Carrie Underwood’s Performance at the CMA Awards: Top 25 Programs of 2017 -- No. 19

It’s been a year of unrelenting loss, mounting distress and escalating anxiety, with daily messaging from our president causing upset for millions, natural disasters taking so many lives and destroying so much property, random acts of terrorism at so many different locations around the world and more mass murders here at home than ever before in our violent history.  All of this was covered in deep detail by the cable news networks and the broadcast networks’ news divisions, and the cumulative effect was so overwhelming that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that the thousands of people who died here, there and everywhere were people whose lives mattered.  For that reason I felt there was no more touching a moment on television this year than the end of the In Memoriam segment during ABC’s telecast of the 51st Annual Country Music Association Awards, featuring a lovely performance of the Christian hymn "Softly and Tenderly" by Carrie Underwood.