television Archives - Page 8 of 42

I remember watching television

In the spring of 1962, I had only two TV choices

Mark Evanier posted the openings to the 42 different television shows that comprised the spring 1962 prime-time TV schedule for CBS. Of the shows, listed at 23:45 of the video, the only shows I never heard of were Ichabod and Me, Window on Main Street, Oh! Those Bells, Frontier Circus, and Father of the Bride.

I’m not sure I ever watched Hennessey, Checkmate, or all of the anthology dramas. But I surely viewed the others, especially the Saturday night lineup of Perry Mason, The Defenders, Have Gun Will Travel, and Gunsmoke.

He also posted the lineups for NBC for Fall 1962 and ABC for Fall 1961 (both at 24:50). I recognize many, though not most of the NBC shows. Maybe it was that WNBF, the CBS affiliate was on VHF, Channel 12, while WINR was on the UHF range, Channel 40.

But I recognized a LOT of ABC shows, even though Binghamton didn’t have an ABC affiliate until November 1962, when WBJA, Channel 34 came on line. That’s likely because WNBF carried a lot of ABC shows.

Unsurprising, I ran the category Old TV Theme Songs on a recent JEOPARDY!

Meanwhile, Ken Levine, who has written for prime time network television, recently noted that some recent network shows, one that had been on for four seasons, had been canceled and he had never heard of them. I’m very much in the same boat.

It’s a different time. Netflix and a bunch of platforms followed by a plus sign, from Disney to Paramount. And even shows that others recommend to me I can’t find the time/inclination to watch. As a result, I’ve seen NONE of the programs nominated for this year’s Emmys that weren’t on broadcast TV.

Just a few

So what I DO watch is heavily influenced by what my daughter views. She got into Station 19, which is a spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy. These stories are so intertwined that if you were to see one without the other, it might not make as much sense.

It reminds me of when I was collecting comic books, and you didn’t understand what was going on in the Fantastic Four or the Amazing Spider-Man if you didn’t also check out a particular issue of X-Men or The Avengers.

The other thing odd about the 19/Grey’s series is that the storylines were almost a year behind “real-time” this past season. So the narratives in the spring of 2021 took place in the height of COVID and demonstrations right after the murder of George Floyd. Then in the last episode of Grey’s, but not 19, the story fast-forwarded almost a year.

I have a friend who writes, every time I mention television, that I should not watch it. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. It’s bad for your sleep, your health, your brain, your self-esteem, maybe your eyes.

I take my blood pressure daily in the morning, before breakfast. If my wife’s had the TV on, even if it’s off the ten minutes before the reading, my BP is about 15 points higher systolic and about 10 points higher diastolic.

I’m sure watching far less, and the pandemic did not increase my consumption by one iota.

Best Sitcoms – what’s that?

Can an animated show be considered?

Recently. Rolling Stone listed the 100 Best Sitcoms of All Time. There was a time I’d be all over this.

But as Mark Evanier noted, the meaning is fuzzy. Does The Best mean the Most Influential? Beloved? Enduring?

Can an animated show be a sitcom? The Simpsons are #1 on the list.

But the real issue for me is that there are shows that I have NEVER even HEARD of, let alone seen. #98 Derry Girls, #96 Bluey (animated), #95 Baskets, #94 Insecure, #93 Big Mouth (animated), #88 Party Down, #83 Letterkenny, #78 Peep Show, #72 The Comeback, #64 What We Do in the Shadows, #61 Catastrophe, #59 Spaced, #57 You’re the Worst, #40 Review. Do any of you recommend some of these shows?

And some of these are on a platform called Channel 4, which I assume is NOT the British news programme.

I’m not planning to go through all of the rest. You can assume, however, that whatever CBS shows that are on this list from 1965-1980, and the NBC shows from 1983-2000 I probably watched.

Some shows

#99 Frank’s Place – I’m glad this obscure dramedy made the list, though I haven’t seen it since it first broadcast. Ditto #91, Buffalo Bill.

#85 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show – in the 1950s, it broke down the fourth wall.

#65 Phineas and Ferb. I know more about this animated show than any adult should. I liked it.

#49 Barney Miller, was not only one of my favorite shows but had one of the best theme songs. Interesting, though, the attempt to make this a work and home show (like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, The Dick Van Dyke Show, for two) just didn’t click here. The home segments, with Barbara Barrie, were abandoned quite early.

#38 Friends – I’m surprised the phenomenon didn’t rate higher, though the show irritated me as often as entertained.

#36 – Sex and the City – a sitcom? The writeup describes it as beginning “as a clumsy, loud, and only occasionally funny attempt at social anthropology… By the end, it was almost purely a drama…”

Plus

#15 Arrested Development – I watched a few episodes the first season and gave up. Yet I watched the second season and grew to like it.

#14 The Andy Griffith Show. When flicking through the channels, I’ll still watch it.

#11 The Dick Van Dyke Show – the only sitcom for which I own the entire run on DVD. Yes, DVD on DVD.

#6 MASH – as early as the middle of Season 1, it dealt with serious subjects. The “Sometimes, you hear the bullet” episode. e.g.

#4 I Love Lucy – we’ve been to the museum. From a comment by the late Dustbury: “I Love Lucy invented the sitcom as we know it, with three-camera coverage, film instead of kinescope, and reruns (39 new shows a season, plus 13 repeats). Its influence is incalculable.”

#3 Seinfeld – I liked it much more when it really WAS about nothing, such as getting lost in a parking lot. I thought it became mean-spirited after a while, and I gave up on it.

Chuck Connors would have been 100

Celtics, Cubs

It could have been in TV Guide or another magazine, or a newspaper article. All I know is that, during the run of the TV show The Rifleman (1958-1963), I knew that Chuck Connors had been a professional athlete before he became an actor.

He played basketball with the Boston Celtics. In 1946, Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors was the first NBA player to shatter a backboard, doing so during a pre-game warm-up in the Boston Garden.

The future actor also played baseball. Before the 1940 season, he was signed by his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers as an amateur free agent. Though somewhat successful in the minor leagues, he got into only one game with that major league team, in 1949.

On October 10, 1950, he was traded, with Dee Fondy, to the Chicago Cubs for Hank Edwards and cash. He spent part of the 1951 season with the Cubs, appearing in 66 games, 57 of them as a first baseman, batting .239.

“In a 1997 biography titled ‘The Man Behind the Rifle’, author David Fury says that ‘Chuck”‘Connors acquired his nickname while an athlete playing first base. He had a habit of calling to the pitcher: “Chuck it to me, baby, chuck it to me!”

North Fork

His IMDB record begins in 1952. But he’s best known for playing Lucas McCain in 168 episodes of The Rifleman. The Complete Directory To Prime Time Network TV Shows, by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, have a great description of the show.

“The setting was the town of North Fork, NM, whose marshall seemed incapable of handling any of the numerous desperadoes who infested the series without Lucas.” I’m sure I watched it a lot in the day, and it’s still available on MeTV.

Lucas McCain was ranked #32 in TV Guide’s list of the “50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time” in the 20 June 2004 issue. He raised Mark (Johnny Crawford) by himself.

Chuck spent a season on Arrest and Trial, a cop show with Ben Gazzara, which I don’t remember.

Bitter Creek

Connors was on another western, Branded (1965-1966). “Jason McCord, the only survivor of the Battle of Bitter Creek, is court-martialed and kicked out of the Army because of his alleged cowardice. Rather than demean the good name of the Army commander who was actually to blame for the massacre, McCord travels the Old West trying to restore his good name and reputation.

And my sisters and I would reenact the opening theme, which I can hear in my mind’s ear to this day:

“All but one man died, There at Bitter Creek. And they say he ran away. Branded! Marked with a coward’s shame. What do you do when you’re branded, will you fight for your name?

“He was innocent. Not a charge was true. But the world would never know. Branded! Scorned as the one who ran. What do you do when you’re branded, and you know you’re a man?

“Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you must prove… You’re a man.”

And in the intro, the officer would break McCord’s sword over his knee. We would take a thin tree branch and break it in the same way. Or more often, take this paper covering that came with the dry cleaning and tear it.

Oddly, I don’t remember the show itself very much.

Redux

Here’s some trivia. “He suffered almost the same fate in each of his two television western series. In The Rifleman: The Vaqueros (1961), he was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree, and left to die under a scorching sun by a group of Mexican bandits. And in Branded: Fill No Glass for Me: Part 2 (1965), he was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree, and left to die under a scorching sun by a group of Indian warriors. (In both cases he survived.)”

I didn’t see him much after that, except in an occasional guest appearance, and two episodes of Roots. No, I did NOT see Werewolf.

Chuck Connors was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1991.

Born: April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York City, NY
Died: November 10, 1992 (age 71) in Los Angeles, CA

Actor Kurt Russell turns 70

Portland Mavericks

When I told my wife I was probably going to write about Kurt Russell turning 70, she went “Oh!” “What does THAT mean?” “Kurt Russell was my first crush.”

Not that I’m jealous, mind you.

I was utterly fascinated by Kurt Russell as a kid. He wasn’t much older than I was. I know I watched The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (1963), a western, though I don’t specifically remember the storyline. “Twelve-year-old Jamie McPheeters, along with his ne’er-do-well father and a ragtag group of pioneers, travel westward from Paducah, Kentucky to the California gold fields in 1849.” Nope, still don’t recall it.

And there were a series of movies, some with Disney, which I almost certainly watched.

The New Land (1974) featured “the trials of a settler family of Swedish immigrants to America.” Watched that, too. If you don’t remember it, it’s probably because lasted only six episodes.

He didn’t become one of those child stars who ended up troubled. Instead, he developed into a successful adult actor, primarily in movies. And most of them I never viewed! In fact, looking at his IMDB roster of films, there are only three I’m positive I saw: Silwood (1983), Swing Shift (1984), and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017). Oh, I did see the Elvis TV movie in 1979.

Baseball

There’s a film I just read about that I want to see. The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014) is a “documentary film about the Portland [OR] Mavericks, a defunct minor league baseball team… They played five seasons in the Class A-Short Season Northwest League, from 1973 through 1977. Owned by actor Bing Russell [Kurt’s dad], the Mavericks were an independent team, without the affiliation of a parent team in the major leagues.”

The things I discover. “Kurt Russell was a switch-hitting second baseman for the California Angels minor league affiliates, the Bend Rainbows (1971) and Walla Walla Islanders (1972) in the short-season Class A-Short Season Northwest League, then moved up to Class AA in 1973 with the El Paso Sun Kings of the Texas League.

“While in the field turning the pivot of a double play early in the season, the incoming runner at second base collided with him and tore the rotator cuff in Russell’s right (throwing) shoulder.

“He did not return to El Paso but was a designated hitter for the… Mavericks… late in their short season… He had been doing promotional work for them in the interim. The injury forced his retirement from baseball in 1973 and led to his return to acting.”

Goldie

Russell appeared in five films with performer Goldie Hawn, possibly still best known for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The first was way back in 1968, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. Goldie made her big-screen debut in a bit part. She was 21, but he was only 16.

During the making of Swing Shift (1984), they became romantic partners. They were also in Overboard (1987), and the two Christmas Chronicles films (2018, 2020).

They’ve been together since 1983. Her kids (Kate and Oliver Hudson) are his kids. His kid Boston Russell is her kid. They have a son together, Wyatt. And they are happily unmarried.

Goldie said, and Kurt would agree: “We have done just perfectly without marrying. I already feel devoted and isn’t that what marriage is supposed to do? So as long as my emotional state is in a state of devotion, honesty, caring, and loving, then we’re fine.

“We have raised our children brilliantly; they are beautiful people. We did a great job there and we didn’t have to get married to do that. I like waking up every day and seeing that he is there and knowing that I have a choice. There is really no reason to marry.”

Kurt Russell turns 70 on St. Patrick’s Day.

John Candy would have been 70

SCTV

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is my favorite John Candy movie. It’s also my favorite John Hughes film.

James Kendrick described it as “a road comedy about two men trying desperately to get home for Thanksgiving and having every obstacle imaginable thrown in their way. The men are played, in a feat of pitch-perfect casting, by Steve Martin and John Candy as complete opposites who, at the beginning of the film, don’t know each other, but by the end have found that they have more in common than they thought.”

Candy himself was quoted about the script. “I just cried with laughter when I read it. It’s like it was written with me in mind, which makes a big difference. I could see just see the movie in my mind.”

Back in 1972, John was accepted in the Second City comedy troupe’s Chicago group. For two years, he worked with folks such as John Belushi and Gilda Radner. He then returned to Toronto in 1974, working with Second City’s Toronto group.

SCTV

John “helped bring the troupe’s skits and sketches to Canadian television in 1977 as SCTV. The series also featured Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Harold Ramis. That’s where I first him. “John Candy’s Johnny LaRue, Josh Shmenge and Gil Fisher (“The Fishin’ Musician”) were about as different from each other and Candy himself as you could possibly get.”

He reportedly turned down offers to be in the SNL cast. Interesting, then that he ended up in ten movies with SNL alums.

Among the movies I saw, he appeared in The Blues Brothers, Stripes, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Splash, and Home Alone. One of his best performances was in a more serious role. “During his screen-time as Dean Andrews in JFK (1991), the nervous sweat seen on his face is real, as the thought of acting in a dramatic film opposite such heavyweight actors as Donald Sutherland and Gary Oldman made him very scared.” He was very good.

Another solid role was as the title character in Uncle Buck (1989). He said, “In the movie, Uncle Buck doesn’t talk down to these kids. And I think that’s why they like him. He treats them as an equal.”

A sad demise

I’ve learned that John Candy lost his father Sidney to a heart attack when John was only five years old. Sidney was 35; HIS father also died of a heart attack. “John was a heavy smoker for most of his adult life. He officially quit smoking cigarettes a few months before he passed away.” And the large man was sensitive about his weight and periodically tried to shed some pounds.

Still, he too died of a heart attack, on March 4, 1994 at the age of 43. He was in Durango, Mexico filming the western spoof Wagons East. According to fellow SCTV alum Catherine O’Hara, “just before going to Mexico, Candy talked to her on the phone and told her that he feared going to Mexico because he felt that ‘something bad is going to happen there.'”

Sadly, John Candy, who was born 31 October 1950 in Toronto, Ontario, was only 43 when he died. He was well-loved by his compatriots.