Category: Television

Earlier this week, I watched a video that listed the new shows of 1983 and turned it into a quiz wherein I listed the ones I remembered.

I have done the same with the 24 New Shows of 1987 (26 if you count the two Fox shows mentioned but not depicted).

As then, I have bolded the shows I remember and included links to any I mentioned by name on this blog.

• Dolly!, a variety show. Come on, kids did not watch these.
• Women in Prison, a sitcom?
• A Different World, which I didn’t watch. But I didn’t watch The Cosby Show, either.
• Full House
• Second Chance
• Everything’s Relative complete with shot of the World Trade Center in the beginning of the intro.
• My Two Dads; I remember a single episode, where they give a party and try to engage the teens in conversation, and the daughter imagines them as really old.
• I Married Dora; I am pretty sure I watched this every week and was very disappointed when it was cancelled. I remember the ending of the last show, where they break down the fourth wall and say they were cancelled and all bow. Also, this program more than Down and Out in Beverly Hills caused my crush on Elizabeth Peña.
• Buck James
• A Year in the Life
• thirtysomething; although this came on at nine, so I didn’t watch it. Not that I would have. Thirty-something was old.
• Frank’s Place; I’d like to think I kind of remember this, but not for sure.
• The “Slap” Maxwell Story
• Hooperman; although all I remember is that John Ritter was the title character. Good enough for trivia nights.
• Beauty and the Beast
• Once a Hero
• The Oldest Rookie
• The Law and Harry McGraw; although, again, only the title and that Jerry Orbach was in it.
• Jake and the Fatman; Joe Penny’s show after Riptide
• J.J. Starbuck
• Leg Work
• Private Eye; I want to say I remember this, but there were so many shows (and video games with the same or similar names.
• Wiseguy; didn’t see it though, as I think it was a nine o’clock start.
• Tour of Duty; also here and here. I actually have the whole series on DVD as I previously mentioned.

So I rmemember a bunch of them, but only watched two of them back in the day (watching the videocassettes that my father recorded with him and my brother counts).

Weird; I thought I had a lot of time to watch cable in the old days; however, by 1987, we were living in the trailer and we had cable, so I was watching a bunch of movies on Showtime over and over as I have previously mentioned.

Yesterday, Ace posted a link to a YouTube montage of the intros of new television shows of 1983.

22 in all. I thought I’d treat it as a quiz, though, and put the ones I remember in bold and include links to those I’ve referred to on this blog which is at least three. I’m going report on this in real time, posted after I watch the whole video, because it’s like 25 minutes long and I only have time to watch it once.

The shows are:

• It’s Not Easy
• We Got It Made–although I was sure I referred to it somewhere, I cannot find it, but for a while, I misremembered Bill Maher as the straight man male lead.
• Oh Madeline–although as I mentioned when I referred to the show last month, I remembered it was on, but I never watched it.
• AfterMASH
• Jennifer Slept Here–really, I haven’t brought that up? It didn’t run very long, but I can still remember the theme song. Also, with this and the short run Eric Idle vehicle Nearly Departed makes me wonder why we don’t have reboots of ghosts-live-here sitcoms these days–but both of these were very short runs indeed, which perhaps answers my question.
• Just Our Luck
• Webster referred to in the book report for Alex Karras’s Tuesday Night Football.
• Mr. Smith
• Manimal, although I think it came on on at nine p.m., so I only saw the intro before I had to go to bed.
• Hardcastle and McCormick; okay, I’m cheating, I referred to it on another blog.
• The Scarecrow and Mrs. King
• Whiz Kids
• Boone
• The Rousters
• The Yellow Rose
• Cutter to Houston
• Trauma Center
• Bay City Blues
• For Love and Honor
• Emerald Point N.A.S.
• Lottery
• Hotel

To be honest, I thought I was going to clean up on this show because I knew so many early; however, it looks like they stacked sitcoms early in the list, and I was most familiar with those programs.

I also thought I’d referred to a couple more shows than I thought I did, but I’m almost half-convinced it’s because my quick searching failed. Did I now go on about how pretty Ann Jillian was at some point?

At any rate, it was an interesting bit of nostalgia (the whole point of the montages, I know). I saw a bunch of that guys whom I saw in other programs. And I saw numerous actors and actresses who lucked out that these shows were short lived, as that meant they were available for other projects that really worked out for them. For example, Susan Dey and Richard Dean Anderson were in Emerald Point N.A.S.; if that show had been even a trifling hit, who would have been MacGyver? And if Bay City Blues had worked for a bit, would Sharon Stone have become a movie star? Would Dennis Franz have become a bankable cop in Hill Street Blues, Beverly Hills Buntz, or NYPD Blue?

I don’t like to spend thirty minutes watching YouTube as a rule, gentle reader. And my television (or streaming) habits are not such that I’m well poised to even bother with quizzes like this in 2050 (not that there will be enough shared nostalgia to warrant them anyway–the prevalence of cable in the 1990s pretty much splintered us starting even then).

However, I do have the urge to try something similar with 24 New Shows of Fall 1987–by then, my viewing habits had changed and I was no longer roaming the housing projects at night (the street lights come on later in Milwaukee) and was instead in a trailer in the soft southern lands, so I might do even better. Although perhaps not with the references.

George Clooney gives ‘Buck Rogers’ reboot serious star power

I bet climate change. And nobody will take my bet that the antagonists will be changed from Chinese. Probably to Republicans. Or businessmen who brought on the apocalypse for their own power/profit.

Reeling in the years, here’s previous mention of Buck Rogers on MfBJN:

• I Am Buck Rogers
• Book Report: Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future
• Book Report: Armageddon 2419

Not really, I hope, but the New York Post story entitled Who will replace Alex Trebek as ‘Jeopardy!’ host? Meet the top candidates has five candidates:

• George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton White House staffer who is now a television political commentator.
• Betty White, which is based on a joke Trebek made once about a suitable replacement.
• Ken Jennings, the winningest Jeopardy! contestant.
• Laura Coates, a CNN legal analyst talking head.
• Alex Faust, a hockey play-by-play announcer.

Come on, two political talking heads are on the short list? Really?

Clearly, it’s Ken Jennings, right? And the rest of this column was driven by the need to file some column inches, ainna?

Also, is this too soon?

My beautiful wife and I have been watching the James Spader television show The Blacklist since almost the beginning. We have been recording it from the beginning, but I think we started watching it after a whole season had elapsed as we don’t tend to watch 3.5 hours of television a day.

We’ve stuck through it even though its internal intrigues have often sounded like they were not planning any sort of arc across the seasons, but rather came up with something after each renewal. So we’ve had lots of crazy things going on, the story line turning on itself, mysteries resolving into new intrigues that, in total, won’t stand up to scrutiny.

We’ve stuck through it through poor police procedures, most notably how lackadaisical the police are at setting a perimeter when busting in on bad guys, often skipping any sort of perimeter if the bad guys need to escape or setting the perimeter appropriately at 46 minutes after the hour when they need to wrap the episode up. I’ve forgiven other television-driven decisions and tactics as well, not to mention the intrigues and characters who are important for a while and then are not.

But in the current season, I’m having a hard time with the absurd hard-left story lines and moralizing.

Spoilers below the fold.

Continue reading “Why I’ve Almost Given Up On The Blacklist“ →

Seen Powerline’s The Week in Pictures:

Come on. I mean, aside from the commas missing from the appositive phrase, Diana was not the “queen lizard.” Any fool knows she was not even in charge of the invasion force, being instead in charge of one of the ships and the chief science officer.

Although one of her superior officers (Pamela, a Supreme Commander) intimates that Diana had a relationship with the supreme leader of the the Visitors, her position was certainly not queen.

I mean, if you don’t remember this stuff off the top of your head, you can read about it on Wikipedia.

Man, the first miniseries came out when I was eleven, and it creeped me out a bit–aliens was something that tripped my willies even into my early 20s.

Although I have both V and V: The Final Battle on DVD, I haven’t watched them in a long time. And I have not seen the new one (well, 2009-new, which is actually newer than the new Battlestar Galactica) because Morena Baccarin cut off her hair for it. Also, because it’s the new one, and the old one is always better.

Sledge Hammer was born in St. Louis.

(I learned this because Adaptive Curmudgeon had a post today capped with a clip from the 2008 film Burn After Reading that featured Sledge Hammer! and the Farmers Insurance pitchman, so I looked him up on IMDB and learned that he’s been in a lot of other television shows and films since the television comedy that I know him best for.)

Certainly the IMDB entry says he’s known for other things.

But come on. He’s Sledge Hammer!

Trust me, I know what I’m doing.

Kids who grew up on syndicated television in the 1970s, before cable television, might have trouble with this, although they might not even know it: Confusing their Frenches.

Mr. French was a character on the television show Family Affair played by Sebastian Cabot.

Victor French was an actor who appeared most notably (for syndicated television viewers) in Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven.

I’m throwing Merlin Olsen into the mix here because he also had facial hair and because he appeared in Little House on the Prairie as a replacement character when Victor French left the show. Also, he appeared in a Highway to Heaven episode and said to Victor French “All I could see was the flowers and the beard. I thought you were Merlin Olsen.”

Mr. French	Victor French	Merlin Olsen

I am sure this field guide has absolutely no meaning in the second decade of the twenty-first century, where I’m the only one thinking of these particular television programs, none of which I particularly liked but watched we only had five channels and because Sid Meier’s Civilization was still decades away.

Gen Z’s ‘OK, Boomer’ meme may become a TV show.

It’ll be as big as the television series based on a Twitter feed was ten years ago.

Which is to say, not very big at all. Even William Shatner could not save it.

Because old people watch television, and they don’t want to watch television mocking them nearly as much as kids want to make television shows that mock old people.

Besides, as you know, I’ve already got a favorite Boomer show.

So yesterday, I illustrated a repeated motif in the television series Airwolf, that the climactic air battles were always a bit touch-and-go, dramatically, until the Airwolf pilots did the loop. You see, Airwolf had jets and could actually do a loop unlike, you know, real helicopters. And at the end of the climactic air battles at the end of the show, Airwolf always won by doing the loop. So I did an extended rant about how they should maybe do the loop immediately and win decisively in the first minute of battle. But that would make for bad television. And perhaps it stressed the airframe and they tried to avoid it if possible.

So then I got to thinking about helicopters in television shows, and then maybe a quiz wherein you try to name the television program from the name of the helicopter in it.

You know, like Blue Thunder, which was spun off from the movie of the same name (and featured Dana Carvey in a dramatic role). Airwolf essentially ripped off the super copter schtick, but did it more successfully than the Blue Thunder television series did.

But the thoughts of a quiz evaporated quickly when I realized that the helicopters were the star of the shows, so the shows were named after the helicopters. What show was the helicopter “Airwolf” on? Not much of a quiz after all.

The only one I could think of off the top of my head was the Screaming Mimi, which was not the title of the show on which it appeared.

Do you happen to know the show I’m talking about?

Continue reading “An Ill-Conceived Quiz” →

Although every generation gets the Bruce Campbell hero it needs, he will have some big shoes to fill when he hosts Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

Best known for the “Evil Dead” franchise and USA’s “Burn Notice” — not to mention his bestselling autobiography, “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor” — he is now hosting the latest installment of “Ripley’s” (Sundays at 9 p.m. on the Travel Channel).

“I thought ‘Ripley’s’ was a good fit for me because the people who follow what I do, they like stuff on the edge, and that’s what ‘Ripley’s’ is,” says Campbell, 60, on the phone from his home in the self-proclaimed “wilds of Oregon.”

. . . .

“They’ve been around for 100 years, so everyone’s heard of them,” says Campbell. “In my formative years, there was always some form of Ripley’s book or publication [in the house]. I still have the red, cloth-bound Ripley’s book that I had in my living room. It had all these crazy illustrations of people doing amazing things.”

I mean, I can still hear Jack Palance from the 1980s ABC version of the show saying, “Believe it…or not.” Where the “or not” sounded like a threat, and you’d better believe it if you know what’s good for you.

Someone is unhappy with how Game of Thrones is turning out:

Where to begin with “The Bells,” an absolute disaster of an episode that exhibited every bad habit the series’ writers have ever had? They threw out their own rule book (suddenly the scorpions don’t work and Drogon can burn everything?) to pursue gross spectacle.

Character and substance were left by the wayside so that the plot could go where the writers wanted. The pace was rushed in the beginning, painfully lagging by the end. The script created plot devices and conflicts out of thin air (no really, when were the bells ever so important?), relished in violence and let a main character survive beyond any reasonable odds.

Yeah, kinda like they did with Lost. The show’s writers were making it all up as they went with no end in sight, and then when they had to wrap it up, they did so with a truncated season that didn’t answer most of the questions from the bulk of the series and instead created a new series of mysteries and questions in the last series, questions that viewers were not invested in, that they could wrap up.

Badly.

So you won’t have to wonder if I watch multi-season narratives like this. I don’t. Because they’ll botch it.

UPDATE: Ace agrees about Game of Thrones and also brings up Lost.