Setting the Record (or the Video Tape) Straight

The only picture I could find with a TV in it.

Dearest children, students, friends, relatives, and anyone else who tolerates this blog:

I am not anti-TV. If I were, I'd be the world's worst hypocrite. I feel that I've left some of you with the impression that I'm against practically all TV programming. Well, I am against a lot of it. Whole categories of television programming these days leave me sort of cold and utterly unimpressed.

But there are some pretty decent and well-written things on the tube these days, as well. It's not up to you to follow my TV schedule nor is it up to me to influence yours. But, the First Amendment still being in place (for the moment,) allow me to talk about what I like and don't like on the tube.

REALITY TV: So called. It began with sticking a bunch of people on an island and exposing them to various "hardships" and "dangers." If there were really any danger, they'd be catching a ride out of there with the directors and the camera crew. And where's the reality in a group of
"stranded" folks just happening to be between the ages of 20 and 34 and generally fairly attractive. Why aren't us normal looking folks even represented on these shows? A couple of years ago I walked into the room and some family members were watching a lot of professional models (some of them male!) who were all sharing the same apartment! Oh, sure! THAT's gonna happen. And they teased each other and cried and ganged up on each other and encouraged each other, and occasionally tossed someone out on the street just because the rest of them didn't like that person! What's REAL about that? If he or she has a lease and the landlord doesn't want him/her out, guess what? They're stayin'!

Sheryl has been a fan for a couple of years of Dancing With the Stars. She started out just trying to support Marie, then laid off a season, but Donnie's on this year, so our TV is tuned to it again. She votes twice, once with her phone, once with mine. OK, I guess there's some reality there. Ozzie Osbourne's little girl really seems to have to work hard to learn the dances and the former Speaker of the House broke his foot - really! But does this qualify as "reality." I mean, if they weren't contacted a year in advance and if their agents hadn't accepted the 7 figure contract for them, not one of these stars would show up to work their guts out under the tutelage of a professional dancer who thinks they're all idiots. I mean, how real is that?

One last jab at reality TV. PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! I have to leave the room whenever the family plebiscite chooses to watch something in which people are dancing or in which unbathed people are living on a beach. I mean, they remembered to bring all the sound equipment and the lights, but nobody thought they'd need some clothes? I'm 58, but I'm not dead! I openly gasped the other night when a woman did some kind of Argentine dance with her partner. My wife, being a woman and therefore quick to detract from all other women, said, "She's 48." That only made me gasp some more. She was so perfect from head to toe (all of which was clearly visible) that it sort of hurt to look at her. I mean, beauty like that never even finds its way into a museum. Time to leave the room.

COMEDY: There is not a single sit-com currently under production which doesn't embarrass me with its sheer stupidity. Nearly all gags these days are based on sex, be it of the hetero- variety or the homo- variety. They bore me. They embarrass me. I've sort of felt this way all my life. We watched the sit-coms when we were kids, because our parents watched them. But even then they embarrassed me quite a lot. Some were just trying too hard. Some were just absurd without achieving "comedy of the absurd." Lucy never appealed to me. At all.

Dick Van Dyke was a good show.

The Beverly Hillbillies was periodically good, but the best character, the bank president's secretary, wasn't on nearly often enough.

Since the Vietnam Era, I can think of only two comedy series which were truly superior: MASH and Barney Miller. MASH was really just an incredibly long protest against the Viet Nam war, set in Korea between 1950 and 1953. The writers gave the soldiers, officers, doctors, and nurses the same attitudes that Hollywood liberals had between about 1967 and 1975. They thought like them, talked like them, and even cut (or didn't cut) their hair like them. And yet I generally liked it. The writing was usually clever and the acting was always superior with one or two exceptions. Mike Farrell was great, usually, but he couldn't cry convincingly on cue. But neither could I, so I decided to cut him a little slack.

Barney Miller was my all-time favorite sit-com. Every character was underplayed to just the right degree. A few nights ago I saw the guy who played the goofy kid on the squad. He was in an episode of Criminal Minds, playing a bald, grey-bearded grandfather who learns, along with his wife, that their murdered daughter had a little boy and that they will get to raise him. The Japanese guy on Barney Miller was a comedic genius. Dead-pan is an expression that must have been invented just to describe him. I'll never forget a scene in which some dumb guy looks at his Asian features and begins to speak to him in loud, slow syllables of pidgin English. After the idiot walked out, the officer was standing there being stared at by all his colleagues. He opened his hands wide and said, "I'm from Omaha." That line had me on the floor.

Another line in a pretty good series that about killed me was when the owner of WKRP in Cincinnati throws a bunch of domestic turkeys to their doom from an airplane as a publicity stunt. "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"

Stand-up comedy is practically dead. Jay Leno, David Letterman, and the Irish and Scottish guys are all reasonably good. But if you go to the dedicated "comedy" channel, all the stand-ups are foul-mouthed and mortifyingly unclever.

The Brits still do pretty good comedy shows, but you have to miss a lot of good American drama to see very much of that. Yes, we record a lot of stuff, but there simply isn't time in life to see everything. Which leads us to...

DRAMA: When I was a kid (also known as the Pleistocene Epoch) there were two types of drama on TV. Everything was either cops & robbers or a western. Variety shows once existed, but they've been gone so long that it would take another entire post just to explain what they were.) Peter Gunn was probably the first great TV detective show, although some others which had started on radio shifted with some success to the tube. Peter Gunn would always be my favorite, at least until Mannix, because Henry Mancini wrote the Gunn soundtrack and the theme, and no screen writer of music has ever bested him. It pleased me to read on the back of the Peter Gunn LP that a "new young piano player" named Johnny Williams was involved in the recording. I have suspicions but cannot prove that he's the much respected best screen music composer of today.

Mannix and Orwell and a few other police or lawyer or detective-type series through the sixties pleased me. But the sixties were dominated by MORE westerns and by SPY shows. My favorite was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughan, who had just been shot to doll rags in The Magnificent Seven a year or so before, played Napoleon Solo, an agent who worked for the United Network Command for Law Enforcement. David McCallum, who today cuts up dead bodies while giving fascinating lectures on NCIS, played his very hip, totally cool partner, Ilya Kuryakin. Timing was everything here. To have a Russian be a major character on a US TV show was unheard of. But to have him be a GOOD guy was astounding! After all, the Cold War was very much under way and anything Russian had an aura of suspicion around it. I recall my father coming home from the radio station one afternoon, chuckling, and telling my mother, "Did you hear what Harry Truman said today? He said, 'You can't trust a Russian.' He didn't say 'a Communist.' He said 'a Russian!' My father was clearly delighted that "Give 'em Hell Harry" was still doing so.

McCallum's character surprised lots of adults in America. Robert Vaughan was clearly the more standard handsome guy on the show, but David McCallum seemed to rev up a lot of female teenage hormones and adults seemed both puzzled and worried about it. Several weeks ago I was watching an episode of NCIS. One of the young women in the show asked their older boss, LeRoy Jethro Gibbs, "What did Ducky (Dr. Mallard) look like when he was young?" Gibbs thought for a brief moment and smiled. "He looked like Ilya Kurakin." This, of course, meant nothing to the young woman, but it made me laugh out loud.

NCIS, CSI (all versions), Criminal Minds, Cold Case, and Without A Trace still interest me, but I usually have time to watch only a couple of them per week. Numbers is good, too, but I hate to give CBS credit for anything because of their long-standing war on the Second Amendment. Then again, they may have made Gunsmoke, a truly great western series. Rats!

Theme music for dramas is usually better than that for comedies, although not always. Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The High Chapparal, The Virginian, and The Rifleman all had beautiful theme music. There was once such a thing as a half-hour drama. The Rebel and Have Gun, Will Travel were two examples of such, both of them westerns. And both had superior theme music.

There is more of what dramatists call "comic relief" in today's dramas. I saw some of that in the spy show days, especially in The Avengers, a British import which depended heavily on Patrick MacNee's acting ability and Diana Rigg's tawny shape and perfect English face. Being British, it was also clever. I own the 1967 season, but haven't seen the other seasons for sale. Some dramas, over the years, have become more comic relief than drama. This hasn't bothered me unless the comic relief was badly done or seemed out of place. One show that did it a lot and did it well was Magnum, PI. Thomas Sullivan Magnum was equal to everything as long as he had his 1911 pistol, Robin Masters' Ferrari, and his moustache. And to think that Selleck got his start playing a dead body! Maybe that was appropriate, though, since he sold cigarettes as the Marlboro Man for a while.

Perhaps my all-time favorite scene from the Magnum series was the one in which stuffy old Higgins had built a model of the Bridge over the River Kwai from toothpicks. He and Magnum had been torturing each other more than usual. Magnum rigged up some tiny explosives, just like in the movie, but it didn't really happen in history, and, using a tiny little plunger, befitting the size of its target, blew the toothpicks all around the room. I knew it was cruel, but I couldn't stop laughing.

Another show that was probably more comedy than drama was Simon & Simon. (Great guitar work in the theme!) Delta Burke's husband, Gerald McRainey (I think) played Rick, older brother to AJ. I recall an episode in which AJ was locked in a tiny sound-proof room and assaulted with incredibly loud sound which could have destroyed his hearing with very long exposure. He pulled out a Colt Python (stainless) and blew out the speakers. At least, that's the way I remember it.

Today, I watch a few shows on the History Channel, a series called Eureka on the Sci Fi channel, and things like NCIS, Criminal Minds, etc.

There is one other show which Sheryl and I love to watch together. This may amaze you (providing that you care.) We like Ugly Betty. I was not predisposed to like it the first time we turned it on, but it turned out to be just the sort of thing I'd thought for a long time that the doctor had ordered for network TV. It is about a family of honest, kind, thoughtful people and their interactions with all the self-serving, devious, cruel blackguards in the world of fashion. For the first time in forever, we have a heroine to whom we can legitimately point and say to our daughters (not to mention our sons) "There! See? She could have been cruel like the other people, but she blew them away with kindness and thoughtfulness, instead." Somehow she has gradually learned to stand up for herself, but she's never lost her essential decency.

Ugly Betty accomplishes something that I haven't seen done successfully since the eighties when Crime Story (set in the sixties) made you have feelings for ALL the characters, even the brutal mafiosi! The character played by Vanessa Williams in Ugly Betty is about as cold, calculating, and mean-spirited as any I've ever seen. Certainly she is the coldest female character I've ever seen outside a vampire movie. And yet, when her insane sister burns up her apartment or her daughter kills a guy in self-defense, you actually find yourself rooting for her. That's the mark of good writing, not to mention pretty fine acting.

So, no. I'm not a hater of TV. But I'm pretty darned critical of what's out there. We just don't need some of the trash that's being made. We absolutely do not need shows called Cougars or Desperate Housewives. They seem to be trying to raise adultery to an art form. No, I haven't watched them. Ever! The previews tell me everything I need to know in order to make an informed decision. Fortunately, my partner agrees with me about most such moral choices. And what we watch on the tube IS a moral choice.

Is It A Plot?

The Model 1894 Winchester, a descendant of the Henry mentioned in the penultimate paragraph.

Last fall I wrote about some new sci fi shows that had begun on TV and which pleased me greatly. Only one of them will survive into a second season of new episodes, I believe. That one is called Fringe. I finally realized recently where I'd seen the actor who plays the mildly insane, absolutely brilliant physicist named Walter in that show. He's the same fellow who played to the hilt the role of the Steward of Gondor in the Tolkein films. You know, the father of Boromir and Faramir? Whoa! What an actor. His show deserves to live on and apparently it will.

But I've noticed a trend throughout my life which manifests itself so consistently that it bespeaks of a plot of some kind. I don't know who's behind the plot, but it's definitely there. It works like this. Someone comes up with a great show. The situation is cleverly different, the characters well drawn and well played. The music, costumes, photography, and direction all scintillate. It promotes thought. It thrills the intellect and the heart all at once. It entertains. It is wonderful!

It is doomed.

A really good show will never last. Someone, and I don't know who but I suspect he's in league with Satan, always sees to it that a great show gets cancelled. This usually happens after its first thirteen episodes, but sometimes it happens even sooner. Occasionally, the secret forces behind this phenomenon will allow the show to run for a whole year before jerking the rug out from under our feet. Once, back in the eighties, a tremendous series which was set in 1963 and was called Crime Story, made it all the way to the end of season two. Then, in the last episode of the season, and with NO WARNING WHATSOEVER, all the major characters go down in the same airplane! To this day there are probably people who lived in Moscow at that time who still get cold sweats after dark and ask themselves what the source was of that unearthly howl which split the Idaho panhandle's night air. But I know. It was my own lament, torn from my throat by the wrenching realization that Dennis Farina's character, Michael Torello and Anthony Dennison's character, Ray Luca, would never again trade vicious threats and warm lead. Pauly Taglia (whose surname means "cuts") would never again casually drive over someone with a semi in order to provide transplant organs to save a dying mafioso. Nor would he ever again say something delightfully stupid like when he asked Ray "Who is this guy Dom Perrignon?" Pauly thought he might be trying to cut in on their action in the alcohol trade.

I was enthralled by a show last year called New Amsterdam. A 17th century Dutch guy saves a Native American girl's life from another cheese-head who gets drunk and comes after her with a sword. The good guy winds up "mostly dead" (sorry, Miracle Max.) The girl's mom blesses the good Dutchman with long life. Really long life. So long, in fact, that he has to reinvent himself every twenty years or so in order to keep people from realizing that he's really 400 years old. For a while, he'll go by the name Amsterdam. Then he'll use the monicker York. (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. The city has been called both since its settlement in about 1624. First, New Amsterdam, then New York.) Sometimes people almost catch on, like the time a girlfriend recognizes his 30-something face in a painting that was more than 70 years old.

The perpetually young hero sometimes pours out his sorrows to an aging bartender - - who is really Amsterdam's son whom he sired when he had a fling in the thirties with a gorgeous black singer. This show was wonderful in every respect. So, naturally, it's gone.

Sanctuary, about a 150 year old woman who doesn't look a day over 36 and is at least as appealing as her gorgeous teenage daughter, was another "too-good-to-last" show. Actually, I think they're going to re-run last year's episodes on the Sci Fi channel which has recently redubbed itself SyFy for no apparent reason. It was about a place which acts as both safe-haven and control for creatures and variant-humans which society isn't ready to know about just yet. The centenarian beauty who runs the outfit owns a Germanic castle which has somehow escaped the notice of everyone else on the outskirts of NYC. OK. I didn't say it was perfect. I just said I liked it.

Life on Mars was another fun one this past winter. A police detective from today gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He's still on the force in the same Big Apple, but his clothes are way out of style. So is his hair. So are most of his opinions and attitudes. But he's so good at his job that New York's finest of 1973 decide to keep him on. He gets weirded out occasionally, like when he sees someone on TV whom he knows will soon be assassinated or when he sees his 6 year old self or his alcoholic father, or his needy and lovely mother. He really wants to help her, but if he hangs around too much, she'll take it the wrong way. And she wants to take it the wrong way, because she has no idea that the nice guy with the clean-shaved sideburns is actually her son.

The girl just down the hall in his apartment building slips him some drugs and he wakes up handcuffed to his own bed and without benefit of clothing. And people who have no idea that AIDS is just around the corner are practicing "free love" with an expertise which might imply that they need no practice at all! To complicate all this, he occasionally hears people from the present trying to contact him. He assumes that he's in a coma and just needs to wake up for all the 1973 stuff to go away. But he's developing a soft spot in his heart for the uniformed only-girl-on-the-force down in his office.

Naturally, this one got the axe, too. At least I think it did, because the network hasn't mentioned it in months. It has ever been thus.

I recall a western back in the seventies which Shaynie and I really liked. They made a pilot movie and said it would be a new series. But it never was. It mixed western grittiness with a bit of spooky quasi-magic. It was called Hunter's Moon. The protagonist rode around with an inverted sheepskin vest on and a Henry rifle resting on his right knee. The ignorant network wanted to imply that there was something extra powerful about the Henry, but, of course, the only thing special about it was not its power but the fact that it would go bang 15 times before you had to stop to reload it. But I was willing to overlook that faux pas if only they would run the series. They didn't.

I'd be willing to bet (if I were a betting man) that this has happened to you, too. Some show that seemed too good to be true turned out to be just that. It disappeared before you had a good mouthful of it. Perhaps you'd be good enough to share some descriptions or titles of such stillborn series with me. But don't bother if it's going to upset you. Really! I understand...