SISTERS, among striking TV Notes, during WGA's attempt for decent treatment for writers, against the wishes (and greed) of producers/the moneyfolk

With the wrapping up of Barry on HBO, those looking for more work from Sarah Goldberg could do worse that turn to SisterS, a co-production of Irish broadcast network RTE, US-based cable station IFC (and thus streaming on AMC+), and the Canadian video-on-demand  outlet Crave, featuring Goldberg as a Canadian woman seeking to meet her biological father, an Irishman who had a brief encounter with her mother on a visit across the Atlantic...who at first meets mostly her half-sister, Suze (Susan Stanley) a bitter and long-abandoned offspring as well, along with the latter's long-suffering mother, and wife of the rambling fellow. Apparently six episodes produced for the first season, and one of the sharper improvement curves I've seen in the first three episodes, as the first was mostly devoted to easy fish-out-of-water humor and mild exploitation at the Goldberg character Sare's expense, the second show giving Sare a bit more gumption as well as demonstrating more than selfish desire to connect with her sperm donor at whatever cost to his theoretical closer family, and the third episode dealing with any number of off the wall aspects of life, death, and women who take care of each other out of necessity and compassion in more or less equal measure. Looking forward to where the remaining episode are going. 

Meanwhile, FXX's intentionally obnoxious but reasonably clever sitcom DAVE has finally forced its way into my attention, about a caricature of its co-creator/star "Li'l Dicky" (legally David Burd) the rapper and his life, which has managed by the currently-most-recently-released episode (the third season finale) to dragoon Rachel McAdams (I will give anything she does a chance) and Brad Pitt (playing themselves) into a video-shoot, and while the last couple of  episodes are all I've seen, I gather this series has been improving as it goes along as well.

With a Justified sequel series coming and Awkwafina is Nora from Queens wrapping up a season with an almost inevitable take-off on Everything Everywhere All at Once, small favors as we wait for Disney, et al., to quit emulating the Governor Meatballs of the world and give the professionals in their employ their due.  Particularly after a tv season which saw the US broadcast nets dump such decent or better series as The Company You Keep (or cancel) and East New York in favor of new piles of game shows next season, and we don't mean more Jeopardy! (though probably that, at least, as well...though I wonder if their writing staff is Not WGA...).

Meanwhile, apparently the greed-piles who have taken over and remade the HBO-owning corporate entity into Warner Discovery (having run Discovery Networks into a set of garbage-fire cable stations) have greenlit a third season for Somebody Somwhere, perhaps the least glamorous dramatic series on US television, and Lyz Lenz suggests, at least jokingly, that her advocacy of it in her Iowa-based newsletter Men Yell at Me might've helped that happen. Maybe! Now let's see if the strike(s) will allow for that...or the greed-piles will settle amicably.

NUMB3RS: Season 4, 401 "Trust Metric" and 402 "Hollywood Homicide" from the TV GUIDE blog of the television series, 28 September/5 October 2007

Further rescues from my "drafts" file of copy for my TV GUIDE blogs, formerly linked at the bottom of my links list (the current TV GUIDE website instead redirects to barebones information on the series, etc.).

Pluto TV offers "free, with ads" streaming of these and other episodes (for whatever reason, they have season four's second episode listed as  its third), and the series repeats are currently broadcast on the H&I network in the US at 3am ET, daily...mildly amusingly, head to head with repeats of the Scott Brothers, then Ridley alone. series The Good Wife in the US on competing Start TV network. Albeit H&I is more or less pitched at men, Start at women. Decent viewing for insomniacs.

In Numb3rs, to give it its preferred logotype, Cheryl Heuton and Nicholas Falacci have created an almost perfect machine, taking the eccentric detective series, whose roots go back at least as far as the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle but which is perhaps best represented on US television by Columbo, and combining that with the ensemble workplace/family drama, which came to its mature form in the US with such 1980s series as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. In addition to good to excellent scripts, sly casting and performances and impressive design, the two extra strokes of brilliance in the makeup of Numb3rs are the gimmicky but nonetheless enjoyable use of applied mathematics in the characters’ crime-solving and, less obviously, the splitting of the eccentric detective into a team of eccentrics, making at least some of the FBI agents at the heart of the show nearly as odd as the mathematicians and physicists (and a city-planner paterfamilias) who aid them. That the Scott brothers, Tony and Ridley, were willing to co-produce the series and occasionally, as with tonight’s fourth season premiere directed by Tony, to take an even greater hands-on interest, is hardly surprising, beyond that a pair of somewhat competitive brothers are the heart of the show. Even where Numb3rs is unbelievable, and it is frequently in small and sometimes large ways, it remains entertaining.

Tonight’s episode [401; "Trust Metric"] picks up from last season’s finale and its quasi-cliffhanger, wherein an ex-military member of the FBI unit directed by Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) was discovered to be a traitor, selling sensitive data to the Chinese government, and perhaps willing to kill to protect his secret. Disgraced and incarcerated agent Colby Granger (Dylan Bruno) somewhat unsurprisingly turns out to be not truly a “mole,” but apparently a triple agent deeply undercover to help ferret out some true double agents in the US Department of Justice. One Mason Lancer (no relation), played with sufficient dead-eyed menace by Val Kilmer, is flushed out thus.

As often on the series, there wasn’t too much sophisticated detective work involved in these events, and some of the law enforcement practice displayed is questionable at best, such as when an attempt is made to recapture Granger and his old Army buddy at a subway station with police are employed on only one side of the tracks, allowing the fugitives to easily escape…even given that Eppes and his inner circle are uncertain as to whether they should let Granger remain at large, surely someone among the police agents at the subway station would’ve said, Say, shouldn’t some of us be over on the other platform, too? But the interaction between the academics and the primary FBI agents under Epps, including the characters played by Dianne Farr and Peter MacNichol (for varying reasons missing from too many recent episodes), is often the greatest strength in Numb3rs, and so too in tonight’s. Farr is particularly good with bits of business that add texture to the drama, as when her Diane Reeves character doesn’t quite suppress her irritation when mathematician Charlie Epps (David Krumholtz) pulls a cube of ice from her glass of tea to use as a visual aide. Tony Scott’s contributions to “Trust Metric” include the unusually large number of jump cuts and quick edits even for this series, which will often engage in those for the sequences set in the Los Angeles FBI headquarters, usually bathed in a blue light (or at least shot through a blue filter), versus the relatively sedate editing and camera movement in the sequences set at the Eppes family home or at the CalTech analog that serves as the home base for Prof. Eppes and his fellow academics, including computer scientist and romantic partner Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat).

[402: "Hollywood Homicide", 5 October 2007]

This was a consolidating episode for the series…easing the Colby character back into the team, showcasing the romances of the Eppes brothers (David Krumholtz’s Charlie with Navi Rawat’s Amita, and the slight edge in Charlie’s voice in response to the gentlest of nudges from his womanfriend; Rob Morrow’s Don with Aya Sumika’s Liz Warner, neither yet good at defusing the workplace/relation tension), giving nearly everyone in the cast a setpiece. It also gave the show an opportunity to mock [then-current HBO tv series] Entourage and to make a few inside jokes about Numb3rs itself…as when mildly starstruck Charlie and the less-impressed Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) demonstrate how they use calculations of water displacement to determine the size of a murder suspect, only to be told by their audience of a film actor and his lifelong friend that their efforts are just like something out of the movies…”only not as cool.”

Aside from the Eureka! moment that led up to that exercise, the math in this episode was rather light; the A and B storylines for this one were still wrapped up in questions of identity (and here’s where serious spoilers begin). Aside from various members of the FBI detail, most obviously Alimi Ballard’s David Sinclair, still trying to come to terms with Colby’s long-term deep cover, the primary mystery of the episode involves what turns out to be two prostitutes who’ve undergone plastic surgery to look nearly identical…one murdered and the other apparently the intended target of that murder.

Kelly Overton excels in the small role as the latter, flint-hearted Andrea Barton, who has been blackmailing the actor and his entourage with information her “twin” had picked up and passed along. It turns out that the actor, who makes much of his brother having been killed in a carjacking some years earlier, actually killed the brother himself in a drunken accident…more twinning, or almost, and more deception.

Aside from being well-paced and only rather slightly far-fetched, the strength of this episode is, as I suggest above, in reinforcing or reintroducing several of the themes that have run through the series, not least the relation between Amita and Charlie. Charlie can be remarkably abrasive at times, while he dithered over whether he wanted to pursue a relation with Amita (if she would have him), and one of the strengths of the series is that this rarely felt like a gambit on the part of the producers so much as genuine unresolved tension within Charlie’s slightly maladjusted soul, which is mirrored in a similarly rocky romantic life for his brother. Leaving aside the affect the death of their mother might have had on the brothers, it also suggests what life with obsessive people, whether ingenious mathematicians or dogged FBI agents, can let one in for.

Ben Blacker's  The Writer's Room podcast, with Heuton and Falacci, among others...

The soundtrack composers in the NIGHT GALLERY: Saturday Music Club submitted for your approval on Sunday

Night Gallery was a disappointing television series, to say the least, even given the occasional excellences in individual episodes (they had the wit to adapt Fritz Leiber stories, but never very well; oddly, they did some of the best dramatization of Lovecraft we've seen). But in one regard, it was a pretty remarkable assembly, even for its time...check the soundtrack composers list from IMDb:

Series Music by  
Eddie Sauter ... (17 episodes, 1971-1973) 

Paul Glass ... (11 episodes, 1971-1972) 


Oliver Nelson ... (7 episodes, 1971-1972) 


Robert Prince ... (5 episodes, 1970-1971) 


Gil Melle ... (4 episodes, 1971-1972) 


Robert Bain ... (2 episodes, 1971-1972) 


John Lewis ... (2 episodes, 1971-1972) 


Billy Goldenberg ... (1 episode, 1969)


Benny Carter ... (1 episode, 1971)


Lalo Schifrin ... (1 episode, 1972)


Frank Skinner ... (1 episode, 1972)

Saturday Music Club: some jazz television series in black and white--an addition

Stars of Jazz (KABC Los Angeles 1955; ABC 1958)
Max Roach Quintet (bad edit in middle)

Julie London

Billie Holiday


The Nat King Cole Show (NBC 1956)(famously unable to get consistent national sponsorship, so NBC ran it in essence to sell Cole's records...and because they should)
with the Oscar Peterson Trio


Art Ford's Greenwich Village Party (Dumont 1957...the last Dumont network series, essentially):


Art Ford's Jazz Party (NTA Film Network 1958...one of the first NTA series):
Billie Holiday:


Coleman Hawkins:


The Subject is Jazz (NBC 1958) (Gilbert Seldes and Billy Taylor, hosts)
"Early Jazz"

Toshiko Akiyoshi Trio

"The Future of Jazz"


Playboy's Penthouse (syndicated 1959) (Hugh Hefner aping Art Ford)


Playboy After Dark: two episodes of the sequel series (syndicated 1969)


Jazz Casual (NET/National Educational Television 1961) (Ralph Gleason, host)
The Dizzy Gillespie Quintet

The Dave Brubeck Quartet

The John Coltrane Quartet


Jazz Scene USA (syndicated 1962) (Oscar Brown hosting, Steve Allen producing)
Jimmy Smith Trio

Stan Kenton Orchestra


Jazz 625 (BBC 1964) (Steve Race, host; later, Humphrey Littleton)
The Modern Jazz Quartet and Laurindo Almeida

Brubeck Quartet

The Dizzy Gillespie Quintet

The Jazz Messengers 

excerpt: The World of Lenny Bruce (unsold pilot)

Lenny Bruce, Jazz Fan by bret-primack

Recent television in some of the less traveled pathways...

The Man in the High Castle (Amazon)
Midtown (TuffTV broadcast/Amazon streaming)
Everyone's Crazy But Us (Funny or Die/YouTube streaming)
The Hotwives of Atlanta (Hulu)
No, You Shut Up! (Fusion cablecast/YouTube streaming)
W/Bob & David (Netflix)
The Price of More (Crackle streaming)
Falcón (CinéMoi cable/streaming)
Spotless (Esquire Network/streaming)
Flesh and Bone (Starz)

Though to refer to Netflix, Amazon, or certainly YouTube as less-travelled pathways generally than broadcast or the larger cable channels is almost wrong these days, it isn't, quite, yet, in terms of viewership of at the highest levels, which still clusters to broadcast, or the odd megahit on cable such as The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. And these series might, with the probable exception of the first (one of two miniseries based on classic sf novels we'll see this season, along with Childhood's End on the SyFy Channel), easily pass by those who aren't keeping an eye out for them.



The Man in the High Castle is, of course, based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same title (referred to rather awkwardly in the opening credits as the "book" by Dick, as if we are to take it as possibly a testament, instead), one which I read over thirty years ago and haven't reread...hence, I'm not sure how faithful to the Book are such details as the suppression of the Judeo-Christian Bible in both the Nazi- and Imperial Japan-occupied North America...that seems rather less Dickian than I'd guess, as well as leaving open questions of how the Italian Fascists and their satellite allies in Spain and elsewhere, with 110% support of the Church, might've fared in the world of the triumphant Axis powers posited here. And posited rather well, with all the creepiness one can squeeze from a 1962 set in the New York City of the North American territories of the Reich, the San Francisco of the Imperial Japanese occupied territories, and the somewhat improbable "neutral zone" in, essentially, the Mountain Time Zone and along the Rockies, specifically in a small Colorado town. Excellent performances from Alexa Davalos, (particularly) Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Rufus Sewell (much, not all, of Sewell's role as primary villain as written seems almost as easy as that which DJ Qualls assays, though he too better than you might expect from the dire comedies he first came to public attention with) lead those from a fine and convincing cast. The slipping in the novel by its end into a sort of surrealist dream driven by I Ching divination is rather more abruptly dealt with here, and makes for a rather enigmatic ending that reading the novel will prepare one for better than one might be by simply watching the series. Small moments, such as the Japanese police inspector assuring the family of those he's just pointlessly had executed that he, the inspector, is no monster, or the thrown-away detail of a NYC airport named for US Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, give the series a heft that adds to the verisimilitude.  A third fine series from Ridley Scott's production unit, after NUMB3RS and The Good Wife.

Rather closer to home, Midtown is a low-budget improv sketch comedy series set among the uniformed police stationed in midtown Manhattan, one which
hopes to remind viewers of Barney Miller even by using the same skyline angle-shot of that part of the city in its opening and transitional montages; however, the majority of the series episodes I've seen take place in the squad car of primary characters played by actual ex-cop Scott Baker and fellow improv veteran Tom Malloy; they are a bit lunkheaded but definitely not stupid characters, and it's a pleasant and reasonably funny series. The small broadcast network aimed at young men, Tuff TV, is running it weekly; Amazon has episodes up for streaming free for Prime members.


Everyone's Crazy But Us isn't quite another improv series, but it still has a similar energy even when fully scripted in short, typically bite-sized webisodes of about five minutes each, with a very impressive primary and guest cast in the several episodes currently available (produced by Funny or Die, the most visible website devoted to professional web comedy, and accessible through YouTube).  Janet Varney (San Diego Sketchfest co-founder and -director, cast member of You're the Worst, and of The Legend of Korra) and Diedrich Bader (Veep, The Drew Carey Show and current Spider-Man animation series) play the rather brittle and self -impressed but not quite completely farcical parents of a small boy, coping with the petty jealousies and rather stronger insecurities of dealing with the status of a married couple and parents in upper-middle-class US suburbs of today. 


The Hotwives of Las Vegas is (the second season of) a parody of the flourishing "reality tv" franchise The Real Housewives of [various US cities] and a few spinoffs from that set of self-indulgence videos; the first season was The Hotwives of Orlando. The season premiere threatens to be a bit too affectionate a parody for my taste, but the scalpel's a bit sharper in episode two, both of which are available for free viewing on Hulu (one can easily see the balance during their free trial, but I haven't yet done so). It has a tough act to follow, in the wake of The Bachelor/The Bachelorette lampoon Burning Love, but the less tightly-focused absurdity of the Real Housewives series are still full of the kind of childish acting-out that makes parody both easy and difficult to keep in believable check; Dannah Phirman and Danielle Schneider are the creators and showrunners for the scripted series. 


No, You Shut Up! is a Very high concept series, basically a parody of the likes of The McLaughlin Group with a panel populated mostly by Muppets, from the Henson Alternative studio, though the host and moderator is human-in-the-clear Paul F. Tompkins (there are usually segments featuring human guests). As too often in such circumstances, the concept tended to hamstring particularly some of the early episodes, as a somewhat clueless male talking hot dog and a reactionary if cute female squirrel puppet add a certainly level of difficulty to putting across the kind of topical comedy one might expect of this heir, of sorts, to such series as Spitting Image (where at least the puppets in question represented actual political and other figures, rather than types of political creatures that show up on such panel discussions)...perhaps with just a touch of Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse. However, the absurdities and political satire have sharpened as the series has continued, having added very good 2016 Election Specials between the third season and the fourth season coming early next year.


W/Bob & David is and isn't a reunion of the HBO cult sketch series Mr. Show (with Bob and David), perhaps the best of the American heirs to particularly Monty Python's Flying Circus and SCTV; the Bob Odenkirk and David Cross-hosted and -created series had a remarkable ensemble cast (nearly all of whom have at least a supporting role in one or another of the sketches in the new Netflix limited series) and even, for the several seasons of its original run on HBO, had the same timeslot, Saturday morning ("Friday night") at 12:30am, as the NBC network version of SCTV Network 90. Odenkirk and Cross have certainly kept busy since...Odenkirk most visibly in Breaking Bad and as the star of Better Call Saul, Cross similarly in Arrested Development and currently in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret...and, as Cross has noted in at least one recent interview, fifteen years of experience as writers and performers since Mr. Show can be felt in the new series, where the transitions between sketches are even more oddly smooth than the Pythonesque links of the earlier series, and there's even more framing in the new series (Paul F. Tompkins is back not only as sketch actor but also as audience warm-up/stage and shot set-up distraction comedian, and these usually off-camera sequences are taped and presented at various points as part of the show). Great fun, even if one doesn't have any memory of Mr. Show.

From Crackle: Heavy Lies the Head

The Art of More is one of the new series on Sony's attempt to compete with Hulu, Crackle, and it's not too shabby. Co-produced by and co-starring Dennis Quaid, it's mostly an amiable if not altogether extraordinary crime drama dealing with the world of high-stakes art dealing. Quaid and Cary Elwes (as differing sorts of not terribly scrupulous art collectors)  are having some fun, and the other best-known cast member Kate Bosworth is given an opportunity to demonstrate her chops that most of her earlier films ill afforded; Christian Cooke, as the protagonist, formerly a US soldier and art smuggler in Iraq and now a junior associate at an important auction house, is somewhat less charming than he apparently thinks he is, but this might simply be due to his character being so as well. His past comes back to do more than haunt him, as the fellow reps and staff in his house and in their most important rival firm (where Bosworth's character is the stressed heiress-to-be, or not, to the ownership) have their own problems, as do the people involved in the back-stories of the items up for auction. It's well-produced, and a pretty clever design for an open-ended series, even if it feels a bit like something that might just as easily been cablecast on the USA or TNT channels, or broadcast on CBS or NBC. 

Falcón is a four-part adaptation of two novels by Robert Wilson, a coproduction for Sky TV, Canal+ and ZDF in various European countries, and imported by the cable/satellite channel CinéMoi; the (figuratively) haunted police detective at the core of the series is the son of a famous, deceased painter, and this becomes uncomfortably relevant to his most recent investigation. Falcón (Marton Csokas, of the latter two The Lord of the Rings films), in the first episode (the only I've seen, I believe the only one cablecast in the US so far) is brought to the scene of the torture and murder of a weathy restaurant owner, and husband of the actual restauranteur Consuelo Jimenez (Hayley Atwell, of Agent Carter).  The dead man had had his eyelids cut away (we are not spared how this leaves the corpse) to force him to watch something disturbing. Since I haven't seen the second episode (which concludes the story begun in the pilot), I can simply note that the acting is impressive, the adaptation of the first novel (which I haven't yet read) seems smooth, and the use of digital video to record the drama allows for the program to seem to be filmed at times, and to look more like the sharper, "flatter" image of high-definition video at others, which is used deftly to cause a subtle sense of dislocation from one sequence to another, or even within scenes. The cast also includes Kerry Fox as Falcón's sister and Emilia Fox as his ex-wife, which almost could seem like a joke on the plenitude of sexual impropriety in this series and the two that follow below. (Also, it somehow seems a bit odd to have all the Spaniards speak with British accents...)

CinéMoi is making episodes available online here.


Another, newer Canal+ series is being imported by the cable channel the Esquire Network, which will also stream the series if you'll let them get around your cookie protection. Spotless involves two brothers from France, with some difficult times in their childhood, making their way through the world of small-time drug-smuggling (the elder, ne'er-do-well Martin Bastière, played by Denis Ménochet) and crime-scene cleanup in London (the protagonist, younger Jean Bastière, Marc-André Grondin). This one also doesn't shrink from portraying the heavy ugly inherent in the difficulties the brothers and their friends and family find themselves in...in the first four episodes (all that have been cablecast in the US), having stepped in Trouble, they keep finding themselves deeper in, as a local mob boss wants to employ them to clean up or at least restage the murders his crew perform, and isn't going to take No for an answer. And other things get more recomplicated from there.  I'll be checking in for more. Created by Corinne Marrinan (CSI and its spinoffs) and Ed McCardie (Shameless) and about what you'd expect from that sort of creative parenthood.  Esquire Network, despite being a cable channel and not beholden to FCC language restrictions, nonetheless is coy about only one word in the dialog; sadly, "fuck" is commonly used enough to make silencing it and only it on the soundtrack a bit ridiculous. 


And in some ways the least of the series in this rundown, the Starz pay-cable series Flesh and Bone is soap-operatic and over-the-top while dealing half-well with very serious matter indeed; the ballet corps and support staff at the heart of the series, and their new-discovery ballerina escaping her tough Pittsburgh background to join the fictional American Ballet Company in NYC, are collectively riven with all kinds of physical and emotional problems. Some of them are inherent in a dancer's life, particularly in women's ballet (where going on pointe, not required of the men, tends to mess over the women's feet, at least); others, in this series, include child abuse and abandonment, anorexia and attendant other disabilities, incest, rape and lesser assault, schizophrenia, combat-induced PTSD, sex trafficking in young teen girls, and more...I can't help but think this ballet series owes its inspiration in nearly equal parts to Mozart in the Jungle, Fame and Flashdance, and manages to amp up the most ridiculous aspects of all three, being the kind of series where everyone compliments, even if backhandedly, the protagonist on her flawless beauty (not so much); series creator-producer Moira Walley-Beckett also worked on Breaking Bad. The Svengali of the company is a tantrum-prone monster who, in the process of chewing the protagonist out, more from his insecurity than her misstep, after (too) many anticipatory quick edits turns to a nest of baby birds on the window ledge, whose chirping has been bothering him, and instead of walking away from the window or closing it, picks up the nest and hurls it several stories down to the street below. And yet, after many, many similarly casually cruel encounters with his employees and others, we're supposed to buy that everyone just puts up with and Deep Down Really Loves his Tortured Genius. Meanwhile, and I know less about dance than I do about nearly any other major area of the arts, even I can tell that some of what is being presented here is pretty impressive, and some, meant to be equally so, is Ballet and Modern Dance 101. The largely dancer/actor cast does its best to keep the series watchable, and a fair amount of sex in the pay-cable series doesn't hurt that aspect, but there's simply too much of a muchness going on here to allow it to be taken particularly seriously. It's also the kind of series where no one even mentions the possibility of an abortion to deal with a pregnancy from incest...I suspect that once a certain rather more widespread taboo is broken, it's a matter that will come up no matter how firm one's beliefs against it might be, even if only to be shot down. 

SCTV (1976-1984): not quite as overlooked a fictional television network

The Second City, the improvisational comedy troupe which has helped groom an impressive lot (to put it mildly) of comic actors and standups over the years (the list can begin with Anne Meara, Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Alan Arkin, Ed Asner, improv gurus Del Close and Severn Darden, Jane Alexander. Shelley Berman, Valerie Harper...and not too long after gathering the likes of Zohra Lampert, Fred Willard and Joan Rivers), began in Chicago (hence the name) and set up satellite workshops/theaters in Toronto and eventually Los Angeles. National Lampoon's Lemmings (a stage revue spun out of the The National Lampoon Radio Hour) and NBC's Saturday Night (as it was first known) were among the productions picking up on the early/mid-'70s talent in both Chicago and Toronto, and so it seemed like not the worst idea to create a Second City television series, beginning in 1976...which, in fact was the title of the first several seasons, Second City Television, produced in Canada for the then very small Global network and syndicated to commercial stations in the U.S. (at the same time, the second series known as The David Steinberg Show was being shot for a single season for CTV in Canada and syndicated in  the U.S. as well, featuring most of the SCTV cast in supporting or guest roles).

Second City Television, SCTV (on CBC and syndicated in the US), SCTV Network 90/SCTV Network (CBC and NBC) and SCTV Channel (cable channels Superchannel [Canada] and Cinemax [US]) all had a relatively similar format: a parody of the programming on a poorly-funded, small-time station (or. later, network) based in the possibly U.S., possibly Canadian town of Melonville. 

First-season episodes slightly repackaged to go with with chopped-up longer later episodes for latter 1980s syndication in the U.S., and rerun on Canada's Comedy Channel and US's cable station Ha!/Comedy Central:




3rd Season CBC/US syndication episodes:




CBC/NBC episodes:






SCTV Channel nearly complete excerpts:

Part 2

SCTV Remembers: Part 1

Part 2

A sort of grandchild of SCTV: latter-day Second City video:

TV notes: MOZART IN THE JUNGLE, NIGHTMARE IN CHICAGO, MAN IN A SUITCASE, SCHITT'S CREEK and on never having Just Three TV Channels...

Capsule reviews of some of what I've liked a lot over the last few months:

Mozart in the Jungle: a sitcom based on oboist Blair Tindall's memoir, has charmed me, for the most part, and while it didn't change my life nor is it "necessary" viewing, it had most of the good elements of the previous rather good series from producer/supporting actor Jason Schwartzmann, Bored to Death, with less celebration of protracted adolescence than was on display in that series. And, like Bored, it seems to be getting essentially no attention compared to other series on its platform (HBO for the older series, Amazon for this one). Saffron Burrows and her character are only the best of several good reasons to give this a try.

 

Nightmare in Chicago is a telefilm I've been meaning to see for decades, since first reading about it in an early Leonard Maltin guide (Bill Warren might've written that review for all I know)...originally broadcast in the first season of Kraft Suspense Theater as "Once Upon a Savage Night" (and based, as it turned out, on William McGivern's novella "Death on the Turnpike"...I keep running into McGivern texts, he the too-forgotten Chicago/Philadelphia noir master; the director was the young Robert Altman).  Unfortunately, neither the full cut of Nightmare, beefed up for syndication from the Kraft episode, nor any form of KST episodes seem to be available outside the gray market,  nor does the episode version seem to be in the Crisis/Suspense Theater package that the Antenna TV network reran recently (a few scattered stations, broadcast and cable, might also be offering it). The link above is to a blurry black and white taping that I suspect was one of those made (several duplicate generations back?) on the fly to reassure Kraft and their ad agency that all the ad spots ran properly during broadcast...so, better than nothing, if not enough better (you do get the full complement of Kraft food ads, and the recipes are often as unnerving as anything about the episode itself). Barbara Turner is particularly good as the kidnap victim of a serial murderer of young women, and Ted Knight is full of appropriate bluster as a police commissioner juggling the suddenly newly active psycho and a nuclear weapons convoy coming through town on the QT.  I look forward to seeing a good copy.

Man in a Suitcase is a bit of a mutant version of a typical 1960s ITC spy drama, since it involves an inappropriately disgraced US ex-spy, with an attitude, who now works in the UK as a sort of private detective/fixer or perhaps a bit more like what The Saint would be like if crossed with irritable youngish Ben Casey. It lasted only one season (ran on ABC in the US). I'm mildly surprised how much I'm enjoying these, put together by some of ITC's better talent of the era.  The first episode (in both the UK and US, apparently, though another is the true pilot), as with several Danger Man/Secret Agent episodes, rather anticipates The Prisoner...others much less so...the influence of The IPCRESS File was probably strong. (Wikipedia notes that this was essentially a replacement series for Danger Man on ITV, the UK commercial network, which certainly makes sense.)

Actual pilot:


Pilot as shown:


Schitt's Creek is a new sitcom on the CBC, imported to US cable with language censored (! sigh) by the Pop Channel, which used to be the TV Guide channel, but is now a joint project of Lionsgate (who bought it) and CBS (who more recently bought in).  Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy are not breaking too much new ground, but nonetheless are expertly portraying somewhat washed up former Canadian television icons, fallen on hard times and living in the motel in the tiny town Schitt's Creek that is one of their few remaining properties...adding to their joy, their spoiled adult children, a daughter and son, live in the room next door (I've only seen two episodes so far, and missed the pilot, so assume the non-kids had been living on parental largesse till that ran out). Chris Elliott and some fine younger actors (including Levy's son, the co-creator) are the supporting cast. I'll watch O'Hara in anything short of a Home Alone movie (Away We Go would be about the far limit), but this is rather good fun so far.

principals of Schitt's Creek

As things wrap up and the layoffs continue from the corporation where I have served as the national public broadcasting scheduling reporter for 17 years (beginning about six months after I started at what was still TV Guide magazine, primarily), entering and editing the data about PBS, nationally syndicated, Create, MHz Worldview and Deutsche Welle North America programming for products ranging from PBS.org through TV Guide products to Comcast and some other cable systems and sub channel guides, I'm about to join the laid off, and it's hard not to think back about my engagement with television, both professionally and beforehand.  

I'm fifty years old, and one thing I've heard repeatedly from peers over the decades has been how they, when young, had only three broadcast channels to choose from when watching tv, at least till cable became available and was actually subscribed to by their families. Seems strange to me, since I guess I was spoiled, from the age of five onward, to never live anywhere where there weren't at least four network stations (including PBS) and usually at least some interesting independents broadcasting within viewing range. In 1969, my parents and I moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Boston suburb of West Peabody, MA, with a summer stopover in Oklahoma City (we traveled by pickup truck with camper atop it. I spent a lot of that trip, while the car was moving or stopped, in the bunk over the cab, which would probably not be an advisable way of going about such a trip today).

So, in Boston, there were no fewer than eight broadcast stations in 1969 or in the months shortly thereafter, and the relatively fuzzy New Hampshire stations to complement them: on VHF, the four big network stations (with National Educational Television/soon PBS powerhouse WGBH on 2, NBC on WBZ 4, CBS on 7, ABC on 5, and those NH stations WMUR, an ABC affiliate on 9--and run on such a shoestring that it didn't begin broadcasts in color until well into the 1970s, apparently--and WENH, the PBS anchor for the state network, soon on 11), and on UHF the commercial independents 27, 38, 56 (the Kaiser Broadcasting channel) and WGBX 44, the little sibling that ran as much local and syndicated programming as NET/PBS items...if 44 wasn't the first station in the US to run Doctor Who, for example, it was one of the first.  (To be continued.)

Saturday Music Club: some Continental '60s rock television and other contemporary ferment

The Kinks in France, 1965:


Beat Club (Germany): Pacific Gas & Electric, the Kinks, Chuck Berry (with a Very sober young woman giving background on Berry's career and importance), the Grateful Dead, the Doors (post-Morrison), and the Rolling Stones.

Pop Gear (released in the US as Go Go Mania as the slang didn't travel) with notable molester Jimmy Savile as host--happily, barely onscreen.

Os Mutantes on French TV (which typoes their name):  "Bat Macumba" & "Panis Et Circensis"


Fanny on French television--terrible recording of excellent performance of "Badge"; the beginning notes only of "Young and Dumb" (circa 1970).

"Bitter Wine"

...and their first album which features it and the studio cover of "Badge", Fanny and their second, Charity Ball.

Better performance video of Fanny, among others.

The Yardbirds Story


The Ace of Cups: "Simplicity"


The Ace of Cups: "Circles"

The Ace of Cups in 1967 and in 2017
The Ace of Cups: "Afro-Blue"
Abbey Lincoln: "Afro-Blue"

The Luv'd Ones: I'm Leaving You

"Portrait"

The Liverbirds: "He's About a Mover" 
(Liverpudlian band, named for local bird species: "Laiv-er-birds")

Joss Whedon on the TAVIS SMILEY show (PBS late night last Thursday)

Watch Writer-director Joss Whedon on PBS. See more from Tavis Smiley.

INDEPENDENT LENS: Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines; Susan Orlean on The JV Club

https://dai.ly/x6jhngc

Watch Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines on PBS. Video archived here.  See more from Independent Lens.

https://dai.ly/x6jhngc

Writer Susan Orlean interviewed by Janet Varney:
This week multiple literal and metaphorical doors are knocked on and opened when Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief! The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup! Many other amazing books and essays!) and special guest star, her son Austin, stop by to unsettle Scott the Dog. Plus, find out why Janet suggests Susan’s nickname be “Puddin.”

TV notes: THIS AMERICAN WIFE video #2; ZOMBIELAND doesn't debut; BORGEN Season 1 on Disc, Seasons 1 & 2 streaming; BURNING LOVE Season 3; Carnegie Medals in Literature Ceremony Live Coverage; MHz Worldview International Crime Drama and more...

Borgen

Some quick notes, while seeking time to do some more extensive ones:

Salon has a review up touting the virtues, and quite impressive virtues they are, of the Danish tv drama Borgen, which I have repeatedly recommended to anyone who holds still long enough to allow me to. Or doesn't run away fast enough. The English and Danish folks behind the original, Danish version of The Killing do the best political drama series on tv today I've seen (given that The Good Wife is less completely a political drama), like the current CBS series much more sophisticated and probing than anything Aaron Sorkin has managed in this arena. You as Americans (if you are such) can now buy the first season in MHz Worldview's dvd set, and watch the first and second seasons for free (the first season only till April 20th) on Link TV's streaming page. MHz Worldview, of course, runs more than its share of European crime-drama series, and streams almost all of them, though unlike the Link TV links only along with the broadcast feed, not on-demand. 

The most passive-aggressive kids' show title so far: TV Ontario's Guess How Much I Love You...

Burning Love is still the funniest web series I'm familiar with, as a deservedly savage parody of such "reality" series as The Bachelor, and (I believe) Yahoo's greatest success in web series so far (repeats of the first season are now running on cable channel E!), though This American Wife, when the second video episode comes down (which it has! see below), will be in serious contention for that...can't have a one-episode series, after all (though the audio podcast remains vital). And then there's Harry Shearer's MyDamnChannel feed...and...and...

Burning Love. You'll be amused by who's in the panda suit, I suspect.

Amazon has, in its attempt to become a major player in web video services, commissioned a series based on that fine horror/comedy Zombieland, but, despite a lot of noisemaking around the web today the pilot of the tv series is not yet up, at least for now...apparently it will be free to view even for non Amazon Prime members.  And WIGS continues to add content, some too soapy, some pretty damned good...meanwhile, I keep meaning to take advantage of my HBO subscription to check out their HBO Go and Max Go series...but time, as noted, is tight...and surfaces are only lightly scratched, here...

And since this tv notes installment seems all but all devoted to web video, I'll mention I've (in my dilatory way) just managed to catch up with the following web-video series: The Merriam-Webster Dictionary's Ask the Editor, and The Guardian Film Show.

But, first, another upaid advert: for the American Library Association:

Booklist, in partnership with RUSA, is announcing the finalists for the
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Finalists
live online with Nancy Pearl and ALA President Maureen Sullivan!
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Listen in to the live announcement of the 2013 finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence. Join Nancy Pearl, selection committee chair, and Maureen Sullivan, ALA President, as they divulge this year's three best adult books in both fiction and nonfiction.

Don't miss this exciting 15 minutes of book award history!
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EVENT DETAILS:
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12:00 PM Eastern // 11:00 AM Central // 10:00 AM Mountain // 9:00 AM Pacific


And in further celebration of literacy in a video age, there is this: Hysterical Literature

 









And, indeed, here's episode 2 of the video version of This American Wife:

Saturday Music Club on Thursday: mostly 1960s televised music of various sorts...

Opening themes to a variety of 1960s US series (including documentary series). Interesting the degree to which big-band-flavored jazz arrangements were meant to indicate modernity, and not solely though of course usually in scoring crime-drama. Westerns more likely to emulate Ferde Grofe when not Holst or Copland. This particular episode of Bus Stop got the series into trouble, adapting as it did a Tom Wicker crime novel, and criticized in Congressional hearings as an example of excessive violence--see the first Kovacs segment, below (Stephen King selected another episode, Robert Bloch's script from his own short story, "I Kiss Your Shadow," as the single most effective work of television horror drama he'd seen).


Dusty, Dusty Springfield's BBC half-hour series.


And a French & Saunders (Brit comedians/comic actors, best-known in the States for, respectively, The Vicar of Dibley and Absolutely Fabulous)-hosted interview with/biodoc about Springfield.


From Stephen Sondheim's score for the ABC Stage '67 adaptation of John Collier's "Evening Primrose": "I Remember" performed by Charmian Carr:


Frankly Jazz, a local series in Los Angeles that ran 1962-63, and drew heavily on the artists signed to Richard Bock's World Pacific label.


A freshet mostly from the late series for Ernie Kovacs, Kovacs Corner (ABC):
Among other things, a bit of a parody of NBC Radio's Monitor and their purring weather-reporter "Miss Monitor"...(a Benny Carter composition from the Count Basie Orchestra recording Kansas City Suite plays behind her):


Kovacs musical animation:


Segments featuring Yma Sumac and mockery of Disney, a partner of ABC but not yet its owner, in the earliest 1960s (and this series was on NBC, anyway...):


Married couple Kovacs and Edie Adams, doing her fine impression of Monroe, and singing more Disney parody...

FFB: THE [SKIFFY] CHANNEL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TV SCIENCE FICTION (sic) by Roger Fulton and John Betancourt (Warner/Aspect 1998)

The Skiffy Channel Guide to In Any Way Fantasticated
TV Stuff We Could Cram In by Mid 1998

Roger Fulton, on staff at Britain's TV Times, first saw published (in the UK) his The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction in 1990; after a 1995 revised edition, the Skiffy Channel, not yet the SyFylis Channel, saw an opportunity for some quick expansion and rebranding, apparently, and writer and editor John Gregory Betancourt was tapped to add considerable  though variable coverage of US and Canadian productions...or so it seems, since the impressive detail and fairly comprehensive coverage of English television has been augmented by sometimes very slight entries on the Western Hemisphere items (and the odd Australian series), making this a flawed but at core a good book of its sort...and useful, as such references are, as a browsing tool in a way that a web-browser often is not, with the latter's nature preferring (though not commanding) more targeted searches. The title of both books seems to have been at least somewhat misleading, as such non-sf fantasticated series as The Champions (far less sfnal than even The Avengers with Steed and his female partners) were presumably part of Fulton's original remit, much less such presumed Betancourt additions as The Flying Nun, Forever Knight and The Addams Family. And I have objections to a few factual omissions and other bobbles which come to mind (the US citations often do but also often don't list episodes, nor even transmission dates nor the networks, syndicators or cable sources of various series; the three episodes of Really Weird Tales are detailed, and is one of the happy items that I'd either completely missed in the past or forgotten about without seeing, but no mention is made of the relevance of this production to SCTV, despite having Second City tv folk behind and in front of the cameras...HBO is cited as the apparently unenthusiastic commissioner...I have to wonder if Global or some other Canadian outlet wasn't a co-producer). While on grounds of taste, I can see why Amazing Stories was omitted (and I can imagine that bad blood might've played a role there, as Betancourt was on staff at the magazine Amazing while that pathetic Spielberg/NBC anthology series named for the magazine was unspooling), but to refer to Small Wonder (quite probably the most aggressively inane sf-themed sitcom in North American history, and I realize the amount of competition there has been for this dishonor) as "amiable" is simply beyond the pale.

So...as noted, a particularly good guide, I'd say, to British sfnal productions (going as far as to bemoan the rather self-aggrandizingly justified shift of BBC's important Out of the Unknown from primarily sf to primarily horror...without quite getting around to suggesting that the series being taken away from its creator and original show-runner Irene Shubik might've been some sort of Old Boy power play). And entries on key non-British series (including the likes of Captain Video) are almost as complete as the default format, and space available, will allow...a cheap seconhand copy can make for an interesting and even a useful read, and crosscheck to other references.

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog

Kindertotenlieder (public broadcasting on the implications of the Newtown shootings, and related matter).

PBS, Friday, 8-9pm ET (though the legend on the videoclip incorrectly cites the 22nd as the date): 

Watch Preview: After Newtown on PBS. See more from After Newtown.

And...Syndicated to public stations, beginning Saturday, 3pm ET:

One week after the devastation at Sandy Hook Elementary School, numerous questions remain regarding the events that led up to this unthinkable catastrophe. Many of the issues have become all too familiar, and the questions seem to be asked after every similar national tragedy.

Public television will address community issues and concerns and seek out answers by further delving into key topics stemming from recent events with What Next After Newtown: What Our Country and Communities Can Do, airing Saturday, December 22, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. (Check local listings.) The three-hour special, from WLIW/WNET, provides an in-depth analysis of issues featuring a variety of perspectives in an effort to spark a nationwide conversation about long-term solutions.

The event will be offered to public television stations by WLIW/WNET.

"This is a profoundly difficult topic that has hit our community very close to home," says WNET President and CEO Neal Shapiro. "We felt we could play a valuable role in advancing a thoughtful discussion about healing and changing by taking an in-depth look at some of the key issues being discussed in this tragedy's aftermath."

Expanding on the discussions brought forth from the PBS special After Newtown airing on Friday, December 20, What Next After Newtown fully investigates the vital concerns raised by the recent tragedies via six half-hour segments. The segments, which will include an optional local insert produced by the individual stations that choose to run the special, address a range of important topics that weigh heavily on the country and look deeply into the individual issues, exploring what they mean for the nation, for families, schools, and communities. (Stations have the flexibility to air all or part of the three-hour event.)

The segment topics include:
Accessibility of weapons
Violence in the media
Talking to children and finding a path to healing
School security
Public policy and mental illness
The mind of troubled shooters

Need to Know co-hosts Jeff Greenfield and Maria Hinojosa, and Nightly Business Report co-anchor Susie Gharib will serve as co-anchors for the special event with other prominent newscasters to be announced.

The program will be live-streamed to national audiences at PBS.org/afternewtown and will be available after broadcast. Viewers can learn more about the issues discussed on PBS programs at the website and are also encouraged to join the national conversation by using the Twitter hashtag #AfterNewtown.

Executive-in-charge: Neal Shapiro. Senior Executive Producer: Diane Masciale. Executive Producers: Mary Lockhart and Sally Garner.

What Next After Newtown: What Our Country and Communities Can Do is a production of WLIW/ WNET in New York.

For more information, visit: PBS.org/afternewtown.

The World network (usually on the secondary or tertiary digital broadcast feeds of your local PBS station group) has announced Thursday their schedule for running both programs:

December NATIONAL changes

The 60 min. special AFTER NEWTOWN will air on WORLD on Sat, 12/22 at the times listed below. Please also see notes about eliminated breaks in italics.

Sat, 12/22/12 06:00:00-07:00:00 EST AFTER NEWTOWN (Replaces INSIDE WASHINGTON #2436 and WASHINGTON WEEK #5225)

Sat, 12/22/12 14:00:00-15:00:00 EST AFTER NEWTOWN (Replaces NEED TO KNOW #267 and INSIDE WASHINGTON #2436)

Sat, 12/22/12 20:00:00-21:00:00 EST AFTER NEWTOWN (Replaces WASHINGTON WEEK #5225 and MCLAUGHLIN GROUP #3052)

•The 3-hour special WHAT NEXT AFTER NEWTOWN: WHAT OUR COUNTRY AND COMMUNITIES CAN DO will air on WORLD on Sat, 12/22 at the times listed below.

Sat, 12/22/12 21:00:00-24:00:00 EST WHAT NEXT AFTER NEWTOWN: WHAT OUR COUNTRY AND COMMUNITIES CAN DO (Replaces NEED TO KNOW #267, INSIDE WASHINGTON #2436 and PARIS THE LUMINOUS YEARS) 

Sat, 12/22/12 26:00:00-29:00:00 EST WHAT NEXT AFTER NEWTOWN: WHAT OUR COUNTRY AND COMMUNITIES CAN DO (aka 12/23 @ 02:00 EST)  (Replaces MCLAUGHLIN GROUP #3052, NEED TO KNOW #267 and PARIS THE LUMINOUS YEARS) 

 

And...
Glenn Greenwald has a roundup of coverage of US drone strikes and their youthful collateral damage, which includes a link to this video/trailer for a forthcoming documentary:

19 April 1995, Murrah Federal Bldg.,
 Oklahoma City

And...spare a thought...for a similar sort of attack....and result...

SECOND FLOOR

America's Kids Child Development Center

Miss Baylee Almon, 1, Oklahoma City.

Danielle Nicole Bell, 15 months, Oklahoma City.

Zachary Taylor Chavez, 3, Oklahoma City.

Dana LeAnne Cooper, 24, Moore.

Anthony Christopher Cooper II, 2, Moore.

Antonio Ansara Cooper, Jr., 6 months, Midwest City.

Aaron M. Coverdale, 5 1/2, Oklahoma City.

Elijah S. Coverdale, 2 1/2, Oklahoma City.

Jaci Rae Coyne, 14 months, Moore.

Brenda Faye Daniels, 42, Oklahoma City.

Taylor Santoi Eaves, 8 months, Midwest City.

Tevin D'Aundrae Garrett, 16 months, Midwest City.

Kevin "Lee" Gottshall II, 6 months, Norman.

Wanda Lee Howell, 34, Spencer.

Blake Ryan Kennedy, 1 1/2, Amber.

Dominique Ravae (Johnson)-London, 2, Oklahoma City.

Chase Dalton Smith, 3, Oklahoma City.

Colton Wade Smith, 2, Oklahoma City.

Visitor

Scott D. Williams, 24, Tuttle.