A dreadful stretch of days for fans of classic television continues: After My Little Margie‘s Gale Storm and Streets of San Francisco‘s Karl Malden, now we’ve lost Mollie Sugden, star of one of my favorite Britcoms, Are You Being Served? (Her cohort at the ladies’ counter, Wendy Richard, passed away earlier in the year.) A TV critic once said that the reason Cheers worked so well is that it was …
This is a strange one for your Valentine’s Day: Almost exactly one decade to the day after ABC stopped airing Cupid, ABC ran promos tonight for a show by the same name, launching March 31. Only seeing the name the first time out, my initial guess was the network had another reality show in the works — and that was unlikely in the short institutional memory of television that anyone …
Some spookily ill-starred timing below in mentioning Star Trek characters frozen in time — with the loss today of Ricardo Montalban. ABC, CBS, and NBC each had segments on Montalban in tonight’s evening news broadcast; both ABC and CBS mentioned Fantasy Island and the Chrysler commercials — only NBC also included a Star Trek clip (which sort of makes sense, as Island was ABC and Trek was NBC). NBC also …
Jeff Vaughn noticed on YouTube the presence of a portion of The Steven Banks Home Entertainment Center, a one-man stage-show celebration of creative procrastination. The full version of Steven Banks‘ show goes on 40-odd minutes (the other portions are online), and is something you’ll either love or hate depending on your similar time-wasting tendencies: I saw the Home Entertainment Center when it was first on Showtime and have reshown it …
Just a few notes today: I’ll be on the Fictional Frontiers radio show this Sunday — it airs 11:00 AM to 12:00 Noon EST on WNJC 1360 AM-Philadelphia. A few days after, the podcast goes online here. My segment is prerecorded and was an enjoyable interview to do — covering both both my past and future Star Wars work with an interviewer who knew the series really well. It’s part …
As of 3:30 Alaska time today, Senator Stevens’ challenger had gone into the lead by a total of three votes. No political observation here (and of course they’re still counting) — but my first instinct was, “Man, there’s a Northern Exposure episode in here somewhere.” Maurice and Chris canvassing the town, looking for converts for either side! (In reality, Janine Turner was on the air a few times, campaigning for …
Following yesterday’s theme of odd stuff I’ve run across recently — regard the following video, one person’s explanation of the lyrics on the closing credits of WKRP in Cincinnati… Personally, I am pleased that ‘KRP is back on “the new WGN” — even the current, original-music-ripped-out version. (Something has to take up the slack from TVLand, which continues to amble about in search of something other than its original programming …
Now that the site is mostly restored — and using the better blogging tool that Blogger provides — my intent was to begin blogging more frequently. However, this runs against a trio of countervailing forces: one, I don’t have a lot of time — and two, I can’t always talk about what I’m working on. This leaves everything else — which is where problem #3 comes in: I don’t always …