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Mt. Lebanon native Gillian Jacobs is best known for her acting roles — on NBC’s “Community,” in last summer’s Netflix horror series “Fear Street” — but she’s steadily building a reputation as a documentary filmmaker with her latest endeavor, the robotics competition doc “More than Robots,” premiering Friday on Disney+.

This isn’t her first documentary related to STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics — but it is her first feature-length doc, clocking in at just under 90 minutes.

“[STEM] is not an interest I’ve always had. It’s definitely one that I feel like has been cultivated in my adult life,” Jacobs said in a Zoom interview Monday from Marseilles, France, where she’s filming the 2023 Netflix series “Transatlantic.” “When I made the short documentary about [early computer programmer] Grace Hopper, I had such a great time working on that. And after I finished that people would tell me, ‘Oh, do you know about this person?’ It really gave me this impetus to keep going, because people kept telling me about all these other amazing stories of people in STEM.”

In “More than Robots,” Jacobs chronicles the 2019-20 FIRST Robotics Competition, following teams of teens and their mentors as they build robots for the annual event, sponsored that year by Disney’s Lucasfilm.

“Gillian is one who puts in the time and the effort and she does her homework,” said producer Jason Sterman, who previously worked with Jacobs when she helmed an episode of Disney+’s “Marvel 616.” “Gillian starts researching the teams herself, getting an understanding of where she wanted to go shoot.”

She traveled to Mexico City and Japan for filming teams, and then directed remotely once covid hit.

FIRST Robotics founder Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, said he’s happy Disney+ will share FIRST competitions with a wider global audience to help draw more youth into the competition that includes teams like Girls of Steel Robotics, an all-girls 9th-12th grade team that’s an after-school outreach effort at Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics. They’re not in the movie, but Kamen called the team “iconic” within the FIRST competition community.

Jacobs, who can currently be seen in HBO’s “Winning Time,” said the biggest challenge of “More Than Robots” was that, unlike her previous films, all based on past events, she didn’t know what would happen with the teams she was following.

That unknown led to the unthinkable when just a few months into filming, expectations got upended as the pandemic hit and competitions were canceled worldwide. Many long phone calls followed as the production team tried to figure out how to proceed.

“We started to see that so many students and teams were finding a way to try and help in that moment and so that sort of guided us,” Jacobs said. “It was such a clear example that they were listening when the adults were talking about all these principles of ‘gracious professionalism’ and ‘cooperation’ and ‘your community’ and they had really internalized that and you were seeing it in practice. These kids inspired me in a whole new way and that is what the ending of the film became.”

‘Idol’ singer from Fombell

In her second year auditioning for ABC’s “American Idol,” Morgan Gruber of Franklin Township, Beaver County, made it beyond online auditions for the show’s executive producers, which is where she stopped her first time around.

Last fall, producers contacted her and suggested she try again. This time the 17-year-old Riverside High School senior from Fombell made it to the on-air auditions, flying to Austin, Texas, in October to tape her try-out that will air Sunday at 8 p.m. on WTAE-TV.

“It’s definitely surreal seeing them,” Gruber said of meeting “Idol” judges Luke Bryan, Katy Perry and Lionel Richie. “They’re sitting there stone-faced, at least Katy was, and you’re doing all the talking. I just kept rambling on because I didn’t know what to do.”

Gruber said she sang “Can’t Be Loved” by Elle King because it “showed a lot of my range.” Her preferred genres are pop and country-pop. She’s performed as part of the New Castle Playhouse Mini-Stars and hopes to sing at the nursing home she works at as a server.

Gruber’s been singing since she could talk, but said it was Riverside Middle School teacher Vaughn Hudspath who “saw real potential in me and recommended me to a voice coach.”

Gruber said she was excited to meet Luke Bryan because they share common interests (“I live on a lot of land, so I hunt and fish,” she said) and she was interested to see how Katy Perry was dressed. For her own wardrobe, Gruber went to the Free People store at Ross Park Mall 10 minutes before closing.

“We ran in there, grabbed an outfit, tried it on, I liked it and we left,” she recalled.

After high school, Gruber wants to move to Nashville and pursue a music career there.

Bravo parody makes local stop

The Bravo brand tag “Watch What Happens” spawned a podcast, “Watch What Crappens,” which is now on a live national tour that stops in Pittsburgh this weekend.

Hosts Ben Mandelker and Ronnie Karam, who poke fun at the “Real Housewives of…” shows and “Vanderpump Rules,” will be at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks Saturday at 6:30 p.m. with tickets starting at $33. Details and tickets at Ticketmaster.com.

ABC renewed first-year hit “Abbott Elementary” for a second season.

Netflix canceled “The Baby-Sitter’s Club” after two seasons.

NBC’s “New Amsterdam,” currently in its fourth season, will end with a 13-episode fifth season in the 2022-23 TV season.

When the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery Communications completes and following a period of bundling HBO Max and discovery+, the two services will be merged into a single streaming service product. … Disney+ will release sing-along versions (with on-screen lyrics) of Disney musicals with “Encanto” beginning Friday. Later “Frozen,” “Frozen 2,” “Beauty and the Beast (1991)” and the live-action “Beauty and the Beast (2017) will get the same treatment. … Paul Wesley (“The Vampire Diaries”) will play James T. Kirk in the second season of Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”

You can reach TV writer Rob Owen at rowen@triblive.com or 412-380-8559. Follow Rob on Twitter or Facebook. Ask TV questions by email or phone. Please include your first name and location.

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