ABC's 2010-11 Schedule

Here's what ABC has planned for their coming season.

Cancelled: Better Off Ted, Scrubs, The Deep End, Eastwick, Flash Forward, The Forgotten, Hank, Happy Town, Lost, Romantically Challenged, Ugly Betty.

Renewed: 20/20, America's Funniest Home Videos, The Bachelor, Brothers and Sisters, Castle, Cougar Town, Dancing With The Stars, Desperate Housewives, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Grey's Anatomy, Modern Family, Private Practice.

Moved: Dancing With The Stars Results,The Middle.

New: Better Together, Body Of Proof, Detroit 1-8-7, My Generation, No Ordinary Family, The Whole Truth, Secret Millionaire (from FOX).

ABC is holding V for the mid-season as are new drama Off The Map, and comedies Mr. Sunshine and Happy Endings. They have also indicated that, although Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, Wife Swap and Shark Tank are not on the schedule it does not necessarily mean that these shows are dead.

Complete Schedule: (New shows in Capitals)
Monday
8:00-10:00 p.m.: Dancing With The Stars
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Castle

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: NO ORDINARY FAMILY
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Dancing With The Stars Results (new time)
10:00-11:00 p.m.: DETROIT 1-8-7

Wednesday
8:00-8:30 p.m.: The Middle (new time)
8:30-9:00 p.m.: BETTER TOGETHER
9:00-9:30 p.m.: Modern Family
9:30-10:00 p.m.: Cougar Town
10:00-11:00 p.m.: THE WHOLE TRUTH

Thursday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: MY GENERATION
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Grey's Anatomy
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Private Practice

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Secret Millionaire
9:00-10:00 p.m.: BODY OF PROOF
10:00-11:00 p.m.: 20/20

Saturday
8:00-11:00 p.m.: College Football

Sunday
7:00-8:00 p.m.: America's Funniest Home Videos
8:00--9:00 p.m.: Extreme Makeover Home Edition
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Desperate Housewives
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Brothers and Sisters

Better Together is the only comedy set to start in September. Joanna Garcia stars as Mia, who has been dating Ben (Jake Lacy) for seven weeks when she announces that they are getting married and having a baby. This shocks her sister Maddie (Jennifer Finnigan), who has been dating Ben (Josh Cooke) for nine years. They know each other inside and out and they make a point of the fact that their relationship – as it stands – is a "valid life choice." Surprisingly (to Maddie) the girl's parents are supportive of Mia's choice, having recently adopted a carpe diem attitude.

No Ordinary Family stars Michael Chiklis and Julia Benz as Jim and Stephanie Powell. On a family trip their plane crashes in the Amazon. As a result Jim and Stephanie and their two children Daphne and JJ (Kay Panabaker and Jimmy Bennett) each develop a unique super-power. Also stars Tate Donavon, Romany Malco, Autumn Reeser and Christina Chang.

Detroit 1-8-7 takes the basic concept of The Office – a documentary film crew in the work place – and applies it to a serious subject. In this case the work place is the Detroit Police Department's Homicide unit. There are moments when the cops address the cameras directly, and other times when they forget entirely that they're being filmed. The series looks at the various cops and their relationships to each other. Some of the partnerships are cases of teaming opposites with each other while in other cases the tensions are taut. Stars Michael Imperioli, Jon Michael Hill, James McDaniel, Aisha Hinds, Natalie Martinez, D.J. Cotrona, and Shaun Majumder.

The Whole Truth is Jerry Bruckheimer's latest series. Starring Rob Morrow as leading New York criminal attorney Jimmy Brogan, whose long-time friend Kathryn Peale (currently uncast – Joely Richardson had been cast in the role but pulled out of the project earlier this month ) is the Deputy Bureau Chief of the State District Attorney's office. The series endeavours to show each side – prosecution and defense – equally forcing our allegiances to shift depending on what we are seeing. Both lawyers and their teams are equally matched and both have a fervent belief in their clients and their position. In the end what counts is not guilt or innocence, it is what the jury believes to be the truth. Eamonn Walker, Sean Wing, Anthony Ruivivar, and Christine Adams also star.

My Generation looks at the changes that a decade can hold in store for people. The scripted drama looks at a group of people who, in 2000, were the subject of a documentary about high schools students about to graduate from an Austin Texas high school. They are brought back together again ten years later they discover that while they may not be where they expected to be when they left high school, they may need to be where they need to be, and more importantly that while you may not have got what you thought you wanted out of life it may not be too late to get what you need. Stars Michael Stahl David, Kelli Garner, Jaime King, Keir O'Donnell, Sebastian Sozzi, Mechad Brooks, Anne Son, Daniella Alonzo, and Julian Morris.

In Body Of Proof Dana Delaney stars as Dr. Megan Hunt. A brilliant neurosurgeon until a devastating car crash ended her surgical career she has chosen to resume her career as a medical examiner who is determined to learn who or what killed the victims who come across her table. She quickly develops a reputation for going beyond her duties as a medical examiner and greying the lines between the where her job ends and where the job of the police begins. In addition to all this she finds that she has to re-examine and rebuild her relationship with her family which suffered because of her ambition to build her career. Jerri Ryan, Geoffrey Arand, John Carroll Lynch, Windell Middlebrook, Mick Bishop and Sonja Sohn also star.

Happy Endings asks the most important question when a "perfect couple" breaks up: who gets the friends? The perfect couple in this case are Dave (Zachary Knighton) and Alex (Elisha Cuthbert) who promise to stay friends even though their relationship has ended. But can the group of friends, who are as essentially a blend of each individual's friends, hang together? Who gets to go on the big ski trip for example? More importantly, how long do you have to wait before you can act on your attraction to your friend's now ex-boyfriend. It's some thing they'll have to figure out as they go along.

Mr. Sunshine features Matthew Perry as the self-involved manager of a second rate sports arena in San Diego. Ben Donavon has just turned 40 and is re-evaluating his life as a result. But beyond that he has to deal with the people he works with. These include his powerful and highly erratic boss Crystal (Allison Janney) and her clueless son Roman (Nate Torrance) who is Ben's latest employee, Alice (Andrea Anders) the tomboyish marketing director who is also Ben's "friend with benefits," Alonzo (James Lesure) an impossibly happy ex-basketball player, and Ben's assistant Heather (Portia Doubleday) who looks sweet but is frightening – she once set one of her former boyfriends on fire.

Off The Map is the latest medical drama from Shonda Rhimes, and it is about as far from Grey's Anatomy as you can get, literally and figuratively. The series focuses on three young doctors – Lily Brenner (Caroline Dhavernas), Mina Minard (Mamie Gummer), and Manny Diaz (Enrique Murciano) – who come to work in a small understaffed and undersupplied clinic in the South American jungle. All are running away from their own personal demons and are coming to work with Ben Keeton (Martin Henderson), the brilliant founder of the clinic, who had been the youngest chief of surgery at UCLA, and his assistant Otis Cole (Jason George).

Comments:

I am not terribly impressed with what ABC has done with this line-up. I think that there are a couple of interesting ideas. The concept behind Detroit 1-8-7, a documentary crew following the Detroit Homicide cops is one of those amalgams that could work. If nothing else it would seem to take the shaky cam of NYPD Blue and justifying it, while allowing the actors to break the fourth wall from time to time. Will it work though? I'm not sure, particularly with Michael Imperioli – remember how well he worked on the American version of Life On Mars. On the other hand I think that No Ordinary Family is a good mix of concept and time slot. The idea of these people gaining different superpowers after a crash is straight out of the origins of Marvel's Fantastic Four but done with a family rather than a group of people. If played as a light drama rather than with the sturm und drang that accompanied most episodes of Heroes, I think that this is a show that could attract a larger family audience. I'm not sure about The Whole Truth. It seems to take the basic Law & Order template and replace the cops with the defense side of the trial equation. (Dick Wolf would never approve – he has famously stated that he would never do a show that featured a defense attorney because he seems to believe that anyone who has been arrested and charged is nearly always guilty and by implication defense attorneys are worse in some ways than the criminals they defend.) Is this going to work? I don't know. I think it might be trying to push too much material into a too small period of time to really do justice to either side (in truth I often felt that way about Law & Order when I was watching it). I have a bigger problem with My Generation though. This reminds me of an anthology series from almost 30 years ago called What Really Happened To The Class Of '65? which looked at the post graduation lives of individuals from the stated high school class. While I realise that this is almost certainly not what ABC is trying to do with this show, and the concept seems to be drawn more from the 7 Up series of documentaries done by Michael Apted. I'm really not sure that this will work even – maybe especially – as a lead to Grey's Anatomy. I'm not entirely sure about Body Of Proof. I've always liked Dana Delaney, and enjoy seeing Jerri Ryan (who is a better actress than most people gave her credit for when she was playing 7 of 9 on Star Trek: Voyager). The problem for me is that this seems to be well travelled ground. It will undoubtedly be played more seriously than something like Crossing Jordan or Quincy but still it seems to have been done before. Despite its pedigree I just can't see Off The Map working as a series. It may sound patronizing but I can't see a show about young doctors in a jungle hospital drawing a mass audience.

Turning to the comedies, despite enjoying Joanna Garcia's work in the past Better Together seems to be another comedy treading familiar ground. It may work but it sort of stands out in comparison with shows like The Middle and Modern Family. Happy Endings seems to me to have more promise. While the concept of the group and the dynamics of the group bears some resemblance to How I Met Your Mother? and other series in which groups of friends have to differ with shifting relationships, this would seem to be a more in depth examination. There are a lot more issues for potential humour in the breaking up of a relationship and the impact on blended groups of friends than most producers and writers have really explored. Still if I can say that I am looking forward to any sitcom on the ABC line-up – and maybe any network's proposed line-up, it is Mr. Sunshine. Not only is this a stellar cast with great comedy chops but the people behind the scenes are outstanding as well, including Perry (who wrote the pilot and is one of the executive producers), executive producer Jamie Tarses, and executive producer Thomas Schlamme who also directed the pilot. If any comedy is going to get me this year it is probably this one.

Next up – CBS.

Frustration And Happy Town Swag

Sometimes it... well it doesn't suck to be Canadian but it can be more than a bit frustrating to try to produce this sort of blog when you're a Canadian. Take what happened the other day when I got my Happy Town press package – aka swag – from ABC.

I knew most of the details of what was coming because my good buddy Toby got his a few days before I did. Then again he's in New York and as a result doesn't have to cope with Canada Customs examining packages coming across the border. Still, there's a bit of a thrill in getting something like this, and since this is really the first time that I've received a package like this it was a bit special. The package included a one page newspaper talking about the disappearance of Entertainment Editor and well-known blogger Brent McKee and included a link to the online version of the news story.

Besides the newspaper, the package included this post card featuring scenes from around Haplin Minnesota – known as "Happy Town" to the locals – Miranda Kirby, your full service realtor. There's a certain sinister quality to the picture son the card. Maybe it's the strange colour to the photos, or maybe it's the clouds.

There's also a from Big Dave's Pizza Barn, where the New York style pizzas have an authentic quality: "The best way to do that is to use authentic New York City tap water in the dough – shipped to Haplin direct from New York, twice a week." The list of pizzas is small and rather pedestrian.

But the main feature of the menu is a map of Haplin and the surrounding district.

Next up is a scented candle (with an ABC logo on the top).

Then there's a two sided snow globe. On one side is scene on a lake with the woods behind (it also appears on the post card) and on the other a scene of downtown Haplin, dominated by the Our Daily Bread Factory – "The Bready" to the locals – looming over the town like a somehow sinister industrial-era castle. And there's something else that's a bit sinister on one of the buildings, the sign of the notorious Magic Man.

There's a bag of Our Daily "bread." Apparently it actually contains a T-shirt, but it's packed in there too tightly for me to get it out without damaging the bag.

There's a fridge magnet seemingly advertising a German movie - Die Blaue Tur (The Blue Door) which has the tag line "Betreten auf eigene gefahr" ("Enter at your own risk") - but really advertises the House Of Ushers movie memorabilia store.

Finally there's a coffee mug with the Magic Man's symbol on it.

There was actually one other thing in the package, a sheet of paper with a web address where I could watch the first episode of Happy Town online before the general public. And that's where the frustrations comes in, because when I went to the link I was duly informed that the video was unavailable to me. Because I live in Canada, or at least not in the United States. I mean I know why it happens; someone else owns the rights to Happy Town in Canada and they aren't participating in the ABC promotional campaign. Still would it really have hurt to send out a DVD or even a USB drive with the first episode of the show on it? I promise I won't make illegal copies and sell them on my front lawn

So I won't be able to tell you what I think of Happy Town before the show actually airs. Which I sort of think is unfortunate. Part of the purpose of a media critic is to give potential patrons an informed opinion about a TV show or a movie or a game before the material is released to the general public. The principle, which TV executives are obviously aware of, is that positive comments from critics even if they are bloggers will help to draw viewers to their product. And if critics don't like it, well there is still the chance that it might hit anyway "proving the critics wrong." But that only works if critics are able to see the show before it airs. The problem here is that while I am indeed a Canadian, my blog has an audience that is not exclusively Canadian. In fact according to Google Analytics the majority of the people who visit this blog in the past month came from the United States. The thing about the Internet is that you reach an audience without boundaries, unless of course you are dealing with companies that aren't aware of the fact. I guess what I'm saying is that would it have killed ABC to have included a DVD or a USB drive instead of tantalizing me with a website that I can't use?

As far as the press kit goes, I loved it, maybe because it was my first, or maybe because it seemed like fun. It might even be worth something someday, if Happy Town turns out to be a big hit. It might be worth more if the show has a short run and develops a small but devoted – even rabid – fan following. Will it influence what I write about the show? Well if that was why they sent it out it's a failure because when it comes to reviewing shows, I call them as I see them... when I can see them.

ABC’s 2009 Upfronts

Here's what ABC is planning for the coming season. ABC has a lot of shows that are not – as yet - scheduled

Cancelled: Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Pushing Daisies, Boston Legal, Life On Mars, Opportunity Knocks, In the Motherhood, The Unusuals, Cupid, According to Jim, Samantha Who?, Homeland Security USA.

Renewed: Saturday Night College Football, Brothers & Sisters, Dancing with the Stars, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, Castle, Supernanny, America's Funniest Home Videos, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, 20/20.

Moved: Ugly Betty.

New Shows: Modern Family, Hank, Cougar Town, Eastwick, Flash Forward, The Forgotten, The Middle, Shark Tank, V, Copper, Happy Town, The Deep End.

Not Yet Scheduled: The Bachelor, Wife Swap, Lost, Better Off Ted, Scrubs, True Beauty.

Complete Schedule (Changes in January as noted) Times are Eastern, adjust accordingly.

Monday
8:00-9:00 p.m. Dancing with the Stars
10:00-11:00 p.m. Castle

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m. SHARK TANK
9:00-10:00 p.m. Dancing with the Stars Results
10:00-11:00 p.m. THE FORGOTTEN

Wednesday
8:00-8:30 p.m. HANK
8:30-9:00 p.m. THE MIDDLE
9:00-9:30 p.m. MODERN FAMILY
9:30-10:00 p.m. COUGAR TOWN
10:00-11:00 p.m. EASTWICK

Thursday
8:00-9:00 p.m. FLASH FORWARD
9:00-10:00 p.m. Grey's Anatomy
10:00-11:00 p.m. Private Practice

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m. Supernanny
9:00-10:00 p.m. Ugly Betty
10:00-11:00 p.m. 20/20

Saturday
8:00-10:00 p.m. Saturday Night College Football

Sunday
7:00-8:00 p.m. America's Funniest Home Videos
8:00-9:00 p.m. Extreme Makeover Home Edition
9:00-10:00 p.m. Desperate Housewives
10:00-11:00 p.m. Brothers & Sisters

Shark Tank is a reality show in which entrepreneurs bring their ideas to potential investors who critique their presentation and offer to invest in the ones they find most promising. The show is based on a Japanese show called The Dragon's Den which is currently produced in thirteen countries, including Canada, Russia, Nigeria and Afghanistan. The American investors include Robert Herjavec, Kevin O'Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin Harrington, and Daymond John.

The Forgotten is a Jerry Bruckheimer series about a group of dedicated amateur sleuths who attempt to solve cases involving unknown victims. Stars Rupert Penry-Jones, Reiko Aylesworth, Michelle Borth, Bob Stephenson, Anthony Carrigan and Rochelle Aytes.

Hank is a comedy starring Kelsey Grammer as a titan of industry who suddenly finds himself unemployed, almost broke and forced to spend time with his wife (Melinda McGraw) and kids. But he believes that he on the road back to greatness.

The Middle stars Patricia Heaton in a comedy about a middle class family just trying to keep their heads above water.

Modern Family is described by ABC this way: "Today's American families come in all shapes and sizes. Shot from the perspective of an unseen documentary filmmaker, this comedy takes a modern look at the complications that come with being a family in 2009." Stars Ed O'Neil, Sofa Vergara, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Eric Stonestreet, Ty Burrell, Julie Bowen, Sarah Hyland, Rico Rodriguez, Nolan Gould, and Ariel Winter.

Cougar Town marks Courtney Cox's return to network TV. She plays a 40-something recently divorced woman forced to face the truths about dating and aging.

Eastwick is a series adaptation of the 1987 movie. Three women are drawn together by a mysterious man who unleashes unsuspected powers in them. Cast includes Rebecca Romijn, Lindsay Price, Jamie Ray Newman and Canadian Paul Gross.

Flash Forward is a science fiction series in which a mysterious event causes everyone in the world to black out for two minutes and experience a glimpse of their lives in the near future – if they're still alive then. Stars Joseph Fiennes, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Sonya Walger, and Courtney B. Vance, and produced by David S Goyer and Brannon Braga.

V is a remake of the 1980's mini-series about Earth's first encounter with an alien race – a race which wants to have us for dinner. Stars Elizabeth Mitchell, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Lourdes Benedicto and Moreno Baccarin as the alien leader named Anna in this version.

The Deep End deals with four young lawyers who are accepted as associates in one of the most prestigious law firms in Los Angeles and find they must work together to survive even as they are forced to compete as they find themselves in the middle of a power struggle between the firm's founder and the senior partner. Stars include Clancy Brown, Billy Zane, Leah Pipes, Tina Marjorino, and Ben Lawson.

Copper is a Canadian made series from Canwest dealing with five rookie cops plunged into the world of big city policing. No cast has yet been announced.

Happy Town is about Haplin, Minnesota. When the first serious crime in seven years takes place it starts to reveal the dark secrets of the town. Cast includes Amy Acker, Dean Winters Jay Paulson, Robert Wisdom and Sam Neill.

Comments:

I'm really getting behind when it comes to getting these upfront articles out. Stuff keeps interfering.

Maybe the biggest move the biggest move that ABC has made for the coming season is the decision to move Ugly Betty to Friday nights. Conventional wisdom suggests that this is a vote of non-confidence from the network, and that may be right, however there seems to be a renewed effort on the part of NBC, ABCm FOX and The CW to program scripted material onto the night. Why should CBS - which has consistently been successful on Fridays - have the night all to itself?

ABC has been in bad shape and I have to say that this line-up doesn't help them out that much. They seem to be making a big push with their Wednesday sitcoms but the question I have to ask is how many of them will stick. There's some great talent there – Grammer, Heaton, Cox, O'Neill –but whether they'll be able to create a niche for themselves is another question. The competition, much of it from established shows, looks to be formidable.

Give my normal antipathy to sitcoms I'm more interested in the hour-long dramas. Mainly I want to focus on the shows that will be starting September. If I were to single out one as being the most interesting for me, I would probably say Flash Forward just because the concept is just so mysterious in a way that reminds me of what Lost has become. That said, I really don't understand the decision to put it into this time slot. True, Thursday is a showcase time slot, but there really doesn't seem to be the proper "fit" between this show and the Grey's Anatomy-Private Practice combo. Something like Eastwick or The Forgotten would seem, on the surface at least, to be a better fit for the night. The Forgotten seems like the most conventional of the three hour-long dramas debuting in September. I hate to say it, but it seems to be a typical Jerry Bruckheimer series. There's nothing wrong with that – I like a lot of Bruckheimer's shows, including the sadly cancelled Eleventh Hour – but it doesn't look like it breaks new ground and frankly I've come to expect "groundbreaking" material from ABC. While I doubt that I fit into the target demographic of Eastwick, I will probably watch at least a few episodes purely because of the presence of Paul Gross.

Looking at the mid-season shows, there is some interesting material there. We've seen V before of course, but the question any time you do a remake is whether you can bring out some element that makes it stand out from the original series. Battlestar Galactica had it; Bionic Woman didn't and Knight Rider was even worse than the original. From the description The Deep End remind me a bit of LA Law. The question for me is how much the conflict and in-fighting between the firm's senior partners will play into the series. Perhaps the most interesting of the mid-season shows is Happy Town in part because the network promotions are linking it to Twin Peaks. While I don't expect it to be a "new" Twin Peaks I wouldn't be surprised if it has some of the mysterious vibe that the older show had. The one show that holds no interest for me is Copper. The description seems very derivative of the old series The Rookies. Of course I am somewhat prejudiced because I have a poor opinion of many of the shows that Canwest-Global has produced in Canada.

Shark Tank as a formula that has had extensive success worldwide. While I think the concept should work in the US market even in this economy (or maybe especially in this economy), I'm not fully convinced the show will work during the main Fall-Winter season particularly when it is up against NCIS, Biggest Loser or even So You Think You Can Dance.

Too Unusual For Me

Sometimes you run into a show that sort of reminds you of another show but is totally different from that show. For reasons that I can't really explain beyond the setting in the detective's part of a New York police precinct, The Unusuals reminds me of NYPD Blue sort of, kind of, in a way, but not really. I get the feeling that this is going to be hard to explain. And that, somehow, seems oddly appropriate.

Pilot episodes are inevitably about introducing characters and setting up the premise for the show, and the pilot of The Unusuals is no different. We first meet Detective Casey Schraeger when she's posing as a street hooker in a "John sting." Her career as a Vice cop comes to a sudden and surprising end when a supposed client comes up. He's Sergeant Harvey Brown, who runs the detectives unit at the 2^nd Precinct. He needs a new homicide cop since one of his cops has just been murdered – as in the body was only found a few minutes ago. Casey's the replacement. As we'll discover it's not as random a choice as it seems. The first person that Casey meets at the precinct is her new partner, Jason Walsh. Walsh is in the process of "sanitizing" his old partner's locker to get rid of stuff that his wife – not to mention Internal Affairs – would find objectionable. And there's a lot that would upset both the widow and the investigators. Our initial impression of the late Detective Kowalski is that he was a corrupt cop who wasn't very good about hiding the drugs he stole, or the cash that he got as pay offs or the girls he had on the side. They go to see his wife, who knows that Kowalski had at least one mistress but loved him in spite of it all. She tells them that there had been some mysterious hang-up calls. Walsh and Casey then go to visit the mistress, who greats them at the door wearing a bra, panties and a smile – she thinks they're the pizza guy. Walsh makes it very clear that she's not to attend the funeral, and pays her off with money that he found in Kowalski's locker.

By the time that Walsh and Schraeger get back to the precinct they've missed the morning meeting where we meet the rest of the detective squad. This includes partners Eric Delahoy and Leo Banks. Banks constantly wears a bullet-proof vest. This seems to be because he's 42 and most of the men in his family die when they hit 42 – usually by accident. Banks figures that he's in a high risk occupation so he'd better not take any chances. Delahoy is the exact opposite of Banks in that he seems to court danger. We know that this is because he has a brain tumor and has no intention of treating it since he figures that if he gets treatment he'll end up only delaying the inevitable. No one else in the squad knows this of course. The other detectives are Henry Cole, a born again Christian who will pray at the drop of a hat, Eddie Alvarez, who speaks of Eddie Alvarez in the third person and hijacks any opportunity to get himself into the public eye, and Allison Beaumont who seems to be the most normal one of the lot. She fills Casey in about some of the quirks of the others, including the fact that Walsh doesn't stare at her boobs like the rest of the guys, which is different but kind of suspicious because she's got great boobs.

Naturally Eddie Alvarez makes Eddie Alvarez the lead detective in investigating Kowalski's murder, because cop killings are high profile cases and that means publicity for Eddie Alvarez. Not that Sgt. Brown is disagreeing too loudly. I suppose that's because he knows that Walsh is going to be investigating no matter what he says, and he's smart enough to derail Eddie Alvarez and Eddie Alvarez's theory – that it was a random attack. The first lead they track down from the contents of Kowalski's locker is a storage space the cop, who lived in the Bronx had in Brooklyn. There had been a fire in the locker, but much of the stuff didn't burn. There was plenty there. Kowlaski had been keeping files on his fellow cops. What he knew about Walsh is that he had been a baseball player with the Yankees at least for a short time (long enough to get his own baseball card at least), but the big surprise is about Cole. He is linked somehow to someone called Navan Granger who stole an armoured car out in the Midwest. When Walsh, con his own, confronts Cole about it, Cole admits that he in fact was Navan Granger but that he hadn't been able to break into the armoured car to get the money and that the experience had led to him being born again. Then they went after the person who has been calling and hanging up on Kowalski's wife, a 16 year-old drug dealer that Kowalski busted. They figured that he had motive, but it turns out that the kid is in a wheelchair and the elevator at his apartment building, where he lives with his mother, was out of order, so even if he wanted to kill Kowalski he couldn't. And he most assuredly didn't want to kill Kowalski because after the accident that put the kid in the chair Kowalski had become something of an unofficial big brother for him, taking him to Yankees games and helping him get his GED.

Figuring that if Kowalski had mentored one kid he might have tried to help others, Walsh and Casey look through some of his cases. They find a guy named Leon Wu who had been arrested by Kowalski along with Wu's brother. After the brother died in Joliet, Kowalski wrote a letter of recommendation for Leon's early release. Someone resembling Leon was seen leaving the scene of Kowalski's murder. So the detectives head off to arrest Wu – or at least confront him – along with a SWAT Team. However Banks is so terrified at the prospect of going through the door against a heavily armed guy that he loses it and just can't go in. We later see him emptying his guts into a garbage can. The cops go in and shots are fired, with Casey eventually gunning down Wu. But did Leon Wu kill Kowalski? It's made pretty clear that he didn't because we see Cole slipping Kowalski's gun and badge into a hole in the wall at Wu's place and then "suddenly" discovering them. But of course no one bothered to ask how or why the files in Kowalski's storage space got torched, and more specifically how Leon Wu could get at them.

The "B" plot in the episode concerns Banks and Delahoy. They're called out to a city councilman's house, supposedly to investigate a threat against his daughter. As it turns out it has nothing to do with the guy's daughter...someone has killed his cat and "obviously" it is meant as a warning/threat directed at him. Banks and Delahoy refrain from telling this guy what he can do with his cat and his threat – he is one of the people who votes on the NYPD budget after all – and go off to find out who killed the councilman's cat. Outside, they notice a lot of notices about cats who have disappeared with rewards posted. Maybe there's something more than meets the eye here and it isn't just related to the councilman. Looking around the neighbourhood they find a guy trying to stuff a cat into a bowling bag. Clearly this is the guy they're after (because anyone who knows cat's knows that stuffing a cat into a bowling bag is a good way to get your arm shredded). And so they give chase. They chase him into the subway and Delahoy follows him across one of the tracks when he sees a train coming. Figuring that this was a better way to go than a brain tumour he stands there waiting for the train to hit him. It stops within inches of hitting him. Meanwhile Banks has stopped the cat-killer in the next train, using a taser so he doesn't risk contact with the guy who might someone kill him. Once they get the guy back to the precinct they start interrogating him. They use the old "photocopier as a lie detector" trick (with an all-in-one printer instead) that some of the more knowledgeable reviewers link back to The Wire and Homicide: Life On The Street, but I've never seen The Wire. This gets him to admit some of the things he's done, but they get him to break by spraying him with something to attract cats and sticking him in a cruiser filled with them. Turns out his wife had lost their unborn child as a result of a disease she caught as a result of cleaning a cat litter box.

A major theme in the show is the secrets and mysteries that the cops have. These are the things that Kowalski was collecting. Some we know, like Banks and his fear of dying at 42 like the rest of the men in his family, Delahoy and his brain tumour. Delahoy's resulting death wish leads to him going into the raid on Wu without a bulletproof vest. (The real mystery with Delahoy is how he survives: the subway train stopping within inches of him; a shotgun blast from Wu, fired at point-blank range, misses him entirely but leaves a pattern on the wall of a human body with a halo – seeing it Cole says "Jesus.") Some are well hidden. Walsh was a New York Yankee but why did he become a cop, and why does he "run" a deli (that he lives behind) where he only cooks when he feels like it and whatever he, and not the customer, wants? As for Casey, she has a secret she's desperate to protect. She's rich, or at least her family is. We get hints of it throughout the episode – her mom calls her claiming that the maid is stealing from her; Eddie Alvarez's girlfriend recognizes Casey from a high end prep school, and Casey makes it abundantly clear that if she tells Alvarez, Casey will reveal every little secret about her to him – before the big reveal at her father's birthday party. (And a special tip of the hat for the casting of Chris Sarandon as Casey's father. He's the husband of Joanna Cassidy who played her mother. Of course if Monty Hall – Cassidy's father – shows up as Casey's grandfather it will be too much of an in-joke.) Turns out that the fact that her family's rich, and that she was booted out of six private schools and dropped out of Harvard to become a cop is exactly why Brown wants her to help him clean up his squad. Because of all that, she can't be corrupted.

I can't really recommend this show, based on the pilot (and that may explain why it has taken me so long to crank this review out). A press release from ABC claims that the show is, "like a modern day M*A*S*H that explores both the grounded drama and comic insanity of the world of New York City police detectives." I don't see it. ABC has hyped this series as a "dramedy." I really don't see the "...medy" part either. The writers are clearly going for a black humour sort of comedy which is apparent from the Banks and Delahoy characters. The idea of partnering the vaguely suicidal Delahoy – who presumably wants to die in the line duty so that his badge will be retired (as explained by Walsh at the wake for Kowalski badges get passed from officer to officer until the badge "kills" its owner) – with Banks, who is obsessed with staying alive to the point where he constantly wears a bulletproof vest and becomes physically ill at the prospect of going through a door presumably struck the writers as funny, but it didn't work for me. The way that Delahoy survives certain death – when he's nearly hit by the train and when Wu shoots him – seems to fit in the same sort of black comedy mould. Eddie Alvarez reminds me of Frank Burns from M*A*S*H, the character that you absolutely know will be the butt of every joke in the precinct. The business of Walsh running his deli when he felt like it, and feeding his customer whatever weird combinations that he wanted (food that no one but he could possibly stomach), felt tremendously forced. Making the character of Casey Schraeger a rich girl hiding the fact that she's wealthy to be "one of the guys" is frankly rather trite. As for the "dram..." part of the show that was probably a bit better but not by much. The contrast between the serious case of tracking down Kowalski's killer and the "comedy" case of tracking down the cat killer didn't work for me.

Turning to the acting, I'm not really impressed. None of the four principal actors – Amber Tamblyn as Casey, Jeremy Renner as Walsh, Adam Goldberg as Delahoy, and Harold Perrineau as Banks really didn't impress me either. In Tamblyn's case, she's meant to be something of a blank slate, without any of the quirks that has left the precinct in disarray. Renner basically has a weary, deadpan quality about the way that he plays Walsh. It's fine and probably works for the character but it doesn't excite me. He seems bland. Goldberg's Delahoy is brash, loud and annoying to me but the truth is I've never really been a fan of Adam Goldberg's so I'm prejudiced. The one actor that I really didn't mind was Harold Perrineau. The fear of dying that Banks has is irrational and mostly only somewhat less annoying than Goldberg's Delahoy. However there was that one moment when Banks broke down to his partner about not being able to go through the door that worked for me, and that was largely due to Perrineau being able to really make us feel the terror that Banks had of dying in that situation.

I'm more disappointed with The Unusuals than I probably have a right to be. I suppose it's because at some level I bought into the hype that ABC built up for this show and it really doesn't work all that well in my opinion. My hope is that it will improve with time; that they can make the characters more dynamic and the quirkiness at once more realistic and less heavy handed. That's my hope. My expectation is that the show will continue on the course that was set in the pilot, and that's a shame because there are better shows out there than what I saw in the first episode of The Unusuals, including a number that look like they're going to be cancelled, and while I'll keep watching the show for a while in the probably vain hope that it will improve, I much rather be devoting my time to the shows that I really prefer.

Who Knew?

I mean seriously. Who'd have thought that you were more likely to get hurt on a show like Dancing With The Stars than on Survivor?

I think I've been pretty good in not writing about reality shows this year – this calendar year that is – and believe me it's been pretty hard. I mean there's a part of me that has been dying to express my opinion about "Coach" on Survivor (a real blowhard), how the group that Ramsay himself says is the best bunch of contestants ever to appear on Hell's Kitchen still can't cook the bleeping risotto, how the great challenges on The Amazing Race are exceeded only by the colourful locals – who frequently behave like they've been indulging in the local potables – who smile and laugh at the crazy Americans, or how one of my favourite poker players – Annie Duke – has so annoyed Joan Rivers (and therefore endeared herself to us all in the process) that Rivers compared her to Mussolini. But until now I've been holding off, holding my fire for the really bad reality shows that are going to be filling the summer schedule. (Okay, so I'm going to have to make an exception for Chopping Block. The host – Marco Pierre White – was Ramsay's first boss and made Gordon f'ing Ransay cry! And he has the pictures – in his autobiography – to prove it! How can you not write about that!!) Still I can't let the spate of injuries that have plagued the cast of Dancing With The Stars pass without some notice.

Let's face it. You'd expect people to get hurt on a "macho" show like Survivor. They're out there, isolated in the wilderness fending for themselves and then competing in those competitions where people are running and grabbing at each other, so obviously they must be getting hurt. What could happen on a "girly" show like Dancing With The Stars beyond the occasional blister on your heel thanks to an ill-fitting dancing pump?

Ah, but you would be wrong my friends. Looking at the list of serious dance related injuries – injuries that either involved broken bones, forced contestants (celebrities or pros) to leave the show before or during the competition or required them to have surgery after the show – on Dancing With The Stars and you come up with an interesting list:

• Cristián de la Fuente – ruptured tendon in left bicep; kept dancing but needed surgery after show ended. Season 6.
  
• Misty May-Treanor
  – ruptured Achilles Tendon during in rehearsal; forced to withdraw from show. Season 7.
  
• Susan Lucci – apparently sprained ankle during rehearsal; in fact she had broken two bones in her right foot. Season 7.
  
• Lance Bass – broken toe. Season 7.
  
• Jewel – initially diagnosed with tendonitis, later discovered she had broken her tibias in both legs during practice; unable to dance. Season 8.
  
• Nancy O'Dell – torn meniscus in one knee; surgery required. Season 8.
  
• Karina Smirnoff – professional dancer, suffered neck injury requiring surgery. Season 6.
  

This doesn't include a number of other injuries that weren't serious enough to need surgery, illnesses, or events that injured participants outside of the context of the competition:

• Li'l Romeo – injured his leg playing basketball; replaced by his father Master P. Season 2.
  
• Marie Osmond – fainted while the judges were critiquing her during a live performance show. Season 5.
  
• Jane Seymour – food poisoning resulted in her missing a results show. Season 5
  
• Kristi Yamaguchi – injured ankle; did not affect her participation on the show. Season 6.
  
• Kim Kardashian – cut her foot on a piece of broken mirror in her hotel room day before being named as a contestant; doctors okayed her to participate. Season 7.
  
• Jeffrey Ross – suffered a scratched cornea in his left eye during rehearsals; didn't last long enough to know if it would have taken him out. Season 7
  
• Brooke Burke – injured foot during camera blocking rehearsal. Season 7.
  
• Maurice Greene – hyper-extended leg during rehearsal for group Paso Doble. Season 7.
  
• Kym Johnson - professional dancer, hyper-extended leg during rehearsals. Season 3.
  
• Mark Balas – professional dancer, dislocated shoulder during encore dance. Season 5.
  
• Derek Hough – professional dancer, injured neck while rehearsing a routine for the results show; forced to miss that night's results show. Season 6.
  
• Derek Hough – professional dancer, suffered food poisoning after drinking a protein shake. Season 6.
  
• Karina Smirnoff – professional dancer, suffered left ankle sprain in rehearsals morning of performance. Season 7.
  
• Derek Hough – professional dancer, blacked out after tripping and hitting his head. Taken to hospital but cleared to continue dancing. Season 7.
  
• Julianne Hough – professional dancer, initially thought to be suffering a bad stomach ache, she was subsequently diagnosed with Endometriosis and was required to have surgery to remove her appendix; missed two weeks of dancing. Season 7.
  

Compare that with serious injuries on Survivor (same definition as for Dancing With The Stars):

• Michael Skupin – fainted while attempting to start a fire and fell into the fire, suffering severe burns to his hands; evacuated from the show and had to have surgery. Season 2.
  
• Jonathon Penner – suffered a puncture wound to his knee, which became infected; evacuated. Season 16.
  
• James Clement – suffered an injury to his finger which the medical team monitored; when the risk of infection spreading to the joint of his finger was deemed too great he was evacuated. Season 16.
  

That's it. While seven people have either broken bones, been forced to withdraw or had to undergo surgery during their time on Dancing With The Stars as a direct result of events that took place on the show or in rehearsals for the show, only three people on Survivor have suffered injuries that were serious enough to get them taken off the show.

The big question is, "why is this happening?" The initial reaction was that the professional dancers were forcing their celebrity partners to practice too hard and for too many hours. According to the show's executive producer Conrad Green, speaking to People Magazine the truth may be quite the opposite: "This is now three fit women, if you include Misty May-Treanor from last season, who had to withdraw from the show. Perhaps people who are fitter throw themselves into it with more wild abandon. I really feel for them and we may need to take a look at [how hard people train] in the future." In other words it is the celebrities, and in particular the fittest of the celebrities, who are driving themselves to over-train for this competition.

There are other aspects at work however. Starting in the fourth season of the show, training time was reduced from six weeks to four. According to The Ballroom Dance Channel
blog the logical result of this is that with less time to learn the same number of steps and routines the celebrities – in particular the most competitive ones, who are often also the fittest – are going to drive themselves to do more, often at the risk of injury. The blog includes an interesting statement by amateur latin dancer and blogger Tonya Plank: "I mean, for the average serious beginner, you'd probably take two hours of intense private lessons per week, then about 10-15 hours of less intense, more social-dance-oriented group classes, and about three or four hours a week on your own. So, they are basically spending about a quarter of the time each day training that these DWTS competitors are." Plank also stated that to achieve the level that Dancing With The Stars wants from the celebrities – what's known as "Open Gold" level – usually takes two to four years for most people, and the celebrities on the show are required to achieve that sort of level in not one but two very different disciplines, which most dancers don't attempt.

Pro-am competitor Jerry Bowman explained his normal training routine involves 45 minute training sessions. There are two types of open –choreographed – competition. One of these involves groups and is what is normally seen on television. The other is a "showcase routine" which sounds very much like what is done on Dancing With The Stars: "This is danced with just you and the pro taking the whole floor and being judged on a graded scale with judges comments. This is a choreographed routine that usually has been put together for an exhibition show hosted by the local studio. It then gives an opportunity for the student and teacher to get feedback on the routine. Because these are done for an exhibition/recital type program and are usually more involved then about 20 sessions are used to prepare the routine." Bowman also mentioned that he personally usually spends as much time on his own practicing the routine, at least for the Open Routines (the group dances). He doesn't specifically mention the Showcase Routines, but assuming that he maintains the same routine for those that would mean roughly 30 hour in total spent training for a Showcase Routine, spread over a period of time. And he is an experienced dancer.

So what is the answer for Dancing With The Stars. While Conrad Green seems to suggest that limits should be imposed on the celebrities the editor at the Ballroom Dance Channel blog suggests that the answer might be to give participants more preparation time – at least in terms of the number of weeks that are available for them to work in – would certainly be helpful. In fact the two ideas could work together; an extended preparation period with limits on the total number of hours that could be spent preparing. On the othe hand this might work against the weaker competitors. I'm just guessing but I think that Steve Wozniak is in greater need of practice than Denise Richards or Ty Murray.

One thing is for sure, after the spate of injuries that Dancing With The Stars has had over the years the degree of fitness needed to do well on this show shouldn't be questioned. It's about more than fancy steps and hard-bodied women dressed a few strategically place feathers and sequins – though Lord know, the latter is why I watch!

On The Sixth Day Of Christmas

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me – six male characters I enjoy.

I did this last year and it seemed to work out pretty well. In fact I think it worked out better than I expected it would considering that it was a last minute addition to the list. What I'm talking about is characters rather than actors. True, there are cases where it is the actor who really makes the character, where no one could ever imagine someone other than who was chosen playing the role. Then there are characters who may not be "actor-proof" but into whom an actor grows. After a while you may come to think that no one else could do the role but that's because you identify the character with the actor and vice-versa. Think of this sort of role as being an off the rack suit rather than one that is made to measure. And so with that as a preface here's my list:

• Charlie Crews (Life): One of the holdovers from last year and for good reason – I want people to watch this show! The reason I want people to watch this show is the performance of the two leads, Damien Lewis and Sarah Shahi, who is going to be on the list of female characters in a couple of days. Crews is a perfect example of an "off the rack" role. While I won't say that any actor could play the part, it's also not a part that could only be filled by Damien Lewis. In fact because Lewis is British, it's probably a role that he is less suited for than many actors. And yet Damien Lewis has made Crews his own. While Charlie's quirks and what might be called "personality tics" are largely the product of the writers, it is Lewis who takes those qualities and with his mode of speaking and his body language turns them into a believable character.
  
• Jack Donaghy (30 Rock): I can't remember the last time I actually watched an episode of 30 Rock (the first time I saw it I was very turned off by the character of Tracy Morgan) but I know and appreciate just how good this show is. A large part of it is due to the ensemble cast but the standouts are Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin. I don't know that Donaghy is the role that Baldwin was born to play but I do think that there is no one else who could play Donaghy.
  
• Patrick Jane (The Mentalist): I've recently been somewhat dismissive of The Mentalist because the series seems to be a "safe" approach for CBS. Still Simon Baker invests Patrick Jane with a number of qualities that make him stand out. I recently read an interview in which Baker stated that in his interpretation Jane is "full of self-loathing and incredibly self-deprecating." In his view, the death of Jane's wife and daughter shaped the character by taking away just about everything in his life. It's shown in his clothes which are worn and his shoes which are worn out. It indicates that since the death of his wife and daughter, "he gave up on his physical appearance." As Baker puts it, "Jane really has nothing left to live for, except for a form of revenge and justice, and his own take on what justice is." While The Mentalist may be a safe show for CBS, following a format that is episodic and therefore eminently repeatable, the way that his personality is presented makes Patrick Jane one of the more complicated characters around.
  
• Walter Bishop (Fringe): Walter Bishop stands out in a different way from Patrick Jane. While the fact that Jane has largely given up on living except for his determination to avenge his family, Walter Bishop is a mass to personality quirks that are blatantly obvious to the viewer. It's largely due to his insanity of course; Walter is quite literally a mad scientist. Although the role of Walter Bishop is one that abounds with opportunities to chew the scenery, John Noble invests him with a considerable amount of humanity. In a very real way Walter is almost a child, alternately naive and knowing, callous and caring. A very enjoyable portrayal.
  
• Dave Williams (Desperate Housewives): Villains are often the juiciest roles for an actor and in Dave Williams, Neal McDonough has found good one. On the surface Dave seems like a personable fellow out to make friends and help people. It's all part of a massive plot of course. While retaining his "nice guy" exterior, Dave has run Mrs. McCluskey out of her home, killed his former psychiatrist, started a fire in a night club to cover the murder that killed six or seven people, and framed Porter Scavo for the murder. The reasons for his actions have slowly been revealed. Initially it came out that he was seeking revenge against one of the husbands of Wisteria Lane. Narrowing it down slightly it was mentioned that the person he was after had killed someone in prison. Most recently it was revealed that – like Patrick Jane – Dave is seeking to avenge the death of his wife and daughter. In this case the vengeance will not simply be the death of the person (and I'm not going to mention who if only to avoid the wrath of the spoiler haters) he holds responsible for the death of his family but rather to inflict suffering on this man of the likes that he himself suffered.
  
• Gil Grissom (CSI): I've always liked William Petersen's performance as Grissom but with the announcement that Petersen would be leaving the series in the middle of this season, the producers seem to have made a very deliberate effort to focus storylines on Grissom. He's been made to appear increasingly melancholy and the producers have delved into his relationships with both the people he works with and people outside of his life who are important to him like Sara and Lady Heather. There's a telling moment at the beginning of the season when Grissom asks the psychologist played by Alex Kingston whether dogs can adopt the emotions of their owners that really lets us know that for whatever reason – most likely that Sara has left – Grissom is increasingly dissatisfied by where he is. It is perhaps fitting that it is his closest confidant, Catherine Willows, with whom he first confides his intention to leave. It is also fitting that she knows him so well that she can say that she knew he was going even before he did. In spite of the fact that they have never been physically intimate their connection is on a very intimate level. The past half season or so of the series has provided viewers with some of the most revealing glimpses of Grissom ever in the show.
  

On The Fourth Day Of Christmas

On the fourth day of Christmas my true love – Television – gave to me... four shows from last season that I wish were still on this season.

Okay, first of all this isn't the "fourth day of Christmas" post that I had originally planned. What I did have planned was a series of gripes about Canadian TV and the difficulties that being a Canadian imposed on people who love TV – like the fact that the best premium cable, and some basic cable, shows don't show up on basic cable here for months or years after they air in the United States. I could have reviewed Deadwood and Rome, but what would be the point; they had already been cancelled. And please don't ask me to subscribe to the premium channels to see these shows unless you are willing to provide me with a guaranteed $28 each and every month to pay for them. And don't even get me started on people who embed HULU clips on their websites that I can't see because I'm not an American. At least HULU tells me up front. Some other sources make me watch a commercial first and then tell me.

I know, this all sounds a bit self-centered. More to the point writing it was increasingly difficult for me, so I dropped it, but what to replace it with. I very nearly wrote "On the fourth day of Christmas my true love – Television – gave to me... nothing at all." I think I could have spun that into a piece about the industry but it kind of loses the numerical flavour. But then I thought of a great old standby, the "wrongly" cancelled show. Networks have all kinds of reasons for cancelling shows of course but in the light of what we got from them instead, maybe they shouldn't have been so hasty with what they did dump.

Moonlight – CBS: CBS cancelled a show that usually finished first in its timeslot and replaced it with The Ex-List. More to the point they cancelled a show about a vampire in love with a human (and vice versa) six months before ($150 million gross in four weeks), and less than four months before HBO put True Blood on the air. Yeah I know there were fan protests, and I know that after what happened with Jericho (which the network totally mishandled, but that's beside the point) CBS might be just a little wary of on a show that might be described as a "cult favourite," but come on, can anyone really say that the show wouldn't have performed better than The Ex-List? No, I didn't think so.

Women's Murder Club – ABC: This was the show that was usually on opposite Moonlight an alternated winning the time slot with it. The show, about four women involved in the criminal justice system – a cop, a coroner, an assistant district attorney, and a reporter – did reasonably well in the ratings and was one of the few new ABC shows to come back after the Writers Strike, and did so with little apparent erosion in the ratings. The show was not the unanimous critical success that Pushing Daisies or to a lesser extent Dirty Sexy Money and Eli Stone were, but in terms of audience numbers it was close to the latter two series. The time slot might have hurt it; Grey's Anatomy on Thursday night might have been a better fit for the show than 20/20 or the weak and often moved Men In Trees. Certainly Women's Murder Club would have done better coming out of Grey's Anatomy than Big Shots did last season or Life On Mars did this season.

Las Vegas – NBC: Yeah, I know it was expensive, and yeah I know that it was coming to the end of its string but it was one of the great "guilty pleasures" and it deserved to be treated better than NBC treated it in what turned out to be the final not quite a season. Particularly when you remember that this season NBC had Crusoe, My Own Worst Enemy and Knight Rider, none of which can be classified as "great guilty pleasures."

1 vs. 100 – NBC: This one was really hard to decide on. There are a lot of people who would have said Journeyman but it wasn't a show that I saw much of, and I could make arguments for FOX's New Amsterdam (because I liked the concept; it reminded me a bit of Highlander) or Shark (because it's fun to watch James Woods chew scenery), the CW's Aliens In America (which I never saw, but had good ratings – well good by CW standards – until it came back from the strike and let's face it the CW needs all the help they can get). In theory at least I could even make a case for the CW's Life Is Wild on the grounds that it was closer to family fare than most of what is on any network and even at its worst in terms of ratings it did way better than all of the MRC shows that the CW put on combined. But no, I went with a game show, 1 vs. 100 and I did it because as game shows go it was more knowledge based than something like Deal Or No Deal and despite all of the tinkering that NBC did with the scoring system (instead of money levels for each question where you got that amount for each mob member eliminated they changed it to ten levels were you had to eliminate ten mob members to collect that amount of money) and the composition of "the Mob" (putting permanent mob members in, some of whom wouldn't have survived the old system – I'm looking at you Dahm Triplets and you Oscar the Grouch) it was always an enjoyable show to watch.

Short Lived ‘60s Shows

I saw the following video over on Mark Evanier's site the other day and it was extremely evocative for me. Mark mentions that he remembers watching all of the shows mentioned except for the one starring Bob Goulet. Well, I don't remember as many but I do remember Blue Light, the show which starred Robert Goulet.

I'll go into detail about a lot of the shows after the video, but first a general observation. All of the series mentioned here are from ABC and CBS – nothing from NBC. To me, it seems slightly surprising that a lot of the shows I remember from my childhood come from ABC. You have to understand that in the 1960s ABC was the weakest of the "Big Three" networks by a long shot. To be sure they weren't as weak as they had been in the 1950s, thanks at least in part to being the home of most of the Quinn Martin series like The Untouchables and 12 O'Clock High but they weren't the powerhouse that they would become in the 1970s under Fred Silverman. It's easy to understand why Mark Evanier, growing up in Santa Monica would remember shows from all three of the networks including ABC, but I was growing up in a one channel city that wouldn't get a second channel for about five years, and that channel was, by law, the CBC. So why was I seeing what seems now to be an inordinate number of ABC series?

I don't know, maybe it's because I was in a one channel market that I saw these shows. When CFQC (the local channel) was licensed in 1954 it was a CBC affiliate, meaning it carried CBC shows but was privately owned – in this case by A.A. Murphy who also owned what until 1951 had been the only local radio station. As I understand it, while there were requirements for affiliates to carry most of the shows that the CBC ran they had a considerable amount of leeway over some of their own line-up. This was particularly true in the afternoon, where local stations often programmed their own kids shows in preference to what the CBC was offering, but I expect that there were evening slots that the local stations also programmed. In Saskatoon, for example, the Friday 9-11 p.m. time slot was always available for movies programmed locally. Probably other time slots were treated in the same way.

Of course it couldn't have been easy for a local station owner or manager, particularly in a place like Saskatoon, to buy programming for the local market. Rights would after all be held nationally, and besides the CBC there were two big rights holders. One was the CTV network – the one that we didn't get in Saskatoon until 1971. The other was a station called CHCH out of Hamilton which had dropped its CBC affiliation in 1961 because the CBC's Toronto station (owned and operated by the network) covered the Hamilton market. They didn't join CTV for exactly the same reason – that network's Toronto station covered Hamilton. What this meant of course was that CHCH would buy rights to American shows and own those rights for all of Canada, even though those shows would only be seen on those parts of Southern Ontario covered by CHCH. I guess that the only thing more frustrating than being a local station manager trying to get fresh American programming and having to deal with CTV, CHCH and the Americans was being a kid in a one station town buying the fall preview issue of TV Guide which in the 1960s only showed the new US Network shows, and thinking of these marvellous shows we couldn't see, like this space show call Star Trek. The station manager may have had a lot of headaches but he also had a lot of power in those stations. These days, with Canadian station ownership laws the way they are, the local station manager is probably supremely lucky if he can choose what colour his office is painted, but that's a story for another day.

Good Morning World. CBS Never saw it. Ronnie Schell is probably better known for playing Gomer Pyle's best friend PFC (and later Corporal) Duke Slater on Gomer Pyle USMC. His time on Good Morning World and earlier on That Girl fit between his two stints on Gomer Pyle. The show ran for a single 26 episode season.

I do remember ABC's O.K. Crackerby! with far more fondness than its meagre run really deserves. The great Burl Ives played O.K. Crackerby, an Oklahoma oil millionaire (because Texans were overdone even before Dallas) who is trying to break his kids into high society. A running gag on the show was Crackerby and his family – with new tutor St. John (pronounce – inevitably – "Sinjin") Quincy in tow – arriving at a swanky hotel and being denied service because they're too plebeian. At that point O.K. would call his head office (represented by one guy sitting near a computer) and within a few minutes Crackerby would own the hotel. If the place had been "The Sands" it would become "The Sands Crackerby." I suspect he made far more out of hotels that slighted him and his kids than he did out of oil. Ives, who had already won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1958's The Big Country would go on to be one of the stars of the anthology series The Bold Ones (with Joseph Campanella and James Farentino) but is probably best known (on TV at least) for being the voice of Sam the Snowman in the perennial Christmas special Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. The series was the first major role for actress Brooke Adams as Crackerby's daughter Cyntia.

CBS's version of Blondie is a show that I just barely remember. This was the second attempt to bring the comic strip to TV after it had had a significant run as a movie series. Although the show featured Will Hutchins from Sugarfoot and Patricia Harty from (the much than this) Occassional Wife, it is also the first series that Jim Backus did after Gilligan's Island and the only series that Backus did with his wife Henny Backus – she played Cora Dithers to his Julius Dithers.

I only have very vague memories of CBS's The Good Guys as well. If what I understand of the series is correct, this promo would seem to be from the second season – where Bob Denver's character stops working as a taxi driver and goes to work for Herb Edelman's character in the diner that he owns – but the intro (where the announcer says "Bob Denver looks like a winner") suggests that this is from the first season of the show. At least some of the episodes featured Alan Hale Jr. and Jim Backus although I'm unable to determine if they ever appeared on the show together (but it's probably a good bet that they did at least once).

I have no recollection of CBS's He & She so it probably didn't show up around here. The show sounds terrific. It not only featured Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as newlyweds, but also featured Jack Cassidy, Kenneth Mars (best known for his roles in Mel Brooks films, notably as Franz Leibkind, the writer of "Springtime For Hitler" in The Producers) and actor-singer Hamilton Camp (one of two actors to play H.G. Wells on Lois & Clark, but who is probably best remembered as Del Murdoch from a single episode of WKRP In Cincinnati – "Speed kills Del."). The show earned five Emmy nominations including one each for Prentiss, Benjamin and Cassidy and won the award for Outstanding Writing in Comedy...but by that time it had already been cancelled.

I liked to watch Major League Baseball, but the games I saw were on NBC and featured Curt Gowdy and Pee Wee Reese not on ABC. I don't think I ever saw "The King Family" on anything except someone else's show.

Off To See The Wizard seems to have been an umbrella title for family theatrical movies from MGM with 30 second introductory bits from the Wizard of Oz characters introducing the movie. Except of course that the movies were either cut to fit a one hour time slot, or cut in half and serialized. No wonder the series only lasted 20 episodes. Oh, and none of them were the original Wizard Of Oz. Thank goodness.

The Travels Of Jamie McPheeters is another ABC show I never saw. It did have a surprisingly strong cast including Dan Oherlihy, Charles Bronson and a young Kurt Russell. Also present for some episodes were four brothers named Osmond (Alan, Jay, Wayne & Merrill – no Donny).

I didn't see The Time Tunnel in its first run but I did see it later in syndication on CBC (that's where I also saw Star Trek the first time). The show was pure Irwin Allen cheese that could probably be done much better today if anyone had the mind to (which apparently someone did, though the pilot for a revival never did air). The big star was singer/actor James Darren (I always liked him though singers seem to think he should stick to acting and actors think he's a better singer) but it also starred Robert Colbert as the older more cautious man lost in time. Finally the show featured Lee Merriweather (who played Catwoman in the theatrical movie for the 1966 Batman series) and stupidly only showed her in a shapeless lab coat.

I never saw ABC's Honey West – probably much to my regret given the sexy nature of this trailer. Hey even at 9 I liked Diana Rigg, and at this age Anne Francis was almost as hot.

The Patty Duke promo is pretty generic. Besides mentioning her own show, which of course was a staple around here, she also mentions the debut of Batman. I did watch Batman and indeed was swept up in "Batmania" but around here the movie came before the TV series rather than being made during the show's run to capitalize on the success. The series showed up here in the Fall not as a mid-season replacement. The person who put this together was probably more interested in the Robert Goulet series Blue Light though. The show featured Goulet as an American who had renounced his citizenship and was working for the German Propaganda Ministry as a sort of American Lord Haw-Haw. In truth he was using his broadcasts to send intellignece to the Allies as well doing sabotage when necessary. Unfortunately seventeen members of the Blue Light operation had been killed, leaving only Goulet's character David March and his partner Suzanne Duchard (Christine Carère) alive. And because only his handlers actually know that he's working for the allies he's in danger not just from the Germans but also from the Resistance and his own side. Like O.K. Crackeby, another show that I really liked – when I was 10.