I Lost A Friend

A friend I never met died on Tuesday. Sam Johnson of Savannah Georgia was 42.

I was away from the computer for most of the day so it wasn't until a few minutes ago that I checked Ivan Shreve's blog, Thrilling Days Of Yesterday. When I read the top item a nasty chill ran through my body. Ivan had received the news of Sam's death from a commenter on his blog. Apparently Sam's older brother Anthony found him dead in his apartment.

Sam, along with Ivan and a handful of others was one of the first people that I encountered when I started this blog. In fact I can't remember when I first encountered Sam because the comments from before I went over to Haloscan seem to have disappeared. It doesn't matter. Sam always always knowledgeable and usually had something interesting to say when he commented on what I wrote.

The real revelation was when I started reading his blog. Sam's writing was more far ranging in subject matter than mine and touched on just about everything. I learned a lot about Sam and his life, the mother he loved and the father he hated, the illnesses that be battled, his love for working in radio which he only recently gave up, his feelings on life the universe and well, everything. He was an interesting writer and he could pull you in. What turned out to be his last post was an open letter to Miley Cyrus about how to treat his city. Sam had rules about how to behave in Savannah and you damned well better not disrespect his town.

Sam suffered from severe kidney failure. Every few days he went for dialysis which sometimes didn't always go as smoothly as it might have. He raised money for the National Transplant Assistance Fund Southeast Kidney Transplant Fund, and was hoping to get a transplant. He needed to lose some weight before he could get the transplant and of course he needed money to pay for it. As a Canadian the latter part breaks my heart. While Canada has one of the lowest rates of organ donation in the western world, cost would not be an impediment. Finding the kidney might, but for someone whose need – in terms of the seriousness of his case – was as great as Sam's the other impediments (money and the waiting list) probably wouldn't have been as great. For those of you who read this, maybe consider giving a bit of money in Sam's name either to the National Kidney Foundation in the United States, The Kidney Foundation in Canada, or to your local fund of the National Transplant Assistance Fund.

Sam Johnson loved radio, comic books, old cartoons on TV, bacon, and his town, and he had opinions on all of these subjects. I was interested in reading about what interested him. I'm really going to miss you Big Man.

TV Guide Fall Preview 1972 – The Comments

First up some comments from Todd Mason:

Actually, the bitter Serling line about NIGHT GALLERY was that it was "MANNIX in a shroud."

Me: I grabbed the Serling "Mannix in a cemetery" quote from Wikipedia (naturally). I should have expected Serling to come up with something better.

Leaving aside social pressures on the brass at CBS, the rationale for dumping BRIDGET LOVES BERNIE was presumably the amount of the audience BLB was losing from ALL IN THE FAMILY, a consideration that would, for example, later doom any number of NBC sitcoms on Thursday nights in the '80s into the '90s, good, bad and indifferent.

Me: I'd accept that point – which I think was the point that Mike Dann was trying to make – except for a couple of things. First of course is that Dann was wrong about the show hammocking because it did finish the year with a higher rating than Mary Tyler Moore. If you cancel Bridget Loves Bernie wouldn't you cancel MTM following the same logic? The second thing is probably a bit more important. The show finished in fifth place for the year, ahead of MTM and every other show on CBS except Maude and Hawaii Five-0. Even if you think that the show can't stand on its own without the lead-in of All In The Family, surely it seems too highly rated to not at least try to keep it in the line-up by moving it to another night (a modern example was CBS's decision to move Shark out of the post CSI timeslot on Thursday night to Sunday night; it had strong ratings on Thursday but died on Sunday, but at least the network tried). And given the fate of CBS's new comedies launched on Friday nights in September 1973 – Calucci's Department which was cancelled after 12 episodes and Roll Out! which lasted 13 – I think it's fair to say that a relocated Bridget Loves Bernie couldn't have done worse. So why wasn't it tried unless there was pressure on CBS to dump the show.

(Of course, any reason to dump David Birney is usually a good one, as ST. ELSEWHERE would later discover.)

Me: Not to mention Meredith Baxter

Serling had his own side project at about this time...his radio serial ZERO HOUR.

Me: Serling's writing would be perfect for radio.

Certainly, my Saturday nights didn't improve after the move of M*A*S*H back out of the 8:30 slot till 1975, when I was able to watch AITF, the placeholder CBS put in behind AITF, MTM, BOB NEWHART, BURNETT, MONTY PYTHON on the local PBS affiliate, and over to NBC for the first season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE or, every fourth week, WEEKEND. As a kid, a great if marathon night.

Me: That show at the start of the 1974-75 show would have been Paul Sand In Friends And Lovers. Not a show I ever warmed to, mostly because I couldn't stand Sand. It was replaced in the time slot by the All In The Family spin-off, The Jeffersons. Then the next season – 1975-76 – the FCC regulation on "The Family Hour" forced All In The Family to move to Monday nights at 9 p.m., which was deemed a "suitable" time for the show.

Todd caught this before I had a chance to post on the subject:

funny how memory goes. By the time SNL debuted in 1975, ALL IN THE FAMILY would've been moved to its Family-Friendly Monday slot, so it would've been an hour of relatively bland CBS programming, which I would still watch, before the MTM/BOB NEWHART/BURNETT/PYTHON/SNL (or WEEKEND) marathon for me.

Me: The thing about what I've dubbed as one of the greatest TV line-ups ever is that it only lasted for the 1973-74 season before the "broke up the Yankees" so to speak. The 1975-76 CBS Saturday schedule started with The Jeffersons, followed by Doc (starring Barnard Hughes), and then MTM, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett. Speaking of SNL there were actually two shows of that name in the Fall of 1975; the NBC late night show that everyone knows, and a primetime ABC variety show opposite The Jeffersons and Doc hosted by none other than Howard Cosell! I'm enough of a masochist to want to know what that show was like!

The attempt to humanize the M*A*S*H characters killed the comedy, as far as I was concerned. Sharp satire became often bland cuteness.

Me: Or worse, pretentious dramedy.
It's safe to say that the show changed significantly when Wayne Rogers and MacLean Stevenson left. Potter and BJ were interesting characters to be sure but they had what could probably be described as a more realistic quality. They also made Major Houlihan more human – more Margaret and less Hot Lips you might say – so that increasingly Frank Burns seemed out of place; like Yosemite Sam in a live action movie. Winchester was his "human" replacement. I'm not saying that he show didn't work with these changes because quite patently it did, but it was hugely changed (beyond effectively becoming the Alan Alda Show). However you are right that the sharp satire was gone. Maybe for satire to work it has to be largely populated with cartoon characters like the largely incompetent middle management bureaucratic (Colonel Blake), the hyper-efficient "secretary" (Radar), the by the book professional (Major Houlihan),and the gung-ho type with a little power and slightly less intelligence (Frank Burns), that the one or two "humans" (Hawkeye and Trapper) have to do battle with.

Next up more from "Mr. Television" Mike Doran:

The NBC replacement on Tuesday ... surprise, surprise - a movie! NBC had the biggest backlog of theatrical fims , and its long-standing sweetheart deal with MCA-Universal for TV movies, so when two hours opened up anywhere on the schedule, what could be easier? On other fronts, I was a liitle surprised that you didn't mention BANYON's replacement: Bobby Darin's variety show, brought back from the previous summer. The show fared badly and was dropped, and Darin's death followed not long thereafter (but I don't believe there was a connection). One other quick point: if you're wondering why there was so little about Robert Conrad's third of THE MEN, ASSIGNMENT: VIENNA, as opposed to the other two shows, that's because Conrad was a last-minute replacement for Roy Scheider, whose price went up dramatically when FRENCH CONNECTION became a huge boxoffice hit. It was probably still being retooled while ABC was putting the promo together. Back to the vaults now to await your next installment...

Me: Figures that NBC went with movies. Why bother to produce new shows when you can just slot in movies and probably get great ratings with them. And of course any new movies could be potential pilots for next year. Still, it kind of helps to explain why so much of NBC's product in the 1970s was – how should I put it – rather dismal.

The Bobby Darrin Show didn't get a mention because I really haven't been mentioning these short lived shows that often. I probably would have written more about it if I had remembered that he had died so soon after the show ended (about eight months later). And no, the TV work didn't have a connection to his death; it was a series of events starting with forgetting to take prescribe medication after dental work which led to blood poisoning, which led to damage to one of his heart valves which led to his eventual death.

I was wondering about the lack of material for Assignment: Vienna in the ABC preview show. The other two shows were given a lot of time in the show, and Jigsaw in particular looked interesting. Interesting to find this out about Roy Scheider. Twenty years later he wasn't so choosy about TV work (Seaquest DSV of course, a show which I'm sorry to say got progressively worse the longer it ran). It reminds me of the story of the Canadian version of Howdy Doody. The actor originally cast in the role of Timber Tom, James Doohan, wanted more money than the CBC was prepared to pay, so he had to be replaced. The eventual replacement wasn't available for the first week or so of the show so they brought in a temporary replacement named Ranger Bob...played by William Shatner.

And now a little conversation between Mike and Todd:

Mike: In the early to mid 70's ABC aired a program which was similar to Laugh In. It was so over the top it only lasted one episode. I sort of remember watching it. Do you have any idea what it was called?

Todd:
Mike, that was TURN ON. Only ott by the standards of a nervous ABC, but it was they who mattered.

Me: Turn-On was 1969 and Tim Conway, who was the guest host on the one and only episode, has dined out on this story ever since. He has always claimed that the show was cancelled midway through the episode. Not true, well not totally true. ABC officially dropped the show two days after it aired, but there were two local affiliates, in Cleveland and Denver, went to the first commercial break and didn't go back to the show, while some stations outside the Eastern Time zone simply refused to run the show at all while some stations that aired it told the network that they wouldn't be back the next week. To be fair to ABC (Me? Being fair to a network? Well bite my tongue!) this represented a mutiny by affiliates which makes the current business with NBC's Boston affiliate refusing to air the prime time Jay Leno show look minor by comparison. At the time station ownership was restricted to five stations per owner, so no network could afford to have stations dropping one of its shows so publicly. They could stand on principle and air a full 13 episode season on a dwindling network, or they could knuckle under and dump the show. Guess which one they chose? Turn-On was replaced by the squeaky clean King Family Show.

Turn-On was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, who had also created Laugh-In. They had previously offered the show to NBC and CBS, both of which rejected it. A CBS executive reportedly stated that, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." This may be a reference to Photsensitive Epilepsy. In 1977 Schlatter went on to do a revival of Laugh-In, sans Rowan and Martin. It too ran for one episode, largely on the strength of one of the cast members, Robin Williams, who between the time that the show was made and the episode was shown had became a superstar thanks to a little show called Mork & Mindy.

And now, some show themes. First up we have a persona favourite of mine, with music by Patrick Williams. Note the first guest star.

Next up, since we talked so much about it, here's the first couple of minutes of the very first episode of Bridget Loves Bernie. If nothing else, it's a pretty damned good cast. By the way, the pilot episode can be found, in three parts on YouTube.

Next week (or so) 1973. It wasn't the year 1972 was, but it wasn't too bad.

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.

Another Apology

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (and if you're not please, please do) know this already but for those of you who don't here goes. I was hoping to get a post on The Unusuals up on Friday, but I ran into a problem in that my Internet connection went out for most of the day, and given that it was Good Friday, I didn't even bother to try to call customer service (which is actually located here – stunning). So instead I did things that didn't involve the Net (and I confess that I loved it, at least as a change for a while). I suppose I should finish the Unusuals post today, but after that I'll probably revert to my regular post on the TV Guide Preview comments and save the reviews of Southland and Harper's Island for next week. In the case of Southland that's probably not such a bad idea, because I really need to get a better handle on that show. As for Harper's Island, it's still unviewed on the DVR (which desperately needs some content pruning and a DVR Expander, but will probably need another airing to get a real sense of it (but it features one of my favourite character actors, Jim Beaver, so that's a mark in its favour in my book). But this sort of thing (as well as what I laughingly call real life) is really throwing my TV reviewing out of whack.

1972 – The TV Guide Fall Preview

There are those who say that 1939 was Hollywood's "greatest year" or its "golden year." I know; I bought the book, Hollywood's Golden Year: 1939. It's not a thesis that I'm entirely willing to accept because it is my belief that there have been other years – before and after 1939 – when Hollywood achieved artistic and commercial high points. Similarly I don't wish to suggest that any given year was "TV's Golden Year" but I would suggest that if someone were to come up with a list of "Greatest Seasons," 1972-73 would be very near the top. Even some of the failures were in their own way brilliant. With the possible exception of NBC, 1972 was a hell of a good year for just about everyone, in particular the viewers.

Let's take a look at the network with the biggest problems first. On the surface it didn't look as though NBC was having problems. They debuted five new series in 1972 compared to seven each for CBS and ABC. The problem was that of the new shows only two stuck, and both of them needed major surgery to stay in the line-up. In addition three series that started the season ended their seasons in January 1973. One of these was Rod Serling's Night Gallery. By this point Serling had essentially disowned the series because his contributions were being ignored and his complaints to producer Jack Laird were essentially being ignored. By the final season Serling was so dissatisfied that he labelled the show "Mannix in a cemetery." The situation with Bonanza was even worse and very similar to what happened with Petticoat Junction. The death of Dan Blocker after the 1971-72 season seriously damaged the dynamics of the show – which had suffered a significant ratings loss the season before – and competition from the new CBS series Maude were enough to kill it. As for The Bold Ones, the shows fourth season retained only the New Doctors segment after going to two segments the previous season. It also lost John Saxon as one of the characters, who was "replaced" by Robert Walden (yeah, not really much of a replacement). It ran sixteen episodes and I'm going to suggest that maybe the quality of the scripts was hurt by having to have new scripts every week rather than every other week (or every third week in the first two seasons). Me, I preferred the episodes with Burl Ives and company.

As for the new shows that NBC had that season, the only two shows that got a second season were The Little People with Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares, and the Wednesday Mystery Movie. In The Little People Keith play a pediatrician working with his daughter in a practice in Hawaii. The show was a comedy and did well enough in the ratings to get renewed. However when the show was renewed the decision was made to add a couple of new characters, a child-hating and very proper doctor, played by Roger Bowen, and the woman who owned the clinic – and much of Hawaii – played by Nancy Kulp. This changed the focus from the relationship between the two doctors and their patients (and the patients' parents) to the conflicts between the adults. (They also changed the name of the show in that season to The Brian Keith Show) further distancing itself from the original intent of the series. The Wednesday Mystery Movie was an attempt to expand the Mystery Movie franchise. The original group of shows – Columbo, McCloud, and MacMillan & Wife – were moved to Sunday night. They were supplemented by a fourth show, Hec Ramsey which starred Richard Boone as a former gunfighter and lawman (who in one episode claimed that he once worked under the name Paladin) who had left the west to study modern (for 1900) methods of detection, stuff we now call forensics. The show lasted two seasons and died not because of poor ratings but because star Richard Boone had disagreements with the studio (that doesn't seem to be an uncommon thing with Richard Boone). The Wednesday Mystery Movie was entirely new. It featured three shows; Cool Millions with James Farentino as a globe-trotting private detective who charges a million dollars to take a case (back when a million dollars was big bucks), Madigan with Richard Widmark recreating his role from the 1968 movie of the same name (although in the movie, Madigan dies at the end), and Banacek with George Peppard as freelance insurance investigator out to stick it to the insurance company that his father had worked at for years before. Banacek ran for two years and was picked up for a third...until Peppard quit to keep his ex-wife Elizabeth Ashley from taking a large percentage of his income in her divorce settlement.

As for the rest of the NBC shows, Banyon, was 1930s period piece starring Robert Forster as the title character and '30s movie star Joan Blondell as the owner of a secretarial school that provides Banyon with office employees. The show ran fifteen episodes. The other two NBC shows lasted a full season but while Search – about a high tech detective agency that constantly monitors its operatives – and the anthology Ghost Story (renamed Circle of Fear at the same time that it dropped host Sebastian Cabot) but weren't popular enough to pick up.

NBC also had one show that didn't make it beyond the 1972-73 season, but that was because it had literally run its course. That was America: A Personal History of the United States, writer-broadcaster Alistair Cooke's love letter to his adopted homeland which alternated with the NBC news show NBC Reports. Today no commercial network would put a show like America on; it would be relegated to PBS or to some cable network (after all opponents of PBS constantly say that cable can and will do everything that PBS does). In 1972-73 not only was it a popular success, it won the Emmy for the Outstanding New Series beating The Julie Andrews Hour, M*A*S*H, Kung Fu, Maude, and The Waltons, and was actually nominated in the Golden Globes as Best TV Show – Drama.

Over at ABC, the network unveiled some impressive new shows. In what may be one of the earliest examples of placing a show as a lead-in because of the gender of fans it would attract, the network put the male oriented cop show The Rookies as the lead in for Monday Night Football. The show fit the standard formula of a group of young people, three (male) rookie cops of various backgrounds (Georg Stanford Brown, Michael Ontkean and Sam Melville), being mentored by an older superior officer, played by Gerald S. O'Laughlin. Kate Jackson played the lone woman in the regular cast, a nurse married to Melville's character (years later he played her ex-husband in Scarecrow & Mrs. King). Another highly successful show for ABC was Streets of San Francisco the entire cast of which consisted of a former and a future acting Oscar winner. Karl Malden (Streetcar Named Desire) played Lieutenant Mike Stone, a veteran of over 20 years on the San Francisco PD while his partner, Steve Keller, was played by Michael Douglas (Wall Street). Keller was college educated but had no experience as a cop. Stone was (yet again) a mentor for the younger cop.

The third huge success for ABC was Kung Fu. Supposedly the show was based on a concept created by actor Bruce Lee (this is according to Lee's wife Linda who claimed that Warner Brothers stole the idea) and Lee had been considered for the part of Kwai Chang Caine – the producers decided that they needed someone "serene" for the role and that the only reason Lee was considered for the part was because the network wanted someone more muscular. The producers claimed that they wanted David Carradine of the role of Caine from the beginning even though he wasn't Asian (which stirred quite a bit of controversy in the Asian American acting community). At the time Carradine was in the middle of what can probably be called his "hippie phase" so the part of Caine seemed to be a perfect fit for him. The show was a perfect fit for the early 1970s with its mix of social responsibility, spirituality, Buddhist thought, and pacifism (at least until forced into action).

Kung Fu was initially scheduled to run once a month, alternating with ABC's other western Alias Smith & Jones on Saturday nights. However, the ABC line-up underwent a major reshuffle when the third hour of the Saturday night line-up, the paranormal thriller Sixth Sense died. Alias Smith & Jones was also dropped and Kung Fu and Streets of San Francisco moving to Thursday night in the second and third hours of primetime respectively. Owen Marshall: Counsellor At Law moved to Wednesday night while The Julie Andrews Hour (a variety show that was a major break for impressionist Rich Little) moved to the second hour of Saturdays replacing Kung Fu. The Men, a wheel show featuring Assignment: Vienna (Robert Conrad as an undercover spy in Vienna), Jigsaw (James Wainwright as a cop who chafes at standard police procedures but is effective in finding the missing persons he seeks), and The Delphi Bureau (Laurence Luckinbill as a counter-espionage agent with a photographic memory) moved to the third hour of Saturday nights. Both The Julie Andrews Hour and The Men were cancelled at the end of the season. The other new show cancelled at the end of the season was The Paul Lynde Show, in which Lynde played a family man who had to deal with his wife and two daughters as well as his eldest daughter's new husband Howie, the bane of Paul's existence.

The other ABC show to survive the season was Temperatures Rising, produced by William Asher.It probably shouldn't have survived given what happened to it. In the first season the show starred James Whitmore as the chief of staff at Capitol General Hospital in Washington, with Cleavon Little as Dr. Jerry Nolan, a resident who is also the hospital's chief "operator" (if there was a card game or a wheelchair race in the hospital, his character knew about it). Reportedly the public disliked Whitmore but liked the show and liked Lynde but hated his series so Whitmore was dumped – along with everyone else in the first season cast except Little – and Lynde and a new cast (including Mister John Dehner) were inserted. The result was a mess. Lynde's character, Paul Mercy, was thoroughly dislikeable but not as unpleasant as his invalid mother who bought the hospital. The series was cancelled and then revived, with the mother character dumped and replaced with a previously unknown sister played by Alice Ghostley. Of course, both Lynde and Ghostley were veterans of Asher's previous hit for ABC, Bewitched.

Of course it was CBS that had the greatest success in the 1972-73 TV season. Consider the CBS shows that debuted that year – M*A*S*H, Maude, The Waltons, and the Bob Newhart Show. Even when they failed something good came out of it. Consider the network's only mid-season cancellations of the year; Anna And The King starring Yul Brynner and Samantha Eggar in a non-musical (and allegedly a sit-com!) version of The King And I, and The Sandy Duncan Show which was an attempt to revive Duncan's earlier series Funny Face (which ended when Duncan was hospitalised due to cancer which took the sight in one eye). Both aired on Sunday nights along with M*A*S*H, The New Dick Van Dyke Show, and Mannix. When they cancelled the shows, CBS moved The New Dick Van Dyke Show from 9 p.m. Eastern to 7:30 p.m., shifted Mannix to 8:30 and added Buddy Ebsen's return to TV as a dramatic actor, Barnaby Jones. The show, which had ties to another CBS detective series Cannon, ran for a more than respectable eight years.

I don't think that much has to be said about most of the successful CBS shows in the 1972-73 season. Each of them achieved an iconic status. Who can forget Maude, the "liberal" spin-off of All In The Family where the lead character was the much married, opinionated, liberated force of nature who just happened to be the cousin of Archie Bunker's wife Edith. Then there was The Bob Newhart Show, which wasn't as politically opinionated as All In The Family or Maude but which meshed beautifully with its lead-in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Both shows managed a near perfect blend of their respective characters' work and domestic lives, filled in each case with interesting and quirky characters in both areas. And of course what can really needs to be said about M*A*S*H, the comedy with dramatic overtones set during the Korean War but really an allegory for Vietnam and the illogic of the military in general. M*A*S*H was one of the most honoured and respected TV shows ever even as it metamorphosed with the various cast changes over the years. Certainly the M*A*S*H that debuted in 1972 was far different from the show that ended its run in 1983, with the regular characters becoming increasingly realistic in tone, and the storylines becoming increasingly dramatic. And, I suppose, with the network becoming increasingly aware that they didn't have an "ordinary" sitcom on their hands (as we'll see in the 1973 season this realization took a while to dawn on them).

Then of course there was The Waltons. It may seem a bit surprising that CBS began airing a new rural series just two seasons after the great "Rural Purge" but I suspect that there were reasons for the network putting it on the air. I have a theory that its period setting allowed it to focus on what today would probably be called "traditional family values"; the children are polite and responsible and obviously don't become involved in drugs or protests, they respected their parents and their elders and the whole family eats dinner together every night. Might I suggest that the material is the sort of thing that would appeal to the Nixonian "silent majority?" At the same time of course writer Earl Hamner Jr. was able to develop storylines that related to the issues of the day. In its own way, The Waltons examined women's rights, race, addiction (in the form of alcoholism) and other issues that people could relate to. And perhaps the most impressive thing about the show is the way that its success seems to have come as a surprise. The 1972 TV Guide Fall Preview issue says the following about The Waltons: "They're descended from pioneer stock and they'll need all the strength they can muster – they're up against Flip Wilson and The Mod Squad." In fact it was those two shows that needed the strength; The Mod Squad was cancelled at the end of the 1972-73 season, while The Flip Wilson Show was cancelled the next season.

CBS cancelled two of its new shows at the end of the season. One was the low rated New Bill Cosby Show which, along with the fifth season of The Doris Day Show, hadn't been able to thrive opposite Monday Night Football. The other show was Bridget Loves Bernie which occupied the Saturday time slot between All In The Family and Mary Tyler Moore. The show was a variant on the 1922 play Abie's Irish Rose, which had been made into a movie twice and even been a radio series from 1942-1944, and dealt with a young Jewish cab driver and writer (David Birney) who married a wealthy Catholic girl (Meredith Baxter). The format is an old one that has been adapted to other situations over the years (the Canadian series Excuse My French dealt with a poor Quebecois girl who married the son of a wealthy Anglophone businessman and had to deal with both of their families; Dharma & Greg was about the son of a wealthy conservative family who married the daughter of unreformed hippies). Bridget Loves Bernie has the distinction of being the highest rated series ever cancelled by any American network. According to the 1972-73 ratings list on the Classic TV Hits website the show finished fifth overall with an average 15.681 million viewers, which means that it finished ahead of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which had an estimated audience of 15.293 million viewers. One suggestion is that the writers ran out of ideas after the first season, but it's generally accepted that CBS cancelled the show because of hate mail and protests from opponents of inter-religious marriage, supposedly various Jewish groups. However, at the time CBS denied the allegation. According to Robert Metz's CBS: Reflections In A Bloodshot Eye Mike Dann claimed that "though the ratings were good they weren't good enough. The show caused a "hammock effect" on the Saturday-night schedule. Sandwiched between Family which drew 46 million homes and The Mary Tyler Moore Show which drew 41 million, Bridget Loves Bernie only managed to attract 31 million." This assertion in particular seems erroneous (to say the least) given the data listed both by Classic TV Hits and The Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable Shows 1946-Present. The story of protests by people who vehemently objected to the show seems most plausible. Whatever the truth, the cancellation of Bridget Loves Bernie, together with mid-season moves that moved the aging Mission: Impossible (which would be cancelled at the end of the season) from Saturday to Friday (for Sonny & Cher) and The Carol Burnett Show from Thursday (where it's time slot was occupied by Sonny & Cher) would set up one of the greatest nights of TV ever, the CBS Saturday night line-up of All In The Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.

(I'm still doing a bit of research on a couple of replacements for cancelled shows in the season. I need the show that filled the 8:30-9 p.m. slot on ABC and the two hours between 8 and 10 p.m. on Tuesday night on NBC. Help would be appreciated.) (Update: I found the ABC 8:30-9 show. It was A Touch Of Grace starring Shirley Booth, J. Pat O'Malley and Marian Mercer. I still need the NBC show(s).)

Below is the 1972 ABC Fall Preview in three parts. Sorry, no TV criticism from President Nixon this time.

New Harper’s Island Trailer

Normally I don't post trailers for new shows that are coming up in the next few days, but I'm making an exception for Harper's Island. There are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the show features one of my favourite character actors, Jim Beaver (Jim is a favourite of mine not only because he's a first rate actor but because he's an extremely knowledgeable guy who used to post a lot in newsgroups like rec.arts.movies.past-films; it doesn't hurt that he was Don Adams's son-in-law either). The show looks to be a great combination of gothic horror and mystery with a ton of atmosphere.

It's possible that the show could represent a fundamental change in the way that American network TV is done, if it's successful. It will tell a close-ended story in a thirteen week run which is similar to the way that British TV is done. It seems very close to the original concept of a mini-series. However, unlike a miniseries there is the possibility that the show could be renewed for another thirteen week run. If so, most if not all, of the cast would be replaced and the setting would be different. Even the name would change.

I have a couple of worries about Harper's Island. One is the way that the network has chosen to handle it. Starting the show in April and having the finale run on July 2 seems to me to be something of a vote of non-confidence in the series. If CBS felt sure about the show wouldn't they have started during the "February" sweeps (which happened in March this year) and ended it during May sweeps? Or were they worried, once they decided to put it in the prime Thursday night slot following CSI that the show would suffer against the final episodes of ER and wanted to put it against the (supposedly) weaker competition of NBC's new series Southland? My other worry about the show has to do with whether or not the serialized nature is going to have a negative effect on its performance. Will an audience that seems with only a few exceptions to be dialled in to procedurals (here defined as "a genre of programs in which a problem is introduced, investigated and solved all within the same episode") be willing to invest the time and thought needed for this type of drama which requires an extended attention span. A plus for the show in this area is that it will be running for thirteen weeks without a hiatus. Still, it does seem to be a risky move.

Anyway, here's the new Harper's Island trailer. (I hope to have the 1972-73 TV Guide Fall Preview material posted later this afternoon.)

On April Fools Jokes

For a textbook example of how to set up and sell an April Fools' Day joke, see the series of posts from American-born Canadian screenwriter Dennis McGrath. He started slowly with a vague rumour about possible changes as Canwest-Global. Next he moved on to a more detailed rumour involving real places people and events but still eminently plausible. And then he sprang the trap, "revealing" a merger between Canwest-Global and CTV-Globemedia to become CTV Canglobe Media, reshuffling their programming assets to form the ultimate in demographic targeting. One network would be Global Dude, featuring programming oriented to a male audience, while CTV would retain the female oriented shows. The only sticking point was supposedly which network would get House. In addition to his website, Dennis also used other assets – notably his Twitter account – to tease the story.

A nice addition – apparently triggered by the April Fools' Day joke from another site was the story that the new company would also integrate the assets of Toronto based Naked News Broadcasting Network (NSFW of course), with the Global Dude news being done by nude anchors both male and female. (Actually this isn't a totally absurd idea; Naked News has a reputation for excellent news coverage in addition to the nudity. Based on past rulings from the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the Naked News could easily be shown on broadcast stations – and was seen for a time on CITY-TV in Toronto – since the nudity is in a non-sexual context, although the duration of the nudity force it to be aired later than the 9 p.m. watershed.) I'm ashamed that I didn't think of it.

Of course, in keeping with Canadian traditions related to April Fools' Day Dennis did reveal that it was all a joke at Noon and used the opportunity to show readers how this applies to screenwriting:

• Basic plausibility allows you to slip in the ridiculous; just like a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down.
  
• Let the rope out slowly.
  
• Details, details, details.
  
• There's always a spoiler.
  
• Reward your audience.
  

Dennis's series of posts are a beautiful example of how to subtly play with your audience, and why – really – you can't do a great April Fools' joke on the spur of the moment like I did with mine (I had been too busy labouring over the PTC thing to really work on this one). I bow in the presence of a master.

Because We’re Canadian And We Can

Canwest Global press release (not) – hold to 1, April:

Fooled by the size of the company's debt many analysts have expected the Global television network to retrench and to become even more of a bastion of American network shows than it already is, in spite of CRTC regulations. The opposite seems to be the case as Canwest today announced that starting next season the network will only broadcast Canadian programming.

The new policy was announced by the new director of media relations for Global TV, Avril Poisson:

"Global Television is just pleased as punch to announce our new programming plan which will be effective immediately. The slogan for our network's new policy is 'Because we're Canadian and we can.' This new slogan recognises the differences between Canadian broadcasting regulations and what goes on in the United States. This new policy presents a comprehensive redirection for the network and encompasses drama, reality-competition, and something called comedy which I'm not really familiar with.

"In the field of drama we recognise that our current business model is broken. In the past we have been focussed on the first run syndication market as a way to create Canadian content without actually spending our own money. Even if we were able to sell a piece of crap show for two years it represented Canadian content and we were able to run it for years after production wrapped up. However the first run syndication market is no longer what it was thanks to things like The CW and MyNetwork TV taking our market away. So we've decided to switch our focus to co-productions with American cable networks such as FX, Showtime, MTV, TNT, Spike and so on. In fact we'll be aiming our sales at just about every network that has ever been criticized by the Parents Television Council. The shows we are producing will be gritty and real and will of course include strong language and nudity. They should produce strong ratings as they are shows that American broadcast networks can't show but aren't a problem here because we're Canadian and we can!

"This part of our drama plan won't be available to the network for between six months and a year depending on the contracts we sign with the American nets which want to present all of the episodes before they go free to air, particularly in areas such as Windsor-Detroit and Vancouver-Seattle where our stations can be picked up with an antenna by poor people who don't have cable or satellite dishes. As a stopgap measure we will reaching back into the history of the network. Back when Canwest-Global was just CKND in Winnipeg we won many many Gemini Awards, and Nellies before that with small dramas that worked as an anthology show. Sure, they only aired during the summer when no one was actually watching TV but they were cheaper than dirt to make and earned us a lot of prestige while not actually having anyone in them you'd know. We're going to make a new series of these shows and may even be able to find a market for them in places where American culture isn't really available, like Cuba. because we're Canadian and we can.

"Producing reality-competition shows are a new area for us, but from what we've observed this is an amazing growth area and we're really surprised that no Canadian producer has done anything with it. We will be licensing a couple of ideas from several producers including a Canadian Big Brother, which will be more free-wheeling, profane and sexy (that means swearing and nudity won't be censored), and a Canadian Last Comic Standing which will feature jokes that can't be used on an American show, because we're Canadian and we can. Still most of our reality-competition shows will be original to our network. We've observed that many American reality-competitions are thinly imitations of other shows that are just different enough that no one can sue. So we will be making The Great Canadian Race – a show where competitors go across Canada, from Ottawa to Lake Nipigon and from Point Pellee to Kirkland Lake (what do you mean there's more to Canada than that – that's crazy talk); The Intern in which competitors live in a Toronto loft and have internships with Global Toronto with the winner getting a job at one of our stations away from Toronto – we'll see them at work and at play. Since people like dancing shows we have Anyone Can Dance in which ordinary people instead of celebrities compete with professional partners. There's Strip Poker After Dark which is pretty much self-explanatory. And there are many more that we're not ready to talk about, but they'll be smart (well smart for reality-competition shows – these things are relative) and sexy (meaning lots of naked flesh) which is allowed because we're Canadian and we can.

"In terms of comedy, well umm, well uh, well to be honest with you we've never really done much comedy. We've got Howie Do It of course which we do because we can sell it to NBC and maybe they'll let us do Deal Or No Deal Canada again. I sincerely apologize to my American friends but that's what happens when you make a deal with the devil...or Jeff Zucker and Ben Silverman which is much the same thing. As for sitcoms, well I suppose we can steal some ideas from somewhere, but I don't suppose they'll be successful, because we're Canadian and we can't. Well at least not the people Global can afford to hire.

"So there you have Global's master plan for restoring financial viability to the network. If this doesn't work we have a few other ideas. We're looking at CRTC regulations and there may be a loophole that will allow us to fill the line-up with British and French shows because they're considered Canadian. If that doesn't work we can always sell our entire network to some sucker entrepreneur while we keep the profitable specialty cable services, because we're Canadian and we can!

"One thing is sure: this isn't not a joke."

Who Does The PTC Hate Now

It's been a while since I've written one of these PTC pieces, and there's a reason. They make me ill. Oh, I don't mean that I want to vomit when writing one or anything like that (most of the time at least), but I usually end up spending too much time on them - because there's only a short length of time that I can look at their site - and feeling that my time could have been spent in so many more productive pursuits...like having a nap or picking lint out of my navel. At times like this it's even worse because while I clearly don't agree with the PTC, their methods, or their views on what is and isn't acceptable on television today, I have to confess that there are times when I sort of agree with what they're saying; there are shows out there with content that I find objectionable, and that I think would be better if they were in a later time slot. The difference is that if there's something that I don't like or find objectionable, I say that I don't like it and find it objectionable; I make no effort to impose my views on you or anyone else. The PTC in their neverending, and increasingly irrelevant and unsuccessful efforts to become America's national nanny not only tells you that they don't like something and find it objectionable but claim to speak for you. So let me make it clear, right now, that I don't like the PTC and I find them objectionable.

The big thing of course – and the reason why I'm writing this – is that the PTC has fired up the "big complaint machine" to go after one of the organization's favourite targets, Seth McFarland and Family Guy and the March 8^th episode of the show in particular. A piece headlined Fox's Family Guy Spreads Filth on YOUR Airwaves on the PTC website leads directly to their pre-written email complaint set up. All you have to do is fill in your name, address and email and click the "Sign & Submit FCC Complaint" button. You don't even have to inconvenience yourself by watching the episode, or even reading the content that "you," through the medium of the PTC, are complaining about. There is a link to an article (which is filled with the usual level of invective from the PTC, and includes words such as "showered audiences in filth," "pump their sewage into YOUR living room," and "shows that corrupt YOUR kids and YOUR culture") and documentation in the letter that "you" are sending to the FCC, but the way the letter is laid out, the documentation is hidden unless you deliberately scroll down on that part of the page. In other words you don't actually have to know what you're complaining about in order to complain about it. And it is entirely possible that a lot of them don't.

So what is the PTC complaining about? Well here's the text of the documentation part of the PTC article:

In one scene, husband Peter lies in bed, his naked rear exposed. A horse enters and licks Peter's rear, as Peter moans in pleasure. "Mmm, what made you come around, Lois? I love you so much. I love you so much, Lois," Peter groans. The FCC has the DUTY to enforce the law and fine Fox for this gross violation of broadcast decency standards.

Among other atrocities in the episode, Peter warns his family that "some of the milk in the fridge is not milk, it's horse sperm," whereupon Baby Stewie eats cereal covered with the "milk"; Peter's gay lover greets him with news that he has arranged a gay "eleven-way" orgy; and Peter helps his son Chris with math homework:

"One trick I used to use is turning things into a word problem. For example, if there are three glory holes in the bathroom at the club and 28 guys at the circuit party. How many rotations of guys will it take before everybody's had a turn? Nine, with a remainder of Brent…Brent can't fit in the glory hole, and that's why we all like Brent."

Okay, so the PTC wants the FCC to fine or sanction FOX for this show. The question is what do they find to be actionable in the scenes cited in their complaint? As far as I can tell the answer is that there is nothing. According to their website the FCC is, by law, charged with preventing the broadcast of obscene material and enforcing the prohibition against indecent or profane material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Material that would be described as obscene according to the FCC definition. The FCC regulates "obscene, indecent, or profane" material and based on the FCC definitions it seems to me that the material cited by the Council does not meet the measure that the FCC has set for obscenity or indecency. Of course that's never stopped the PTC from filing complaints with the FCC in the past, and indeed the FCC has in the recent past – particularly during Kevin Martin's term as chairman – upheld complaints filed by the PTC and fined stations for material which previous commissions had either not found obscene or on which the commission had decided not to rule; nudity on NYPD Blue comes to mind immediately.

That isn't to say that the show isn't offensive to a lot of people. If I were Gay I probably wouldn't appreciate homosexuality being depicted as a lifestyle of anonymous sexual encounters – the reference to "glory holes" – or to promiscuous sexual behaviour – the "eleven way orgy." (I personally am offended that people named "Brent" are depicted as Gay men who are too large to fit through a "glory hole." I for one am not Gay. ;-) ) I'm not even going to touch on the question of the possibility that Stewie was eating cereal with horse semen beyond saying that based on consistency, not to mention taste, only a total moron would not know the difference between the two. However being offended by a show isn't justification for levying a fine on the show; it is justification for not watching the show.

Tied with their FCC complaint is a post in the PTC's TV Trends column called PTC To News Media: "Why Are You Not?" The title comes from a quote by Thoreau and refers to his conversation with Emerson when Thoreau was jailed over his refusal to pay his taxes in opposition to the Mexican War – Emerson: "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau: "Why are you not?" It is more than a little incongruous for them to use that quote from Thoreau to attack the media in a battle to get government to issue a punitive fine on an issue of censorship, but then the PTC has shown any real understanding of irony. The gist of the column is that the news that the PTC was filing a complaint against FOX and The Family Guy episode was not reported "fairly." This seems to mean in a manner that was supportive of the PTC's aims and goals or failing that, neutral. According to the PTC there were a few news sources that "reported the PTC's request for enforcement of existing broadcast decency laws in a straightforward manner," including Broadcast & Cable, TVNewsday, and Communications Daily. It's worth noting that the outlets cited are all sites that report the news without commentary. And the PTC's complaint qualifies as news. But just because it is news does not mean that people don't have opinions on the subject and should not express them.

The PTC doesn't see it that way of course: "In fact, the much [sic] of the media's coverage was squarely in favor of Family Guy's harmful and offensive content – and took the opportunity to attack the PTC." But the PTC only cites five websites that were, "squarely in favor" and who taking "the opportunity to attack the PTC." The first is "The Hollywood Reporter's James Hibberd." One might assume means that Hibberd writes news articles for the trade paper, but in fact he does a blog for the Reporter website where he not only reports the news but often states his own opinion. Hibberd's article is not long but is ever so slightly mocking of the PTC, which is not unusual for him. (He most recently wrote an article on the PTC's outrage at the self-mastectomy scene in Nip/Tuck which is a cogent dismissal of the PTC and deserves to be read.) In this particular case Hibberd's sins are mocking PTC president Tim Winter – "there's nothing hotter than PTC president Tim Winter talking about graphic TV content" – then sneering (apparently one can sneer in print) "I know. I can't believe I missed Family Guy last week either" after running the PTC's own description of the episode objectionable content in the episode. Worst of all he quotes an interview from The Advocate in which Seth MacFarlane expresses his opinion of the PTC:

Oh, yeah. That's like getting hate mail from Hitler. They're literally terrible human beings. I've read their newsletter, I've visited their website, and they're just rotten to the core. For an organization that prides itself on Christian values – I mean, I'm an atheist, so what do I know? – they spend their entire day hating people. They can all suck my dick as far as I'm concerned.

They also object to Bob Sassone of TV Squad. For those who don't know, Bob has been a TV Squad blogger practically from the beginning of the site. He reviews TV shows and comments on news items. In short he is paid to express his opinions. In this particular article he wrote, "Actually, I was kinda shocked by the episode myself, but I'm always shocked by episodes of Family Guy. That's what makes it funny." That was enough to get him mentioned by the PTC. Celebrity gossip blogger and "self-proclaimed 'queen of all media'" Perez Hilton, who is in the business of expressing opinions, was also mentioned. The PTC said that in his article Hilton, "shrugged off the episode's content in his first sentence: 'Bestiality, orgies and babies eating sperm, oh my!'" and "went on to call the PTC's efforts "a waste of energy." Like Hibberd, Hilton uses the MacFarlane quote and repeats it (using the royal "we"), "The Parents Television Council can suck our dick!!!!"

Then there's what the PTC calls the "infinitely ignorable LA Rag Mag;" not really a "mag" or a "rag," just a website. According to the PTC the site "vomited forth the most vitriol" when describing the PTC as "some crazy Christian organization" with "1.3 million freedom hating members." They also objected to the opinion, expressed by the site, that, "We saw this episode and thought it was one of the funniest episodes we had ever seen. Yes, we did gasp at the sperm bottle consumption and the gay orgy scene." While the LA Rag Mag was factually incorrect in describing the PTC as "some crazy Christian organization" – the PTC is socially conservative but non-denominational – they do have every right to express their opinion that the PTC is "freedom hating." The LA Rag Mag also uses the MacFarlane's "objectionable" quote from The Advocate.

Perhaps the most puzzling reaction is to The Advocate because its article is perhaps the most balanced that the PTC cites. It is not given to opinion, supposedly what the PTC wants, with the PTC's complaint reported "in a straightforward manner." However they did offer MacFarlane's quote as a comment from the other side, which was enough – in the PTC's mind – to put The Advocate in the enemy camp, "implicitly defending Family Guy's offensive depictions of bestiality and babies eating sperm as 'off-the-wall animated comedy.'" But after declaring The Advocate to be the enemy they spend an entire paragraph being bewildered as to why they don't side with the PTC: "The Advocate's opposition to the PTC is odd, given that the Parents Television Council is not an anti-gay organization....The PTC's concern is solely that of protecting children from all graphic sexual content on TV, regardless of the genders or orientations of the individuals involved. Surely, gay parents and families are just as concerned about their children being exposed to graphic and gratuitous sexual content as are heterosexual parents."

Having "proven" that their FCC complaint against The Family Guy was not properly reported because a few outlets whose work frequently involves opinions said that they didn't see anything actionable about the episode, and dared to quote an interview by Seth MacFarlane in which he expressed an opinion of the PTC, the group turns to motive. And here is where they really seem to go off the deep end. Citing a pair of articles where the TV Trends writer "proved" that America's TV critics were "completely out of touch with the beliefs of average Americans" (articles which I examined and attempted to debunk in an earlier post) the writer then attempts to explain why members of the news media don't "properly" report on the PTC's complaint against The Family Guy. The media, they say, suffer from the "same defect" – they are totally out of touch with the beliefs of "average Americans." Their full explanation has to be read to be believed (the use of boldface here is mine; if I'm reading this right, the PTC is accusing the defenders of Seth MacFarlane of somehow benefitting financially as a result of defending him):

But what is truly of concern is this: those in the media are so invested emotionally (and perhaps financially) in defending Seth MacFarlane that none of them shows even the slightest concern about – or even interest in discussing -- the content of Family Guy itself.

The question must be asked: where are the reflective and intellectual qualities with which the nation's journalists are supposedly invested? Where is the news media willing to "speak truth to power," when the "power" is a multi-million-dollar Seth MacFarlane franchise? Is it truly the case that not a single one of these reporters believed that there is anything offensive in showing babies eating horse sperm on a Sunday night cartoon? Do none of America's media commentators believe there is anything indecent about describing "a gay eleven-way" in a show on at 8:00 p.m.? Are there no mainstream bloggers who think that mocking deaf children as "signing frantically" as they die is at all problematic? Is there nothing in this episode which any journalist, critic, or blogger found even mildly offensive or worthy of concern? Family Guy's doesn't content bother any of them? Really?

I am not a fan of The Family Guy. I don't watch the show and frankly some of the things that are described by both mainstream critics and bloggers were enough to persuade me that this show isn't for me. And yet I still defend it. In this case I defend it because even though the material may be offensive to some, it doesn't seem to me to meet any of the standards set by the FCC for censure, just as the episode of Las Vegas that they complained about to the FCC didn't seem to me to meet those standards. Mostly I defend it because this is a case of a small minority trying to decide what all other Americans should be allowed to watch. If every one of the PTC's alleged 1.3 million members were to sign a complaint form they would still be less than one-fifth of the 7.17 million people who watched that episode of Family Guy and quite clearly were not offended by the show, but of course there is no medium for them to make their case.

More and more I have come to regard the PTC as the schoolyard bully who when challenged complains that he is being bullied. There is no doubt that the PTC does try to bully producers, advertisers, networks, TV critics, the media, and in a way even the public it claims to serve. In the case of critics and the media, the organization makes the claim that they are out of touch with the beliefs of "average Americans" which is why the TV critic is a disappearing breed, while those in the media who don't cover the PTC and their actions (specifically their FCC complaints) in a manner that the PTC wants them to then it is the media who "refuses to speak truth to power" that does the work of the evil Seth MacFarlane and presumably (by logicl extension) other producers and shows that the PTC finds objectionable in silencing or ridiculing the PTC before the public. And yet surely if the PTC really did represent the views of "average Americans" they would have more members and the audiences for shows that the PTC finds objectionable, like Family Guy, would decline rather than staying stable or growing. If the PTC is really representing the views of "average Americans" then why isn't their membership larger than the viewership of Family Guy? My conclusion is that they represent only themselves and that while average Americans may be concerned with sex and violence on TV their definitions of what is objectionable are radically different from the puritanical views of the PTC leadership and their members and that real average Americans are dealing with the situation on their own without the "help" of the PTC and without using the organizations "big complaint machine." But what do I know – I'm just a not particularly average Canadian.

Sorry Folks

I was hoping to get 1972-73 posted tonight but I was working on something else for the blog and then tonight I've been nursing - unsuccessfully - a nasty headache. '72-73 will either be out Monday night or next weekend (more likely really), with my other project to follow. And who knows, I might get around to reviewing something which is what this whole thing was meant to be about. Wasn't it?

The PTC Will Hate This

I came across this on Mark Evanier's brilliant blog News From Me and thought that it was absolutely brilliant, not to mention hilarious. The background, as provided by the original poster on YouTube – Videoholic50sthru70s – is this. The bit was shot in 1975 when the Family Viewing Hour was instituted by the FCC. This forced All In The Family to be moved to Monday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern from its previous Saturday at 8 p.m. time slot. As Videoholic50sthru70s puts it in his write-up on YouTube, "The cast of All in the Family did a little in-house "tribute" to the Family Viewing our, with their new "1975 version" of the show's opening theme song...and here it is!" It's a great take on TV in 1975, particularly the way Rob and Sally are dressed. It's almost like they're FCC commissioners! You can see the puckish gleam in Carroll O'Connor's eye as he does this.

Given that the Parents Television council clings to the belief that the Family Viewing Hour still exists and indeed should be expanded to cover every hour of the day on every television delivery system that exists or can be imagined, and given that some (if not all) of the people who work for the FCC believe that All In The Family marked the slide of Television from innocent, family friendly entertainment medium to cesspool of depravity, I'm sure that they'll just hate this. Me? I think it's bloody brilliant.

TV Guide Fall Preview 1970 – The Comments

First up we have Mike Doran, helping to fill in some of the holes that I had in the ABC and CBS line-ups:

I can't call NBC's midseason moves to mind readily (I'll look them up when I get home), but here are the others: CBS replaced Tim Conway's hour with Jackie Gleason repeats from the few years before - most if not all Honeymooners. As for ABC, Lawrence Welk moved up an hour, and Pearl Bailey came in to take his old spot. With the other spots you mention, ABC decided to get a jump on the Prime Time Access Rule by leaving those timeslots open - giving the stations an hour on Sunday and 90 minutes on Saturday.

The Gleason repeats were all hour long Honeymooners from episodes he did in the late 1960s. These colour Honeymooners are nowhere near as well known as the half-hour episodes from the 1950s although the episodes are available on DVD from MPI Home Video and air on American Life TV in the US. I couldn't imagine colour working very well with The Honeymooners but that's probably because the shows I remember are the "classic 39" and the addition of colour makes the Kramden's apartment look somehow less squalid and depressing.

These days it is difficult to imagine a network not programming time that they had a right to, even if it is with reruns. The networks hold onto Saturday nights with a death grip in just this fashion, so it is a bit surprising that ABC would actually give the affiliates two and a half hours even with the Prime Time Access Rule coming into force. Then again that was ABC we're talking about, and not at the height of the network's popularity.

I would like to put in a word for THE MOST DEADLY GAME, which may have been the most snakebitten show in recent TV history. The original female lead was supposed to be Inger Stevens, but her unexpected death knocked things off the rails. Yvette Mimieux came on at literally the last minute to try to keep it going, but the premiere had to be delayed to late October, by which time GAME never had a chance.

I think that snakebitten is an accurate description, although whether it would have lasted longer than it did if everything had gone according to plan is questionable; it was going up against Mary Tyler Moore and the first half-hour of Mannix on CBS and the Saturday Night Movie on NBC. The show had a reasonably strong cast with Ralph Bellamy and George Maharis. Arguably Mimieux might have been more famous than Inger Stevens (although Stevens had been in some pretty good movies after she left her first TV series, The Farmer's Daughter, including Hang 'em High, Five Card Stud, and Madigan) which has to be considered an asset for the series.

One thing that I find interesting is the reluctance of TV to take a failed idea and try to tweak it and remake it into something better; in other words recycling their failures. This is a prime example of a show that could be tweaked a bit and be made into something that works. One could make "Mr. Arcane" (the Ralph Bellamy character) very mysterious – really living up to his name – while his ward (Mimieux's character) and her origins would be only slightly less mysterious. That would leave the Maharis character as an "ordinary" guy who splits his time between working on the cases that are brought to them – possibly cases touching on the "unexplained" or supernatural – and trying to discover the truth about his partners. But of course that's just the bare bones of a concept and there are probably plenty of reasons why it wouldn't work.

In a second comment Mike added:

I finally got around to looking up those NBC replacements, and the pattern set by the other two nets holds. CBS used Gleason reruns, already in house; ABC gave large chunks of time back to the local stations; and NBC simply started their Saturday night movie a half-hour earlier - all in anticipation of the Prime-Time Access Rule , which didn't officially kick in until fall (also known as the coward's way out). Meanwhile, BRACKEN'S WORLD gave way to STRANGE REPORT, a Sir Lew Grade product that had been sitting on NBC's shelf for a couple of years. STRANGE was a detective show starring Sir Anthony Quayle as a scientific sleuth in London. By 1971, Quayle was starring on Broadway in SLEUTH, appropriately enough, which might have been a factor in NBC's decision to finally put it on.

Strange Report had as one of its co-stars Anneke Wills, who dedicated Doctor Who fans might remember as Polly, one of The Doctor's companions. She debuted in The War Machines during Hartnell's time as The Doctor, and left in the first year of the Patrick Troughton's run in the role. Most of her episodes are missing but she once described her take on Polly was that she'd react to any threat by doing the sensible thing and running away. Wills was married to Michael Gough (today best known as Alfred in the Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher Batman movies), who worked with Anthony Quayle in Sarabande For Dead Lovers and QB VII.

The basic hook of Bracken's World – a show which I vaguely remember today – was that one never actually saw Bracken but his orders were generally filtered through the medium of his secretary, played by triple Oscar nominee Eleanor Parker. When the show debuted for its second season this conceit – and Parker – was gone and Bracken was seen, played by Leslie Nielsen. It probably wasn't what killed the show but it certainly didn't help it.

One question: are you moving forward or backward or both in this series? My strongest period for this knowledge is the early-to-mid 60s; my resources start to thin out around 1976.

Forward. 1969 was the earliest Fall Preview issue that I still have (there were earlier ones but in the nature of such ephemera were too damaged to retain). I'm going to run into some troubles the closer I get to modern times. I was never a subscriber to the magazine and towards the end of the Canadian edition's publication history the stores never seemed to get many copies of the Fall Preview issues, and they seemed to disappear from the stores almost as soon as they were put out. Maybe someday I'll get the opportunity to fill in and improve my collection.

And here's a comment from our old friend Sam Johnson:

I am diggin' on these TV guide recaps, Brent. I've always wanted to do a breakdown of Saturday morning cartoons from 1960 up until around the early Ninties kind of like this in some type of form. Still, free time keeps me away from the good times, but I digress.

TVSquad.com has been doing something along that line (the one I've linked to is part of a series but as is typical with TVSquad it isn't easy to locate them all). Still there's always room for more - and probably better – writing on the subject.

I know nothing much of the schedule, but a few of the shows I do remember. I recalled that Arnie had Arlene Gonkola as The Harried wife. The only reason for that was the name was just so weird to me as a kid.

Arlene Golonka (on the left here) didn't play the wife on Arnie; that was Sue Ane Langdon (on the right – this is the correct spelling, though you do see it as Sue Anne and Sue Ann). Arlene Golonka was on TV at this time, co-starring on Mayberry RFD as the love interest for Ken Berry's character Sam. It is not a particularly surprising mistake, since the ladies did bear a strong resemblance to each other. Sue Ane – who played Alice Kramden on Jackie Gleason's variety show for less than a year around 1962 – was a pretty hot number in the 1960s. A Google Image search under Sue Ann Langdon yields a couple of "interesting" photos she did for Playboy around 1966 in connection with a movie she did with Sean Connery called A Fine Madness.

I was just starting to read then and began to remember names of TV shows easier. But in my house, the name "Flip Wilson" was the easiest. Before then, it was Bill Cosby, Leslie Uggams, or Lou Rawls with shows (I think Miss Uggams and Mr. Rawls had Summer replacement shows), but seeing Flip with his own show made my family rush to the set to watch what he'd do that week. All I know is that the show brought a lot of pride to my family along with a lot of laughs.

As I pointed out last week, the Leslie Uggams Show debuted in September 1969 and ran for twelve or thirteen episodes before being cancelled. I believe that she was the first African-American woman – and maybe one of the first African-Americans of either sex – to have a variety series. Nat King Cole had a short lived series in the 1950s but that was exclusively a music show, with none of the extras (comedy, dancers) that made for a true variety show. I was a big fan of The Flip Wilson Show as well, but obviously it didn't have the same impact on a skinny white kid from Saskatchewan that it would for you. I suspect that it's in the nature of broad-casting that because it has to appeal to the mass audience it generally reflects, albeit with some delay, the direction that society is proceeding in.

Cappy writes:

The end of The Jackie Gleason Show and the start of Mary Tyler Moore marks the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization.

Interesting opinion. If meant humorously, funny; if meant seriously, it requires at least some explanation.

And now, a couple of themes from the 1970-71 season. First up, one that everyone knows. No, not that one, the other one that everybody knows.

And now for a really obscure one, from a replacement series.

Coming up next weekend 1972!