The Neil Haley Show

Punky Brewster's Soleil Moon Frye and Retired Chief John Matthews

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Soleil Moon Frye, beloved as the star of the 1980s classic Punky Brewster. Frye, an unabashed lover of the era herself, reflected on how deeply the show still moves people decades later, saying Punky was never just a show but a way of life, and that her castmate Cherie felt like a true best friend and the set like family. She pointed viewers to her Hulu documentary Kid 90, a decades-in-the-making project that began...

Author Steven Jay Rubin, Crime Watch Daily's Chris Hansen, Author Tracy Emerick, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Steven Jay Rubin, author of The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia. Rubin, a film historian who spent over three years on the project, said he set out to honor not just Rod Serling but the hundreds of actors and behind-the-scenes people across the show's 156 episodes who might otherwise be lost to history, gathering rare photos and untold stories. He described Serling as a genius who came out...

Black-ish Star Marcus Scribner, Dr. Robert E. Marx on AI, and a Faith Testimony from Owen Wilson

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Marcus Scribner of ABC's Black-ish, a show Neil and his wife catch up on every weekend. Scribner, who has grown up on the series, reflected on auditioning as a naive newcomer who assumed the show would simply run thirty years, only to learn how quickly most pilots come and go, making a run like Black-ish all the more special. He praised the series for telling...

Leeza Gibbons, Walking Miracles' Brett Wilson, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Emmy winner, New York Times bestselling author, and Celebrity Apprentice champion Leeza Gibbons about her passion for seniors and their caregivers. Gibbons said too few people pay attention to an aging population, and that she wants to shine a light on how adult children can honor the senior loved ones who deserve it. She traced her advocacy back to caring for her own mother through Alzheimer's, and described how her mission...

Author Susan Hall, Real Estate Star Ryan Serhant, Author Daniel Fazzina, and a Testimony from Owen Wilson

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a lively cross-continental simulcast, joining Fernando and Sergio Bravo of InfoRadio in Madrid, live from Callao Square during their marathon World Radio Challenge, before turning to author Susan Hall, sister of the late Los Angeles Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss. Calling in from Phoenix, Hall discussed her book, I Laugh in the Face of Cancer, a title Neil and the Spanish hosts loved. She explained that she wrote it because there...

AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, Author J. Len Sciuto, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with an AI Office Hours simulcast, where Neil and co-host Pat Riley traded their weekly love-hate notes on artificial intelligence, the tools that dazzle one minute and frustrate the next. Riley, juggling a packed weekend of work, described the grind of the end of the month and his ongoing struggle to funnel feedback to a ghostwriting team that keeps sending material through scattered channels, some by email, some posted to a shared site...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with horror icon Bill Moseley of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and much more. A lifelong horror fan spooked as a young man by the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Moseley recounted the delightfully unlikely break that made his career: while working on a Wyoming ranch, a coworker's random outburst inspired him to write and film a short spoof called The Texas Chainsaw Manicure, in which he also appeared. He got a copy to director Tobe Hooper, who was so tickled that he cast Moseley...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Celebrity Interviews simulcast live from the grotto, co-hosted by Greg Hanna, welcoming music icon KC of KC and the Sunshine Band. KC reflected on a life steeped in music, growing up in a family where relatives cut radio commercials and gospel records and everyone gathered around the piano to sing and dance. He recalled an almost premonitory certainty that music was his path, and traced his break to a Miami record store that put him near where records were being made, where he crossed paths with...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with Pro Football Hall of Famer Barry Sanders and his advocacy campaign, Tackle PBA. Sanders explained that PBA stands for pseudobulbar affect, a little-known neurological condition that triggers sudden, uncontrollable episodes of laughing or crying that do not match how a person feels, and noted the effort was spurred in part by a Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund survey linking head injuries among former players to PBA-like symptoms. Stressing that the condition is treatable and that the goal is awareness, he encouraged anyone who recognizes the signs to take...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Corbin Bernsen, familiar from L.A. Law and Psych, about his heartwarming family film When We Last Spoke. Bernsen reflected candidly on navigating a strange, uncertain season, restoring his longtime Los Angeles family home and pouring himself into writing, and said that without his faith he might have thrown in the towel. Turning to the movie, based on Marci Henna's novel, he described playing Walt, a grandfather who, alongside his wife Ruby, played by Melissa Gilbert, takes in their two young...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Just Two Choices celebrity segment, co-hosted by Rico Rokowski, welcoming Dan "Rudy" Ruettiger, the real-life inspiration behind the classic sports film Rudy. Ruettiger, who grew up the thirteenth of fourteen children, shared warm, funny memories of a household so full his fiercely organized mother once kept a chain and lock on the refrigerator to keep track of the food, and reflected on the years of setbacks and the sheer determination that carried him against long odds to suit up for Notre Dame and, in the final...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Robert Herjavec of ABC's Shark Tank. Herjavec reflected that none of the Sharks expected a show about five people talking business to become a hit, and were amazed to find it embraced above all as a family show, one that gives viewers hope and inspiration. Even after nine seasons, he said, the creativity of the entrepreneurs who walk in, and the dreams and stories behind their products, never cease to astonish him. He described the experience as a pressure cooker on both...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor John C. McGinley, beloved as Dr. Cox on Scrubs, about the comedy-horror series Stan Against Evil and its second season. McGinley pitched the show, in which he plays a cantankerous small-town sheriff who discovers his New England home sits atop a witch's curse, as essentially Archie Bunker fighting witches, and said he was pleasantly caught off guard when The New York Times named the first season one of its ten best new shows, a stamp of validation for a scrappy genre...

Ghostbusters' Ernie Hudson, Author Paul Shemella, and Retired Captain and Author Donna Roman Hernandez

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Ernie Hudson, beloved as Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters. Hudson recounted that the role was anything but a given, since director Ivan Reitman, with whom he had worked the year before on Spacehunter, initially felt he was wrong for the film and would not even see him. It took months to land an audition, which he eventually won. Hudson said he always believed Ghostbusters would be a hit, given...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Terry Crews, host of America's Got Talent, ahead of the show's nineteenth season. Crews, an unabashed fitness devotee, joked with fellow big guy Neil about staying in top shape and called working in entertainment a total privilege. He explained that he landed the hosting job almost by design, telling his agent to push the envelope and make him a guinea pig by putting him where audiences would never expect to see a former athlete his size. That willingness led first to hosting...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with Golden Globe-winning actress Meg Tilly about the Netflix film War Machine. Tilly first reflected on growing up in a big blended family of twelve, where her sister Jennifer Tilly broadened everyone's horizons, writing plays for the kids to act out and dreaming grandly enough to show them there was a whole world for the taking. A dancer who had performed on the series Fame, Meg fractured her back and could no longer dance, and, with dyslexia making the era's fallback jobs impractical, realized acting...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Celebrity Interviews simulcast live from the grotto, co-hosted by Greg Hanna, welcoming actor and singer Judy Norton, who played Mary Ellen on the beloved series The Waltons. Norton reflected on a childhood that turned play-acting into a career, crediting creator Earl Hamner and a cast and crew stocked with golden-age Hollywood veterans for a show that has stayed relevant more than fifty years later, even though CBS initially expected it to fail. She recalled how the network, under pressure to add family programming, greenlit The Waltons...

William McNamara (UFO), AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram. Same three segments, same note:

The Neil Haley TV Show 08-9-26: Actor William McNamara on The Mike Vilardi Show, AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, and GildaGram with Dr. Gilda Carle

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Mike Vilardi Show simulcast, hosted by Mike Vilardi, welcoming veteran actor William McNamara. Known for Copycat, Chasers, Surviving the Game, and Stealing Home across a 35-year career, McNamara returned to talk about his self-made series The Trouble With Billy, ten episodes he...

Scott Valentine, True Crime Author Matthew B. Cox, and Jesus and Ugly Jody with Jody Corbett

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Love Is podcast simulcast, co-hosted by Kim Sorrelle, welcoming actor Scott Valentine, remembered as Nick Moore on Family Ties. Valentine spoke about resilience, recounting how being run over by a truck left him paralyzed and told he would never walk again, and how he refused to accept that verdict. He framed setbacks as manure to clean off before climbing back on the horse, insisting that when someone treats you like dirt...

Snack Shack's Mika Abdalla, Mortgage Expert Phil Gantz, and Retired Trooper and Author Carlos Rodriguez

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with actor Mika Abdalla about her role in the coming-of-age film Snack Shack, streaming on Paramount. Abdalla, whose breakout came on the Netflix series Project MC2 after an early start in commercials and an American Girl movie, described Snack Shack, directed by Adam Rehmeier and loosely based on his own childhood, as a warm throwback to the coming-of-age movies of the 1980s and 1990s. Centered on two young...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with New York Times bestselling crime novelist Don Winslow, joined by co-host Lefty, about his 26th book, City in Ruins. Winslow traced his lifelong pull toward writing to a book-loving home, a career-Navy father and a librarian mother, and a sister who is herself a novelist many times over. He spoke about the strange intimacy of spending more time with people who do not exist than those who do, the thrill and feedback of meeting readers on tour, and his gratitude that everything he owns he owes to...

Snack Shack's Mika Abdalla, Author Robert Wolf on The Mike Vilardi Show, and Former Congressman Jason Altmire

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a conversation with actor Mika Abdalla about her role in the coming-of-age film Snack Shack, streaming on Paramount. Abdalla traced a career that began almost by accident, with an open casting call for a parenting magazine at her dentist's office when she was five or six, an only child whose mother wanted to draw her out of her shyness. That led to commercials, an American Girl movie at eleven, and her...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Love Is podcast simulcast, co-hosted by Kim Sorrelle, welcoming actor Scott Valentine, remembered as Nick Moore on Family Ties. Valentine spoke candidly about resilience, recounting how being run over by a truck left him paralyzed and told he would never walk again, and how he refused to accept that verdict. He framed life's setbacks as manure you clean off before climbing back on the horse, insisting that when someone treats you like dirt it defines them, not you. He credited his good fortune on Family Ties...

Billy Baldwin of Hit the Floor, Dr. Pam Mullarkey Robbins, The Walking Dead's David Morrissey, and Xzibit

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Billy Baldwin about his guest-starring turn on VH1's Hit the Floor. Baldwin, reflecting on the rowdy, rambunctious upbringing that shaped the famous Baldwin brothers, described the series as a scripted soap opera set inside a professional basketball franchise, the fictional Los Angeles Devils, full of behind-the-scenes drama among players, wives, cheerleaders, and a front office locked in a power struggle. He plays Everett, a...

Grammy Winner Jermaine Dupri, Actor Chris Mulkey, and Entrepreneur Robin Sims-Allen

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Grammy-winning producer Jermaine Dupri about Lifetime's The Rap Game, returning for a third season with Queen Latifah. Dupri, the So So Def founder behind decades of hits and discoveries from Kris Kross to Bow Wow and Da Brat, explained that finding talent comes down to genuine interest and really listening, and that the rare misses happen only when an artist is not as gifted as they believe. He described The Rap Game...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actress Kim Fields, beloved for The Facts of Life and Living Single, about her book and career. Fields, a Steelers fan who competed on Dancing with the Stars alongside Antonio Brown, reflected on nine years, from age nine to eighteen, growing up on The Facts of Life, and on the mentors who shaped her, from co-star Nancy McKeon to Norman Lear, Dick Clark, and Ruby Dee. She credited her longevity to learning her craft, doing theater, and deliberately building backup skills in...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Caregiver Dave segment, co-hosted by caregiver advocate Dave Nassaney, welcoming astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, about his book Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going. Tyson explained that his lifelong goal was simply the PhD in astrophysics, and that he sees his public role as serving the public's cosmic curiosity, even fantasizing about slipping quietly back to the lab someday. He argued that a free, pluralistic democracy depends on shared, objectively established scientific...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with economist, author, and actor Ben Stein about his book The Capitalist Code: It Can Save Your Life and Make You Very Rich. Stein traced his belief in owning capital back to his father, a prominent free-market economist, and to a family shaped by the Great Depression, arguing that owning capital, not just labor, is what gives ordinary people security. His central message was refreshingly simple: most people will never beat the market by picking stocks, so the smart move is to steadily...

The Mike Vilardi Show Episode Title: William McNamara on “The Trouble with Billy,” Hollywood Survival, and Independent TelevisionEpisode Summary

In this episode of The Mike Vilardi Show, Mike Vilardi and Neil “The Media Giant” Haley welcome actor, writer, director, and producer William “Billy” McNamara. Known for Copycat, Chasers, Stealing Home, Dream a Little Dream, and Surviving the Game, McNamara shares the journey behind his independent series, The Trouble with Billy.

Billy wrote, directed, produced, and starred in ten episodes—roughly 300 minutes of television—while navigating limited resources, legal complications, union disputes, and a changing streaming industry. Season...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with actor Philip Winchester about bringing his Chicago Justice character, prosecutor Peter Stone, over to Law & Order: SVU. Winchester explained that Dick Wolf revived the character after Justice ended, dropping Stone into New York around a right-to-die case and the death of his father, and pulling him in through Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy. Where Justice kept Stone in the courtroom, SVU digs into the man himself, his brokenness, family secrets, and the pressure of joining a team that does not want him there. Winchester described Stone...

NeverEnding Story's Tami Stronach, plus Mina Valentine, AI Office Hours with Pat Riley, Grace Lynx Jenkins, and Ryan Aguas of Reignstorm Group

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with actress and dancer Tami Stronach, who at ten played the Childlike Empress in Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 classic The NeverEnding Story and has since come full circle to family entertainment. Stronach walked Neil through an audition process that ran from San Francisco to Los Angeles to a final nerve-wracking callback at Bavaria Studios in Germany, where she learned she had the role the next day. She recalled reading...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Celebrity Interviews simulcast from the Grotto, co-hosted by Greg Hanna, welcoming actor, author, and martial artist Ron Thomas, who played Bobby Brown in The Karate Kid and returned to the role in Cobra Kai. Thomas shared the story he loves to tell, that he was already a second-degree black belt when he auditioned and was told to keep quiet about it because producers wanted actors first, and that stunt coordinator Pat Johnson later trusted him to choreograph his own tournament fight scenes. He described Bobby as the good bad...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity conversation with Today Show weatherman Al Roker, who walked Neil through the pre-dawn routine behind live morning television. He is up around 3:45, on the phone with his meteorologist comparing models, maps, and notes before heading to the studio by about 5:45 for the two-hour broadcast, and he admitted he never quite manages to get to bed on time. Roker turned to his Hallmark Movies and Mysteries film, The Morning Show Mystery: Murder on the Menu, part of a series drawn from his own mystery novels, in which his...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Total Celebrity Show conversation with Pro Football Hall of Famer and Miami Dolphins legend Dan Marino, joining live from a Microsoft Store grand opening in Boca Raton, Florida. Marino took Neil back to his hometown roots in Pittsburgh, where he grew up in Oakland blocks from the University of Pittsburgh, attended Central Catholic, and felt he had no other choice but to play for Pitt. He relived the Sugar Bowl against Herschel Walker's Georgia, recalling the fourth-down touchdown he threw to his friend "Downtown" John Brown...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a Celebrity Interviews simulcast from the grotto and actor Nathan Gamble, whose new faith-based comedy Bad Counselors reaches theaters this week. Gamble described a career that ran the classic actor's arc in reverse. His second-ever audition landed him the role of Brad Pitt's son in Babel, a Best Picture nominee, at just seven years old, and steady work followed in The Mist, Marley & Me, The Dark Knight, and both Dolphin Tale films. He explained to Neil, himself a former professional wrestler, how completely his identity fused with...

Hour two of The Neil Haley Show opens with Todd R. Mitchell Jr., author of Never Gave Up (Reclaimed My Life), joined by his fiancee Tanya Weiner. Todd grew up moving constantly as a military family child, uprooted from the north to the south, and chased belonging in ways that pulled him toward trouble and, eventually, alcoholism. He was an exceptional athlete who earned a full college scholarship without ever playing a single high school basketball game, spotted dunking in a pickup game. He played at Piedmont College in Georgia and was headed to the University...

This edition of The Neil Haley Show opens with a special simulcast of Criminally Good with Sherrie and Jen, the Storehouse Media Group podcast, welcoming Matthew Cox, the former licensed mortgage broker turned nationally recognized expert on white collar crime. Cox built his criminal career around synthetic identities and the fraudulent acquisition of credit cards, personal loans and mortgages, landed on the Secret Service Most Wanted list, and served 13 years in federal prison. Today he hosts Inside True Crime, interviewing law enforcement, journalists and former criminals. Cox opened up about the writing career he started behind...

Neil opened the Total Celebrity segment with a re-aired call from Australia (9:30 PM local time) with Jurassic Park's Sam Neill on the New Zealand feature Hunt for the Wilderpeople from Boy and What We Do in the Shadows director Taika Waititi, then in select theaters. Sam played Hec, the grumpy old geezer paired against Julian Dennison's Ricky, a hip-hop-raised Māori foster kid who lands with Sam's isolated New Zealand couple as his last resort before tragedy strikes and the two end up on the run in the bush. Sam described the film as unsellable to g...

Neil opened and later re-aired the Total Celebrity call with Ghostbusters and Grace and Frankie star Ernie Hudson. Ernie traced how he landed the Winston Zeddemore role (Ivan Reitman had initially cast him out after their earlier film Spacehunter, so it took months to force an audition), his relationship with a fandom he never expected to stay this loyal 30-plus years later, and the arc of The Haunting Of on Lifetime (Saturday September 10 at 11 AM), where a medium reframed the unexplainable overnight he and his family had spent in a haunted Greer, Arizona hotel years earlier...

Neil opened with a re-aired Total Celebrity Show call with six-time Pro Bowl wide receiver and NFL 2000s All-Decade selection Terrell Owens about his run on NBC's Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump. T.O. shared how he was a last-minute addition (added two weeks out, while other cast had known for six to nine months) and tried to absorb the show by watching DVDs friends loaned him, his analysis of Kevin Jonas's mistake of trying to play a game within a game on Trump rather than focusing on the project, and the parallels he drew between...