ And we never got a sound check, that was just unheard of,” he says.

“We didn't care, that was the excitement of the whole, experience. Lonestar was the very first artist, and then Toby Keith had me, and then I became a household name and never had to open for anybody ever again.”

Wilson says country luminary Charlie Daniels became her mentor. “As soon as I moved to town, he just kind of welcomed me like I was a part of the family, and anytime I had any sort of an issue … I mean, he wasn't the only one, obviously. I've been very fortunate, and I've had a lot of people just be really awesome to me and wonderful to me in the past — 20-plus years that I've been in this industry. But Charlie was somebody I could call on no matter what.”

Actor walks on the wild side

Actor Jason Clarke found himself in the wilds of Alaska for his role in “The Last Frontier,” streaming now on Apple TV+. Clarke plays a U.S. Marshal whose jurisdiction is tangled when a plane crashes in the wilderness releasing a gaggle of criminals.

“The mountains are extraordinary,” he says, “and to shoot there and to be part of it and to see that is ... these remote places of beauty that you go to live that life, to get back to yourself, to find the beauty of the world, to find your place within it. You find a lot of the similarities,” he says.

“Australia's a very open, big, huge country. It doesn't have mountains like that, but it's got the solitude, it's got the wildness, it's got the danger as well in those big open places. Strong communities are forged because they have to be. And I think there's a great longing even for any of us in life, as we all go on our journey from trying to be actors, I guess, to then wanting to have a good, strong community wherever we are. And then move back home at some point...”

Seymour hires former co-star

Jane Seymour has enlisted her old pal and former co-star, Joe Lando, in her popular Acorn TV series “Harry Wild.” Fans may remember that Lando and Seymour co-starred on the popular “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” for five years, totaling a whopping 150 episodes. Efforts to bring it back have continued, but so far, no dice.

“Harry Wild,” on the other hand, features Seymour as Harry, a retired literature professor, who is back to her old tricks, solving murder mysteries. Lando will play the handsome state pathologist who helps the amateur sleuth in her "inquiries."

Seymour tells me that after a disastrous divorce she discovered she was penniless. It was the good Dr. Quinn who saved her. “’Dr. Quinn’ is how I financially recovered,” she says.“I literally called my agent and said, ‘I need to work yesterday.’ He said, ‘OK, that’s interesting.’

“So he said, ‘Anything?’ I said, ‘Anything!’ So he called all the networks and said, ‘Jane will do anything, but she’s got to do it NOW.’ And CBS said, ‘We’ve got this movie called “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” and we don’t think it’ll make it as a series but in case it does, we need her to sign for five years. She has to start tomorrow morning at 5 a.m.’

“That was it. I signed for a five-year deal with the understanding that it was never going to happen because it was a little movie they didn’t believe in anyway. I thought it was a beautiful script and loved the character and did 180 hours of ‘Dr. Quinn.’”

Jane Goodall's primate lesson

So sad to hear about the passing of primatologist Jane Goodall. When I last interviewed her, I asked her what she’d learned from her years observing chimpanzees. She said “The most valuable thing I learned from the chimps: they’re helping us to understand that we’re not so different; we’re not as different as we used to think. We’re not the only beings with personalities, minds and feelings — above all feelings. We’ve blurred the line that science has always tried to make so sharp between us and them. And, of course, drawing a sharp line between us and them is the same thing that happens with civil war — the in-group, the out-group. It doesn’t matter what we do to the out-group. We shut them up, do experimentation, we can slaughter them in unspeakable ways, we can fasten them in intensive cages, it doesn’t matter because we’re different. Just like we can go kill ‘those people’ because they’re different from us.”

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