Showing posts sorted by relevance for query hell's. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query hell's. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Something Ed Gorman asked me...

Ed flattered me by asking how it was that some of my middling years seems to be aware of what was going down in fantastic fiction in the 1950s. I responded, inadequately:

I read the nonfiction that was coming out ca. 1978 (the golden age of 13 for me), the year I started reading the various fiction magazines I could find and obtain (cf and contemporary mimetic/eclectic as well as sf/fantasy/horror), religiously…and my high school libraries (Londonderry, New Hampshire for 8th grade and frosh year, Honolulu’s private school Punahou where I missed overlapping with Obama for Soph on) were obliging enough: the former to stock the likes of James Gunn’s ALTERNATE WORLDS and Franz Rottensteiner’s bad but colorful THE SF BOOK and Peter Nicholls’s SF AT LARGE essay collection (and the Londonderry public library had Damon Knight’s THE FUTURIANS, which I checked out half a dozen times...and developed a mild crush on Doris Baumgardt aka Leslie Perri); the latter had Knight’s IN SEARCH OF WONDER and Blish’s ISSUE AT HAND and its first sequel (the second wouldn’t be published till my adulthood). I bought the paperbacks of Pohl’s THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS and the Nicholls SF ENCYCLOPEDIA (I still remember the day I stumbled across the table of remaindered books in Liberty House, Honolulu’s upscalish department store chain--renamed during WWI, natch, along with the liberty pups and the liberty slaw--and saw copies of the fat Nicholls encyclopedia, which I hadn’t seen in the pulp before though I’d read reviews, on sale for $4 a pop), and dug around for Kyle’s coffee-table books and HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS…as well as all the historical retrospective anthologies (and vintage best-ofs) I could find, as well as attending to the autobiographical material in the collections and anthologies offered by Ellison, Asimov, and whomever else chose to do…and, of course, read the columnists in the fiction magazines, including “R. E. Porter” in EQMM, and branched into the bigger fanzines/semiprozines I saw advertised in the digests, such as ALGOL/STARSHIP and SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW, where the increasingly impressive (to me) book critic and apparently major fiction writer Algis Budrys was interviewed by some guy named Gorman.

Though I’d gleaned some things even a few years earlier, reading, among my father’s other pbs and book club editions, Baen at Award’s THE BEST FROM IF, V. 3 volume that included Geis and Del Rey’s farewells to the magazine, and buying Harrison’s NOVA 4 as a gift for my father (from a spinner rack of mostly Manor Books, at the same drugstore with the comics spinner racks and the small newsstand with F&SF and others on it), with a version of Bester’s HELL’S CARTOGRAPHERS essay in it.

And I collected older digests, and read them. Couldn’t get TOO far with, notably, OTHER WORLDS’s more run of the mill stuff, but was slightly croggled to see that 1970s BATMAN comics scenarist David V. Reed/Dave Vern (whose work I read new as a younger kid) not only was mentioned by Bester in that NOVA 4/HELL’S CARTO essay, but also was in Ray Palmer’s stable. People got around! How bout that! Even if they weren’t well-known except in certain circles…thus my awareness began of the "hidden" history that laid there in plain sight, if one took a look...

Les Daniels’s history of horror in mostly pop culture, LIVING IN FEAR, probably was the hook that got me going with the literary-history/crit habit, as I was a horror-seeking machine, though eclectic, as a younger kid (read that about ten and living in Connecticut, finding Daniels’s similar book on comics not long after).
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Friday, August 22, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links on Friday, no less...

Smile
Sorry for the delay, folks...life has gotten hectic again. But, with any luck at all, this will be the last late assembly (and more have finally been presented here).

 Anne Billson: Proof

Bill Crider: Smile (1975 film) [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Soldier in the Rain
Proof

BV Lawson: Media Murder

David Vineyard: True Confessions; The Fugitive (1947 film)

Ed Lynskey: Violent Saturday

Elizabeth Foxwell: Lights Out: "The Pattern" (1951 tv); BFI in search of "A Study in Scarlet"

Evan Lewis: The Fat Man (film)

George Kelley: Legends (tv series) 

Iba Dawson: Frank; Lauren Bacall 
When Strangers Marry

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: You'll Never Get Rich 

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Matched Pearl" (by Henry Slesar) 

Jackie Kashian: Peter Adkison and Jake Theis of GenCon 

Jacqueline Lynch: All the Brothers Were Valiant

Jake Hinkson: When Strangers Marry

 James Reasoner: Kondike (tv series)

Jerry House: Nightfall (CBC Radio 1980 pilot): "Love and the Lonely One"; Enoch Arden (1915 film)

John Grant: Game; The Floating Dutchman; Das Geheimnis der Schwarzen Witwe (aka The Secret of the Black Widow); Hell's House; Something to Live For

Horror Express
Jonathan Lewis: The Big Steal; The Texas Rangers (film); The Giant Claw

Kelly Robinson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908 film); Absinthe

Kliph Nesteroff: Frankie Ray

Laura: Hell's Crossroads; Belles on Their Toes

Lucy Brown: The Informer (1935 film)

The Sheriff of Stone Gulch
Marty McKee: Horror Express

Mystery Dave: Jumanji

Neer: Spoorloos (aka The Vanishing)

Patti Abbott: Summertime (1955 film)

 Randy Johnson: An Adventure in Space and Time; Django sfida Sartana (aka Django Defies Sartana)

Rick: The Mating Season

Ron Scheer: The Sheriff of Stone Gulch

The Spiral Staircase
Sergio Angelini: The Outfit

Stacia Jones: Are You Here?

Stephen Bowie: Dennis the Menace

Stephen Gallagher: Jimmy Edwards and John Franklyn-Robbins

Yvette Banek: The Spiral Staircase




The Outfit

Between takes, Soldier in the Rain
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Friday, January 20, 2012

FFB: Robert Bloch: DR. HOLMES' MURDER CASTLE (1983)


























Robert Bloch's career after 1960 was haunted by the dual shades of the real serial killer Ed Gein and the fictional one he created, Norman Bates (and Bates's two faces, the one resembling Calvin Thomas Beck whom Bloch wrote about, and Tony Perkins's in the film role), that little cluster joining an immortal Jack the Ripper in Bloch-career-haunting (since shortly after he published the ridiculously frequently plagiarized "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" in Weird Tales in 1943). But in what he wrote about, there are at least as many words expended on H. H. Holmes (aka Herman W. Mudgett...perhaps not coincidentally two of the names "Anthony Boucher" used along with Boucher as pseudonyms, as Bloch and William "Boucher" White were long-term colleagues and probably friends). American Gothic was for years probably Bloch's second-best-known novel, and I wondered how much the title American Psycho was an attempt by the best-selling pisher to pay a sort of tribute to Bloch; certainly Erik Larson's Holmes/Mudgett history, The Devil in the White City, has since become more popular than Bloch's two notable long works about the Chicago-based murderer...the other being the long essay "Dr. Holmes' Murder Castle", among the most obscurely-published of Bloch's works; it has appeared only twice, originally in a book from Reader's Digest's "condensed books" division that is not a "condensed" book, but an original anthology of true-crime and supposedly-true paranormal accounts, all written by writers better-known for fiction (with the arguably weak exception of Colin Wilson, who loved to muck around in these fields of mostly-nonfiction). It was later collected in the third volume of The Lost Bloch, an impressive collection also including Bloch's wife (then widow), "Elly" Bloch, and Gahan Wilson's reminiscences of the man, and an unedited form of the interview Douglas Winter conducted with Bloch for the interview collection Faces of Fear; this volume only saw 776 copies produced, apparently (and most of the copies for sale I see are de-accessioned library copies of the pricy less-limited edition of 750).

 It's a fine, novella-length account, and while I like American Gothic better (and Devil in the White City has more room for more evidence and detail, including that dug up since Bloch wrote this, presumably at the turn of the 1980s though perhaps earlier), I'm glad to have "Murder Castle" at hand, and it's an ornament to both books it appears in.

 from ISFDb:

 Title: The Lost Bloch, Volume Three: Crimes and Punishments edited by David J. Schow (Subterranean Press, 2002)

 7 • The Head on the Bloch • (2002) • essay by David J. Schow
17 • Weird Adventures of the Odd Little Band • (2002) • essay by Gahan Wilson
23 • The Shambles of Ed Gein • (1962) • essay by Robert Bloch
31 • Hell's Angel • (1951) • novella by Robert Bloch
91 • The Finger Necklace • (1945) • short story by Robert Bloch
115 • The Noose Hangs High • (1946) • short story by Robert Bloch
139 • It's Your Own Funeral • (1943) • short story by Robert Bloch
165 • Dr. Holmes' Murder Castle • (1983) • essay by Robert Bloch (aka Dr. Holmes's Murder Castle)
239 • Three Whole Hours and Then Some with Robert Bloch • (2002) • essay by Douglas E. Winter
279 • My Husband, Robert Bloch • (2002) • essay by Eleanor Bloch

Title: Tales of the Uncanny editor uncredited (Reader's Digest Association, 1983)

 Dr. Holmes's Murder Castle • essay by Robert Bloch
Curious Encounter • essay by John G. Fuller
The Possession of Sister Jeanne • essay by Norah Lofts
The Remarkable Daniel Dunglas Home • essay by Julian Symons
The Captain's Return • essay by David Beaty
Strange Affair at Stratford • essay by Barbara Michaels
A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin • essay by Colin Wilson

For this week's other books, please see Patti Abbott's blog
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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V on Thursday: the links

Starting Over
Below, the links to this week's reviews and citations; terribly sorry for the various delays this week (my computer in the shop, the press of work, various smaller distractions--I should be back on the Regular Schedule next week). As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

Anne Billson: The Suicide Shop

Bill Crider: InnerSpace  trailer

Brian Arnold: AMC Pacer ads 

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds: Allan Havey at the TCM Classic Film Festival

Dan Stumpf: Hell's Heroes

Ed Lynskey: Dillinger (1945 film)

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Bat

Evan Lewis: Johnny Ringo (tv series)

George Kelley: Monsters vs. Aliens: Supersonic Joyride

Entre Les Murs
Greg Proops Film Club

How Did This Get Made?: Peter Fonda on Easy Rider 2

Iba Dawson: In Honor of La Fête Nationale (Bastile Day)

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Prisoner of Shark Island

Jackie Kashian: Eric Hollerbach on the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? and RT (Russia Today), etc.


Jacqueline T. Lynch: Chip Off the Old Block; The Merry Monahans

Bettie Page Reveals All!
James Reasoner: Somewhere in the Night

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Bettie Page Reveals All!; Babylon-5:  "Infection"

Jerry House: Tales of Tomorrow: "The Crystal Egg"

John Charles: Redline

John Grant: Baryshnya i Khuligan (aka The Lady and the Hooligan); Alias Mary Smith; Wonders in the Dark

Jonathan Lewis: Beyond the Time Barrier; Plunder of the Sun; The Abominable Dr. Phibes

Kliph Nesteroff: Jackie Mason on The Grube Tube (NYC public access television), 1980

The Pajama Game
Laura: The Swordsman: Five Came Back; Her Sister's Secret

 Lucy Brown: The Pajama Game: conferences at Oxford and elsewhere

Martin Edwards: EQMM Podcast: "No Flowers"; Run, Lola, Run

 Marty McKee: Asteroid vs. Earth

Michael Shonk: Counterspy; David Harding, Counterspy (tv pilots)

Mystery Dave: The Lawnmower Man

Patti Abbott: Starting Over; Best episodes of tv series

Peter Rosovsky: Get Carter and its peers.

Prashant Trikannad: Raid on Entebbe

Randy Johnson: The Big Steal: Apocalypse Joe (aka Un uomo chiamato Apocalisse Joe)

Foyle's War
Rick: Raymond Chandler on his a/v adaptations

Rod Lott: Single Room Furnished

Ron Scheer: Librivox audiobooks

Sergio Angelini: John Dickson Carr on radio

Stacia Jones: Cold in July: The Discoverers

 Stephen Bowie: The Best TV Series of 2000-2009

Steve Lewis: Girl on the Run

Yvette Banek: Foyle's War: Season/series 8

Todd Mason: Nadine Gordimer Stories: as noted in this blog previously:

The Gordimer Stories
A selection of eight short films, including an interview with Nadine Gordimer herself, which was shown on at least some PBS stations as a series, all the drama set in South Africa in depths of apartheid and the small and large tragedies those laws force upon the characters, and the attempts to subvert and overcome the noxious racist regime.

 ...which included: 
City Lovers (1982): 
A short film based on Nadine Gordimer's story, and presented on public stations in the 1980s as part of the Nadine Gordimer Stories package, this was the most affecting of the group among those I saw, offering a charming yet telling liaison between a young "colored" ("mixed-race") South African woman and an older "white" German visitor to SA, back in the last years of apartheid, and how his foolhardiness and the insanity of the national institutional racism messes them over.
The Burglar
And I've just seen this past week the David Goodis-scripted (from his novel) The Burglar. This is, almost without question, the most ineptly-acted fully professional film I've seen; aside from an actually competent performance by Martha Vickers, Jayne Mansfield perhaps embarrasses herself the least. There is no scenery left unchewed by about 15 minutes in...if you've ever wondered why Philly looked so run-down by the 1970s, the mastication of locations by this film's cast was a minor but not insignificant factor.
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Friday, May 18, 2018

FFM: FANTASTIC STORIES, August 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, August and September 1976, edited by Edward Ferman

Where were you in the summer of 1976? In June, my family and I were moving from Connecticut to New Hampshire; I was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was definitely on a Mark Twain jag, reading the Tom/Huck/Jim fictions in order of publication, so there's a good chance I read Tom Sawyer Abroad and "Tom Sawyer, Detective" in late June or July. I turned twelve in August. I had read stories by Avram Davidson and Algis Budrys, the headlining writers in the issues under discussion, in Robert Arthur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies by then, but they hadn't yet become among the most important writers whose work I would read, at very least to me. I had read some back issues of Analog, Vertex Science Fiction and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but had not yet sought out new issues. I had all but given up on standard comic books--maybe an issue of Weird War Tales or two, more nostalgically than otherwise, purchased that year; most of my newsstand investment was in Mad and one or two issues of National Lampoon, while mostly reading paperbacks and the odd library hardcover or discard/booksale/secondhand item in boards, aside from what my parents brought home...

Meanwhile, on small budgets, working out of their houses, Ed Ferman in Cornwall, in exurban northwestern Connecticut, and Ted White in the DC suburb Falls Church, Virginia, had both produced impressive issues which were sitting on some newsstands around the world.


  • Publication: Fantastic, August 1976 (issue can be read at the link)
    (View All Issues) (View Issue Grid)
  • Editors: Ted White
  • Year: 1976-08-00
  • Publisher: Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc.
  • Price: $1.00
  • Pages: 134
  • Binding: digest
  • Type: MAGAZINE
  • Title Reference: Fantastic - 1976
  • Cover: Stephen Fabian; column headers: J. Michael Nally
  • Notes: Vol 25, No 4. Page count includes advertising insert for Max cigarettes. Page 66 precedes the ad and page 69 follows it. "Steven Utley" on toc but "Steve Utley" on title page.
    [--and, actually, both August issues had the same stiffened full-color ad for Max cigarets on one side, True cigarets on the other; other ads in the Fantastic include a back cover ad for four tabletop historical war games from Conflict Games, and interior ads for Alternate Worlds Records (at that point with only four fantastic-fiction spoken-word LPs available: one each of Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and Harlan Ellison reading their own fiction, and Ugo Toppo reading Robert E. Howard) and house ads for back and future issues; the F&SF issues include back cover ads for Harlequin's short-lived sf-adventure Laser Books line (September) and F&SF t-shirts (August); along with the interior house ads, there are display ads for the Science Fiction Book Club (one page in each issue), a full-page ad for TSR's Dungeons and Dragons game sets and a quarter-page ad for Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison's Hell's Cartographers. Both magazines also have regular back pages of classified ads. TM]
In the Fantastic, we have the first of Davidson's Jack Limekiller stories to be published, a series fondly remembered by those fortunate enough to have read the stories as they appeared, mostly in F&SF (the frequency with which writers published in both magazines was high), and as collected in the small press volume ¡Limekiller! (exclamation points probably unfortunate). Limekiller lives in British Hidalgo, which somewhat resembles the British Honduras then, and Belize now, where Avram Davidson and Grania Davis and their son Ethan lived for a period, after moving from Mexico (and thanks to Dennis Lien for pointing out in comments below that I had relocated them to Guyana, for reasons only of Middle-Aged Moment). British Hidalgo does seem to have rather more indisputable supernatural occurrences in it, however...one could choose to use the term magical realism to describe these stories, if that wasn't just a cop-out label for well-grounded fantasy fiction set in the otherwise "real world" ...Grania Davis has a story in the issue as well; she, who died in that sudden run of losses of some of the best women writers in fantastic fiction last year, had long since divorced Davidson, but they had remained friends, and even occasional collaborators on fiction, up to co-authoring Davidson's last novel published during his lifetime (and serving as the co-editor of his posthumous collections and longer fiction publications). "Dennis More" (sic)/Keith Taylor might've had a broader following than he has, had he published more novels in the '70s and '80s...perhaps being Australian didn't help, at least in terms of promotion; more recently, chronic illness has been keeping him from work. Steven Utley was another example of a writer who probably should have reached a larger audience than he did, with consistently good and occasionally brilliant fiction much-appreciated by cognoscenti, but not terribly widely-read beyond the more literate Members of the Community...even such peers as George Alec Effinger seem to have reached a slightly larger readership, even if in the latter's case too much of it after his early death.

Lin Carter's usually dire attempts at "posthumous collaboration" with Robert Howard on Conan stories (which at least had the effect of boosting Fantastic's sales) are not notably improved upon by his attempt at doing so with a Clark Ashton Smith fragment...particularly given how much more elegantly Decadent Smith's prose was, elegance not Carter's strong suit. I always enjoyed Richard Lupoff's intentionally parodic pastiches published as by Ova Hamlet, in distinction, even when I hadn't yet read the targets (in this case, the Doc Savage series of stories). L. Sprague de Camp, Carter's senior collaborator on new and "posthumous" Conan stories, had a bit of renaissance of his own short-fiction writing in the mid '70s, not least with the amiable Willy Newbury fantasies in both magazines here and in other issues. 

And the book reviews of Fritz Leiber, Algis Budrys and Barry Malzberg, among the other rotating set of reviewers (wit a few exceptions) in F&SF, were particularly key reading for me in the years when I was gathering these as back issues...Lupoff would also pop up with book reviews in White's Fantastic, Davidson in Ferman's F&SF along with Joanna Russ, and not a few others of note (Judith Merril was the first book columnist during Ferman's editorship, then James Blish was the primary book reviewer until he couldn't continue, and Budrys took on the bulk of the reviewing for a decade-plus). I tended to enjoy Pacifica Radio dramatist and bookstore owner Baird Searles's multimedia reviews as well, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the blog, and Isaac Asimov's science essays, even if Searles (the most consistently-contributing a/v reviewer to date in the magazine's history) has had such predecessors and successors as Charles Beaumont, "William Morrison", Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, Kathi Maio, Lucius Shepard and David Skal to shine as brightly as he did or even a bit more so. 


These issues feature the novel Michaelmas, perhaps a bit shorter than the text of the not terribly fat novel as published in hardcover and paperback by Berkley/Putnam, the first edition later in 1977. It was Budrys's first novel in a decade, though he had already published a novella about Laurent Michaelmas, and would publish another afterward (and had hoped to publish yet another). Also, Budrys was perhaps dreaming big for this novel, somewhat jocularly referring to the potential interview with Johnny Carson (who in the mid-'70s would still tuck interviews with the occasional writer into the last half hour of his 90-minute Tonight Show). Not sure how much juice Berkley put behind the book (not so very much, as far as I know), but it wasn't a breakout for Budrys beyond his pre-existing audience, even if it did well for him (without the kind of revised awkward title Fawcett Gold Medal had blessed his previous two novels with). 

F&SF throughout its run has often featured work by writers who would drop in to fantastic fiction only occasionally, whether this was true of their writing generally or simply in the fantastic-fiction field. Richard Frede, best known for his 1960 novel The Interns, was one of the busy writers who only on occasion would contribute a speculative fiction, while such others as Liz Hufford, Don Trotter, and musician and songwriter Tom Rapp were examples of the relatively non-prolific (at least in terms of prose or non-lyrics poetry). On the other end of the spectrum, within fantastic fiction and without, Jane Yolen, Curt Siodmak (even given his best-remembered work is in film), Herbie Brennan (at least as well-known now for his books about spiritualism and his work in role-playing games), and three relative non-favorites of mine, Michael Coney (tended toward goofy concepts), Raylyn Moore (tended toward relatively trite fantasies flavored heavily with hostility to feminism; the Phyllis Schlafly of fantastic fiction), and Robert F. Young (who tended toward trite ideas handled only mildly less heavy-handedly than Lin Carter, and with even less wit...at least Carter's more lighthearted pastiches, such as his quasi-Doc Savage fiction, had a certain bounce). Barry Malzberg, occasional book-reviewer and more-common fiction-contributor (and later honoree with an F&SF special issue) as well as Ted White's predecessor as editor of Fantastic, and regular fiction and occasional nonfiction contributor there, was also notably engaged as Edward Ferman's co-editor on some impressive anthologies in the 1970s; he likes Davidson's The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy far less than I do. But, given everything, he's allowed to be incorrect in this. 

And the latter F&SF issue features one of David Hardy's cover paintings involving the adventures of Bhen, the BEM (or Bug-Eyed Monster), an occasional series starting in the 1970s, and often, not exclusively, involving Bhen hanging around NASA probes. (Primarily writer) Greg Bear and Stephen Fabian do notably good work on their covers, above, as well. 

Where were you in the summer of 1976, I'll ask again?

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's books (and possibly other magazine issues)...

I like the cover of this Spanish edition of Michaelmas better than the Anglophone editons' covers...such as the Berkley paperback, with the same cover painting as the hardcover first edition, with blurbs pasted over, below:

The Limekiller collection...another uninspired cover, alas:

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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

TV notes: some of what I've seen of the "new season"

666 Park Avenue A series which wouldn't exist if not for American Horror Story, and while not as pretentious nor quite as silly as AHS, and with a slightly better sense of humor about itself, it's still basically The Devil's Advocate come again, judging by the pilot, and it's a damned shame the most prominent "interracial" couple (played by Vanessa Williams and Terry O'Quinn) in US primetime are rather high up in Hell's hierarchy (this last, of course, is not an indictment of this series so much as all the others).  Another sad bit involves anorectic-looking Rachael Taylor, as the spunky architect-heroine, who, having an expensive gown thrust upon her by Williams's seductress, wears the garment on a double-date to the opera (another sure sign of eevul, attending opera), and the garment, meant to accentuate curves, can't find any on Taylor. (The promo photo at left rather demonstrates all this.)

Dexter Two episodes into this season, it's mostly interesting to see Jennifer Carpenter and Michael Hall  playing off one another to such a great degree, given their actual life status as a divorced couple (thanks to Patti Abbott for the fact-checking), as the series details the stepsiblings' treating with her discovery of Dexter's murderous activities.

The Good Wife The scripts and even the guest casting remain solid (in the second episode, at least two of supporting roles are filled by people at "two degrees of separation" from me, which means I've been working on the periphery of television too long, perhaps).

 Copper The (chronologically) second series on this list to owe its existence essentially to Deadwood, as well as having an interesting commissioning station (as the first US dramatic series ordered up by BBC America) and co-creator (Tom Fontana, he of St. Elsewhere and Homicide along with some subsequent work which is solid if not scaling the same heights, such as prison-drama Oz).  Gangs of New York might've made the pitch a bit easier, in this anti-glamorous account of Civil War Irish-American NYC cops, and such friends and acquaintances they have as an African-American doctor and a variety of prostitutes and aristocrats and tradespeople; I'm amused by the literary references these knockabout, but not ignorant, folks are given to make (such as to Cheshire cats and "Ours is not to reason why..."), which I suspect the scripters take great care in vetting for date-probability.

 Hell on Wheels AMC's stepchild of Deadwood, a season older than Copper, is an anti-glamorous account of transcontinental railway construction, in the years just after the Civil War, with all the ethnic and class tensions (and ex-Rebels v. Yanks) you could reasonably ask for (but not far enough west to involve Chinese immigrant workers, so far).  You just don't get enough sinister Swedes (who are actually Norwegian, iirc) in US drama...or Scandinavians at all.

XIII, along with being a stepchild of the Bourne films, is the kind of slam-bang "action" drama with a mildly sfnal premise that used to populate the originally syndicated hour slots in the early 1990s on US tv (Xena, Relic Hunter, etc.), and as such it's not bad, if a bit dragged out, as the Bourne analog tries to recover his memory and plumb the conspiracy which "created" him, and Aisha Tyler as an eventually rogue FBI agent (hello, among other things, 24) attempts to help him. A Canadian series imported south by the Reelz Channel.

 Bomb Girls is another Reelz Canadian import, a well-cast, slightly soapy account of the US women doing World War 2 factory work, and the tensions and potential liberation (of various sorts) that this brings them. I've seen only the second episode so far.

Call the Midwife is interesting in part as the first "standalone" drama series (as opposed to being tucked into the Masterpiece anthology, the sole survivor in this regard outside of sporadic half-hour one-time-only presentations and the rare Great Performances episode) PBS has offered since American Family a decade back (the one about an extended Mexican-American family starring Edward James Olmos, Constance Marie and Raquel Welch, not An American Family the television verite series from the early '70s), and also in its attempt at a clear-eyed look at the post-WW2 London slums and the young nurse-midwives, and their nun mentors, who attempt to aid at least the pregnant women they work with there, under often-shockingly bad conditions. I've seen only the pilot of this one, so far, which has an intentional disruption of tone, to get across the quality of the lives portrayed, but feels just a bit pat, if game, so far.

Sons of Anarchy I've managed actually not to catch a whole new episode so far (FX loads the On-Demand episodes as heavily with ads as they do the cablecast episodes), to see how thoroughly the too-cod-Shakespearean references would continue...but a series I enjoy nonetheless, even if the supposed alternative nature of what the motorcycle club the SOA was meant to be, as opposed to a small-time crime syndicate that it is, remains elusive. One of the best series on the FX channel, which has an impressive slate, with one or two exceptions...one could wish that Fox/FBC, its broadcast cousin, had nearly as much to boast about.

More to come:

Children's Hospital
Comedy Bang Bang
Cybergeddon
Vegas
MeTV and RetroTV finally cleared by Verizon in the Philadelphia area
Newschat series
HBO Go
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