Tag Archives: Television

Reviews

Watching old TV: ’87th Precinct’

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Reading an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain recently reminded me that there was a TV series, long ago, which I remembered enjoying – even before I knew the books existed at all. I checked it out and found and watched it on YouTube. And it’s not bad at all.

One major departure from the books is that the pretense of a fictional city is dropped entirely. This 87th Precinct is set solidly in Manhattan. The fairly large cast of the books is trimmed back here – we have Steve Carella (Robert Lansing), Meyer Meyer (Norman Fell), Bert Kling (Ron Harper) and Roger Havilland (Gregory Walcott). Although I’ve read several of the novels, I’d forgotten the character of Det. Havilland altogether. Wikipedia tells me that he’s a corrupt and unpopular cop in the books, but here he’s a good guy, kind of like Cotton Hawes, who doesn’t appear at all until a single episode late in the series (it only lasted one season). Gina Rowlands is also there as Teddy, Steve Carella’s deaf wife.

The casting could be worse. This was the first role I ever saw Robert Lansing in, and he became one of my favorite actors (though from what I’ve read of him, he wasn’t popular with the people he worked with). Ron Harper as Bert Kling looks about right – blond and young. Norman Fell as Meyer is a disappointment. Meyer in the books is a complex character with an ingrained stoicism dating back to traumatic antisemitic violence in his childhood that caused him to lose all his hair. He’s a large and strong man. Fell did not shave his head for the part (that was pretty rare in those days) or bulk up, but it’s not just that. Fell was primarily a comic actor, and he plays Meyer that way –downbeat Jewish comic relief. Not entirely, but mostly. (Meyer has never had justice done to him on the screen, as far as I know.) Gina Rowlands was lovely, but a blonde rather than black-haired as Teddy was in the books.

The scripts are based on the original novels, whittled down for the time available, with roles switched for the actors on hand. In terms of storytelling, it was really very good, adult television for the 1960s, and it deserved a longer run. Some familiar actors show up – Robert Vaughn as “the Deaf Man,” Robert Culp as a psychopath, and Leonard Nimoy as a young heavy.

Bottom line: Pretty good show. Worth a watch.

Uncategorized, Writing

Superfluous is suspicious

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Raymond Burr as Perry Mason, and Barbara Hale as Della Street, in Perry Mason.

Just yesterday I was talking to someone about recent reports that the most popular content on video streaming services is old, not new entertainment. This article from Screenrant lists 7 suggested reasons for this phenomenon. All of them may have validity, but I wonder if there might be one more – the fact that the older the show, the less woke it’s likely to be. The less likely it will be to try to stuff some fashionable new moral imperative down the viewer’s throat.

In my own case, I’ve been spending my evenings of late with Amazon Prime, working my way through the Perry Mason series (1957-1966). There’s some irony in this – next to Lawrence Welk, there was no show I hated more than Perry Mason when I was a kid. I found it dull – few fisticuffs or gunfights, and half the show was people blabbing in a courtroom. But my mother loved it. Today, there’s almost nothing on television I enjoy watching more than Perry Mason. I guess that means that – despite all appearances – I may have matured a little.

Something else that’s changed about me is that I’ve become a writer. Therefore, I watch for plot mechanisms. And I’ve noticed something – something that’s probably been obvious to more perceptive viewers for a long time.

I’ve figured out how to guess whodunnit in a lot of the episodes – not all of them, but many.

Watch for the superfluous character.

The thing to bear in mind is that – especially in television – especially in the old days – budgets were tight. The revision process in script development often involved finding ways to cut locations (if you can find a way to repeat shooting locations and sets you can save a lot of money) and cut characters (speaking actors are an expense. Make two characters into one whenever you can.)

So if you’re watching an episode of an old series like Perry Mason (or Murder She Wrote, or Columbo, etc.), and you notice a character who has lines (not a non-speaking extra) but seems to be there for no other reason than to make conversation, they’re not there by accident. If you can think of no other reason for the producers to pay them, they’re probably the murderer.

This goes double if the superfluous character is a familiar actor whom you’re used to seeing in bigger roles.

Written fiction is easier. You can deploy a cast of thousands at no additional cost.

Reviews

Revisiting ‘Harry O’

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=qP_nvvcdbWk

I should really wait to post this review/appreciation until I’ve had the time to watch the whole series through on YouTube, but I need a topic tonight and I already know what I think. Harry O, starring David Janssen, was one of the best TV PI series of the 1970s, and could have done even better if the network hadn’t clotheslined it.

The series struggled a bit getting launched. The first pilot movie, which you can watch above, was about a grumpy Los Angeles private eye named Harry Orwell (Janssen). He used to be a police detective, but a bullet near the spine put him on the disabled roster, so now he freelances. Only he’s a bit of a misanthrope (though he always seems to have a beautiful girlfriend) and actively discourages business. His injury interferes with his activity at times. He lives in a shack on the ocean, where he’s constantly working on his sailboat, “The Answer,” which is never quite finished (metaphor sighted!). He has a car, but it’s always in the shop and he rides the bus instead – which offers interesting creative opportunities for the writers, as when he loses a “tail” while riding it.

It seems network executives found the first pilot a little dark, so they ordered another one, which was lighter but hardly cheery. But that one was enough to get the series green-lit. (Jody Foster plays a homeless girl in this one.)

As the season begins, we find Harry living on Catalina Island near San Diego. Still in a shack, still working on his boat and riding the bus. His cop buddy is now Lt. Manny Quinlan (Henry Darrow, whom you may remember as Manolito on The High Chapparal). They’re on and off friends, but have each other’s backs when the chips are down.

Then, half-way through the first season, the network decided it was too expensive to shoot on Catalina and moved Harry closer to LA, but in a nearly identical living situation. His police buddy is now Lt. Trench, played by Anthony Zerbe, who won an Emmy as a supporting actor. The two actors’ chemistry was extremely good. Harry’s car was finally liberated from the shop, but it still broke down a lot. The tone was lightened yet again.

In the second season, Harry’s back injury – though never forgotten – became less important. Toward the end, a young actress named Farrah Fawcett-Majors (at the time) showed up as Harry’s stewardess girlfriend. (This attracted my increased interest.)

And then the network decided it wanted to change its entertainment direction. The relatively intelligent Harry O series was cancelled to be replaced by a star vehicle for Farrah – Charlie’s Angels. I’ll confess I was a big fan of the Angels at the time, but today I find I can’t bear to watch it, even when Farrah’s on. Harry O, on the other hand, holds up extremely well.

Private eye shows were a staple of prime-time TV in the 70s. Quinn Martin Productions, especially, ran a content factory that turned them out like sausages. QM did some quality work – he’d produced The Fugitive, which made David Janssen a star. But they also turned out shows like Cannon and Barnaby Jones that were almost indistinguishable in format, and even recycled each others’ scripts from time to time. I came to see the Quinn Martin trademark as a sure sign of phoning it in.

But Harry O was a smart show with good writing, good acting, and atmosphere. I’d put it right up there with a very different show, The Rockford Files. It could have been a classic, given the chance.

David Janssen swore never to do a network series again. He did a miniseries, but never a weekly show.

Reviews

Of brownstones and starships

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Lately I’ve been “doing” Nero Wolfe on YouTube. First the 1981 series starring William (“Cannon”) Conrad and Lee Horsely, and currently the 2001 series with Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton. But in the course of my fumbling about on the site I stumbled on the little-known video above. It’s a 1959 pilot for a half-hour NW series starring Kurt Kasznar and none other than a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. But more about that below.

I sought out the Conrad-Horsely series for sentimental reasons. The series was one of my favorites back when it came out. Critics complained that it violated some of the basic protocols of the ordered household author Rex Stout created. Though I’m fond of the original Wolfe books, I’m not as punctilious about them as I am about, say, Sherlock Holmes or Travis McGee. I thought Bill Conrad was just splendid as Nero Wolfe, and he had excellent chemistry with Horsely’s Archie. The set designers worked meticulously (and at considerable cost) to recreate Wolfe’s office. I particularly liked the big chair. Stout often mentions in the stories that Wolfe’s upholstered desk chair was specially built to support his great weight.

The only problem with that handsome chair was that it was physically too large for Bill Conrad, who kind of got lost in it. I suspect it was designed with Orson Welles, who was originally meant to play the role, in mind.

But after I’d watched that series’ one season of episodes, I moved on to the 2001 series. It’s very well done and very faithful to the original stories. Also extremely stylish and shot in period. Maury Chaykin as Wolfe is growing on me, though I still prefer Conrad. I’ve always seen Wolfe as a dark-haired man. Timothy Hutton seems a little lightly constructed for Archie, but the attitude is spot on.

But now, back to the 1959 pilot. I was surprised how good it was. Bill Shatner may be the best Archie Goodwin of them all. The role plays exactly to his strengths. And Kurt Kasznar (whom I believe I saw in person once, as Moriarty in a road production of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” play, but I may have him confused with someone else), has a good look for Wolfe and brings the additional value of an Austrian accent. Stout’s Wolfe was Montenegran by birth, but I think this is the only time anyone ever portrayed him with an accent (except for Sidney Greenstreet’s English tones). The plot is stripped-down, as is necessary for the half-hour format (not ideal for the material), and the office set lacks the rich detail of the later productions. But all in all it’s a commendable effort and pretty entertaining.

(It also features the actor Alexander Scourby [whose Bible narration you may have heard], whom I also saw in person once, in college, doing a reading of Walt Whitman. I had a chance to meet him but missed out, as is my custom in life.)

One wonders why it wasn’t accepted by the network. However, if that had happened, Bill Shatner might have still been busy when Gene Roddenberry went looking for an actor to play Captain Kirk a few years later. And the world would have missed out on a rich font of camp, parody, and Facebook memes.

Reviews

Amazon Prime review: ‘One Touch of Venus’

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I’m reading Tolkien’s Beren and Luthien right now, and haven’t finished it yet. So I must find something else to post about. (Note to bloggers: Try to have interesting lives, because if you haven’t got a book review handy every day, you need something more interesting to write about than dentist visits and plumbing emergencies. Unless you’re James Lileks. Addendum to self: I’m not James Lileks.)

I think I mentioned that I’ve been watching old TV and movies on Amazon Prime. One thing that popped up in my suggestions the other day, which I selected, I’m not sure why, was an old 1940s musical called One Touch of Venus. It was a reasonable hit on Broadway, starring Mary Martin, and was made into a movie with Ava Gardner in 1948 – though they reportedly cut a lot of the songs (I’ve never seen it). The version I saw was a different one, done live on NBC TV in 1955, performed, according to the credits, by the Texas State Fair Musical Theater organization. The cast, most of whom are trying too hard in the tradition of live theater, features actress Janet Blair as Venus. The only other familiar face was Louis Nye in a small role.

It’s got a silly premise – a feckless barber named Rodney Hatch gets into an argument with an art collector over an ancient Greek statue. The collector declares the statue (which is surprisingly non-nude, and also bears a suspicious resemblance to a department store mannequin painted white) the image of female physical perfection. Indignantly, Rodney slips onto the statue’s finger the engagement ring he recently bought for his girlfriend – to prove that her hands are just as well-proportioned as a goddess’s. This action brings the statue to life, and Venus proceeds to ensnare Rodney in her charms, break his engagement, and (SPOILER ALERT) abandon him in the end to return to her worshipers (who appear, oddly, to be Hindu or Muslim). Rodney ends up with an entirely different girl from his original girlfriend, which strikes me as an odd plot resolution. I kind of felt sorry for the original girl. I probably dozed off during a scene where we learn why she’s unworthy of a barber.

A fact I missed going in dawned on me suddenly as Rodney was singing one of the production’s comic numbers – “How Much I Love You.”

“More than a catbird hates a cat, or a criminal hates a clue –

“As the high court loathes perjurious oaths, that’s how much I love you.”

 I tried to figure out where I’d heard this before. Finally I realized that I hadn’t heard it, I’d read it. It was published as a poem, and its writer was the great Ogden Nash. Then I remembered that Nash had written the lyrics for a Broadway production called “One Touch of Venus.” (The music, you may be surprised to learn, was by Kurt Weill, better known for “Mack the Knife.”)

My major reaction to the whole thing was, “Wow, culture sure has changed since the 1950s. They’d never do this play today.” Then I looked and found that it’s been revived several times recently. Judging by the sexual (or gender, if you prefer) norms portrayed in the original show, I have to assume considerable revision has been done.

I found a YouTube video of somebody singing “How Much I Love You,” but the actor was so annoying I refuse to post it. You can look it up yourself if you’re curious. They changed some of the lyrics too.

Blogs, Socials, Reading

When the Majority Become Cultural Snobs

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I’ve been thinking to write a thoughtful something about the third season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones. When I started watching it a few weeks ago, I noticed I had forgotten the big storyline from season two, but I remembered that I did not blog about it. Something wasn’t there. Maybe I wasn’t provoked enough (or maybe the sexual aspects of it held me back).

The third season continued to lean into that part of the story. Though Hogarth’s struggle was compelling, it was also awful and fairly ugly. The first season felt like Jessica’s gritty origin story, but now that season three is over, the whole series feels like her protracted story of coming into hero work. She needs Edna Mode to smack her around to help her find her destiny.

But I was talking about something else.

I have watched Stranger Things 3 more recently and may write something about the Upside Down, but Brooke Clark says pretending a TV series is a mature work of thoughtful deliberation does not redeem our interest in it.

Although we are trained to believe in books, we find ourselves watching shows about dragons, criminals, and covens. This leads to cultural status anxiety—a feeling that we aren’t really as sophisticated as we think, because when given the choice, we’d rather flip on HBO than pick up Middlemarch.

There are two ways out of this cognitive dissonance: we can admit our tastes aren’t really as elevated as we like to believe, or we can convince ourselves that television is actually an example of high culture.

Stop Trying to Make TV Smart

We may not have gotten away from what W. H. Auden said decades ago in “The Poet & The City” : “What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.” (via Prufrock News)

Photo by Huỳnh Đạt from Pexels

Writing

Monk Day

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Today is Thursday. That’s Monk Day for me.

As you know (always a dangerous phrase in a story, but this is real life, where you can get away with lots of nonsense), I am currently a free-lance translator. I work from home, setting my own hours – something less ideal than it sounds. I either work quite long hours, or sit around worrying about not working.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that I work in a manner pleasing to myself – usually in sweat clothes on my sofa (sometimes, for exercise, in an easy chair), with the TV on. I have a current TV routine. The H & I Network runs mystery marathons in nine-hour blocks, five days a week. Thursday is Monk Day. Nonstop Tony Shalhoub as an obsessive-compulsive police consultant, whose frailty enables him to see things others miss, even as he barely functions as an adult.

This is a character I identify with.

But that’s not exactly my point either.

I’ve had multiple opportunities to view the two-part pilot episode, and the plotting impresses me a lot. I think it’s a very good example of exemplary character plotting.

We have our “hero,” Adrian Monk, who is afraid, essentially, of everything. He has a long list of phobias, but chief among them is his fear of dirt and germs. He keeps his personal space immaculate and meticulously organized, and can’t even shake hands without wiping down immediately with a towelette. He has a nurse/personal assistant who serves as his mediator with the world.  Her name is Sharona (she is replaced in the third season, but that doesn’t matter here), and she’s more or less his opposite – she’s an earthy New Jersey girl with a blousy style and considerable street smarts. They annoy each other immensely, but each also provides the other with things they need. In spite of themselves, they care for one another – non-romantically.

So in the pilot episodes, the writers set up a perfectly splendid dilemma for Monk. Sharona is kidnapped by a murderer, who drags her off as a hostage – into the sewers of San Francisco.

This constitutes an existential crisis for Monk. His whole life (and his survival, in his own mind) depends on keeping clean. But now he has to climb down into a sewer, where he must encounter sewage, or possibly lose Sharona.

This is splendid character plotting. Monk’s choice is not only agonizing (in a comic way), but it’s germane to the character established in the story. He is tested at his weakest point. He’s forced to leave his comfort zone, to do what he believes he can’t do. His choice to follow into the sewer (you knew he’d do that, didn’t you?) is in actuality an act of faith.

Dramatically, it’s far superior to the more famous “Sophie’s Choice.” Sophie’s choice achieved drama purely through its extremity, but revealed nothing about her character and taught her (and the reader) nothing but despair. The author who counsels despair is like the debater who ends the argument with a punch in the face. It’s effective, but nothing is learned.

Monk is good for you. Good for me, anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Pretender: Rebirth,” by Steven Long Mitchell & Craig W. Van Sickle

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The Pretender: Rebirth

I was a huge fan of the old TV series, The Pretender, starring Michael T. Weiss. It was, I felt, a refreshing concept – on top of the old, familiar theme of the Imposter, one who “becomes” whatever he chooses to be and operates well enough to fool others, you have the theme of an adult male encountering the real world for the first time – childlishly delighted to discover the Three Stooges, or aerosol cheese, or Pez candy. The character of Jarod, a genius combining superior intelligence with naivety, was an invitation to us all to stop and appreciate the wonders that surround us. His quest to find his mother, from whom he’d been kidnapped by the sinister “Centre,” where he was raised as a guinea pig, reminded us of the importance of family.

But the show wasn’t well served by its production team. Each season, Jarod would discover a chain of clues leading to his true identity, and would follow them up, and then the next season that chain would be completely abandoned for another, frustrating the fans. The scripts began to lose track of the original series concept. The show died. There was an attempt to revive it on the TNT network, but that plot was another pointless detour, with uncalled-for mystical accretions.

So I was interested to see that the show’s original creators, Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle, had come out with a couple new Pretender books. The first is The Pretender: Rebirth. I read it with considerable enjoyment, though it’s flawed.

As in the TV version, Jarod, the Pretender, has escaped the Centre. Jarod is a rare genius, a young man with quick learning and empathy skills that allow him to “become” anything he chooses to be, with just a little research. Pursuing him are Miss Parker, sort of like Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel with a harder edge, and Sydney, the scientist who monitored Jarod through childhood, helped him develop his gifts, and became his father-figure.

It’s not enough for Jarod to search for his own origins. He also helps people whenever he can. Here Jarod is intrigued by a news story about a boy who disappeared in a river after an auto accident. Jarod doesn’t believe the boy is dead, and he has a strong suspicion where he is – or at least who can tell him where he is. All he needs to do is become a surgeon overnight, ingratiate himself with a prominent doctor with a grandiosity complex, and spring someone from a mental ward. Continue reading ‘The Pretender: Rebirth,” by Steven Long Mitchell & Craig W. Van Sickle →

Fiction

On Not Watching Game of Thrones

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Kevin DeYoung wrote a post in early August on how he couldn’t understand why Christians would choose to watch Game of Thrones. No amount of awesome cinematography, great dialogue, or storytelling could outweigh the soul-damage done by the graphic violence and exhibitionist nudity. DeYoung followed this post a couple weeks later with a list of reasons he still wasn’t convinced and how he didn’t need to watch the show to know it was something to avoid.

We’ve talked about the show briefly here and not in an entirely negative way. What little I know of the story does appeal to me. The castles, costumes, landscape, dragons, and walkers look amazing. But DeYoung’s points are largely the reasons I don’t want to see it.

I remember seeing a conversation with a couple actresses about how much the show featured female nudity and why couldn’t they expose more men. They were willing to run with that, even mock-campaign for it. Men should have equal access to being full frontal, they said.

DeYoung wrapped up his thoughts like this.

On occasion I’ve stumbled upon a few minutes of PG-13 movies I used to enjoy as a teenager (like the Naked Gun series). I’m appalled by the things that didn’t tweak my conscience then but do now. We are so awash in sensuality that many Christians have no idea how compromised they’ve become. . . . Only in a hyper-sexual, pornographic-saturated culture like ours could we think that graphic sex scenes are no big deal, or somehow offset by a brilliant screenplay.

Uncategorized

“Whom does it serve?”

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Puritan church drummer

Sohrab Ahmari’s The New Philistines, which I reviewed last night, sparked a few thoughts under my follicles.

I noticed some years back that my interest in movies, once keen, was waning. Taking the trouble to make the trip to a theater just didn’t seem a good exchange. Whatever the old rewards had been, they were diminishing. And today, although I have Netflix and Amazon Plus, I don’t use their streaming services a whole lot, either. If I decide I want to view a movie, as often as not I can’t find anything I care to click on.

I used to watch television all evening, every evening. I liked some shows better than others, but I could always find something to amuse me. Then gaps started opening up, where there was nothing I wanted to watch. And now I’ve reached the point where there’s zero network programming that I watch regularly.

Ahmari’s book illustrated why those changes happened. I grew more and more aware – unconsciously at first, but consciously more and more – that everything coming out of Hollywood, big screen or small, was propaganda. In the legend of the Holy Grail, one of the questions asked of the seeker of the Grail was, “Whom does it serve?” With modern entertainment, even the most trivial, that question always applies. Each offering is in service of something. And that something is always some social or political cause.

In the days of the Puritans, it was often complained that people got religion shoved down their throats, that everything turned into a sermon.

Ahmari’s The New Philistines might have been called The New Puritans. Because in the 21st Century, the sermons never end.