Homework

Time once again to give myself a little breathing room by turning your attention to some other TV-related stuff on the internet that’s worth readin’.

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In this piece about one of the great forgotten comedy series, The Bill Cosby Show, Mark Holcomb briefly acknowledges my own blog post about the show, and further flatters me by reusing the screen grabs I took.  But that’s all the credit I can hog, because Holcomb’s insights into why Cosby’s first self-named series was so eccentric and wonderful are much sharper and more detailed than my own.  Dammit.

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I guess The New Yorker can’t afford copy editors for its blog content, since this piece about The World of Henry Orient misspells the name of its screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson, and identifies its producer incorrectly (it was Jerome Hellman, not Jerome Hill).  Nevertheless, the writer, John Colapinto, dug up something truly fascinating in the message boards of the Internet Movie Database (one of my secret sources for tracing obscure people, or finding scurrilous gossip about them).  Although one of its unknown stars, Tippy Walker, did have a minor television career in the sixties (chiefly in arcs on the serialized Dr. Kildare and Peyton Place), The World of Henry Orient is a movie, a good, eccentric, unclassifiable movie about two teenage girls and their precarious interactions (sexual, parental) with the adult world.  The film becomes all the more poignant, or disturbing, when one realizes that its director, George Roy Hill, was boinking the seventeen year-old Miss Walker during and, briefly, after is production. (In yet another editing error, Colapinto is inconsistent about Walker’s age at the time, but seventeen seems to be correct.)  Colapinto’s discovery was that Walker herself quietly fielded questions from fans for several years on the IMDb boards, writing with poor spelling but spare, moving honesty about her troubled life as a starlet who never quite made it.  Colapinto mines a potent contrast between the fragile Walker and her co-star, Merrie Spaeth, who went on to a very public life as the hand up the felt-lined asshole of various Republican politicians and CEOs.  (If that made you think, “Yecchhh,” well, join the club.)

The other thing that bothers me about Colapinto’s reporting is that he seems to be declaring both actresses as officially found.  But Walker’s IMDb posts ended abruptly in 2008, and a lot can happen to someone in four years, especially someone who casually admits to having gone through “periods of homelessness.”  I’d say it’s a “whatever happened to…?” file that remains very much open.

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Here’s an entertaining interview with one of the most ubiquitous of sixties-and-beyond lead guest stars, Bradford Dillman.  Dillman, a slim Anthony Perkins type, played a lot of neurotic and often flat-out-crazy bad guys in his day.  He’s now a writer and has enough wit to weave his way through what almost becomes one of those “wait, I was in that?” sessions.  It’s very tough to mine the good stories from actors who did one of everything but rarely had a job that lasted more than a week.

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The only thing better than a TV actor interview is a TV writer interview, and here’s one with longtime soap opera scribe Sam Hall.  Hall’s claim to fame is his long stint on Dark Shadows, and while that material is covered in revealing detail (Hall’s complicated relationship with Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis is particularly noteworthy), the interviewer, Jay Blotcher, was thorough enough to quiz Hall on his earliest days as a live television dramatist, too.

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Fernwood 2Night is a self-reflexive seventies comedy I’ve never seen, a sort-of spin-off from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which I’ve also never seen.  But from what I’ve read, I suspect I’d have a hard time disliking either.  Here’s a recent appreciation, by Richard Metzger, of Fernwood, a piece that is valuable in particular for the brief recollections offered by Bob Illes, one of the show’s writers, in the comments section.  Illes clarifies some misconceptions about the series and gives a lot of credit to Alan Thicke, the actor-writer-talk show host who remains the butt of a lot of doofus jokes, years after his career sputtered out.  Here’s another of those credibility-demolishing declarations: I always thought that Thicke’s clueless dad routine on Growing Pains was fucking hilarious, a knowing spoof of the fifties Ward Cleaver archetype.

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Just another reminder that my old pal Ralph Senensky is still going strong at his curiously named (since it’s mostly about television) blog, Ralph’s Cinema Trek, with great new stories about the TV episodes he directed.  In a sad coincidence, Ralph’s latest piece, on the Waltons episode “The Firestorm,” mentions his friend Barry Cahill, who died this week at 90.  Square-jawed and solidly built, but not menacing enough to play heavies, Cahill was the definition of the all-purpose actor.  He was married to Rachel Ames, a one-time television ingenue later famous for her long run on General Hospital.

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So CBS, home to that notoriously Fugitive-averse legal team, has in its lawyerly wisdom cease-and-desisted an amateur group’s filming of an unproduced Star Trek script by Norman Spinrad (author of the classic episode “The Doomsday Machine”).  I was with the fans on this one until I got to this passage:

“These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.”

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If you want some new TV coverage, check out this detailed interview with Mad Men’s set decorator, who reveals the inspirations and sources for many of the pieces in Don Draper’s swanky new apartment.  I’m not touching Season Five until it’s over, and I also haven’t yet seen Luck, which shockingly is over, thanks to a cruel slash-and-burn campaign by the typically out-of-touch-with-reality PETA.  (Luck was cancelled due to the widely-reported deaths of three horses during production, even though the American Humane Association signed off on the show’s safety procedures, and Luck’s standards may have exceeded the production accorded to equines in the actual horse racing industry.)  Here’s a very measured, thoughtful consideration of the ethics of Luck’s unenviable situation by Matt Zoller Seitz, who also snagged a revealing interview with the show’s creators, David Milch and Michael Mann.  (I’m a big fan of Mann’s work but I think Milch is a ponderous fraud, so I have no idea what I’ll think of Luck.)

Seitz, incidentally, has emerged as perhaps our finest television critic of the moment.  I was not often in tune with Seitz when he reviewed films for the New York Press (in a section that included two other talented writers, Armond White and Godfrey Cheshire); he was perhaps best known for his obsessive love for the director Terrence Malick, who may be the only poseur in Hollywood with an emptier head than David Milch.  But Seitz is a very knowledgeable and thoughtful television reviewer, who invented (I think; am I wrong about this?), or at the very least helped to popularize, the episode-recap style of reviewing on his blog The House Next Door (since handed over to other minders).  I’m dubious about the value of that kind of instant-impressions writing (David Simon, creator of The Wire, took a jab at it in this recent interview), but I’ve been enjoying Seitz’s imposing Mad Men write-ups this month, confident that the best bits will seep into my subconscious and emerge to enrich my experience of Season Five when the Blu-rays come out in a year or so.

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A reader wrote in a few days ago asking me to “demolish” this blog post in which Macleans critic Jaime Weinman argues that – well, I’m not sure what he’s arguing, exactly, since he equivocates all over the place.  But the question at hand is whether modern television ROOLZ, YO! when compared to older television, which may be “too limited and convention-ridden to qualify as ‘great.’”

Nothing here strikes me as terribly new or interesting but, since someone asked, I’ll say that I didn’t react with the expected outrage (classic TV shows must be defended against the heretics!) but with a kind of weary sadness that bloggers so often feel impelled to weigh in on a subject in which they don’t seem to have much interest in engaging.  Does the beast really need to be fed that badly?  I don’t disagree with all of Weinman’s points.  He overstates the exceptionality of HBO (is he unaware of all the network and basic cable shows, from Veronica Mars to The Shield, that have expanded the boundaries of television just as much?), and sees Twin Peaks as the beginning of an era of quality television drama that actually extends back to Hill Street Blues and especially St. Elsewhere.  but Weinman is right in that good television has a trajectory.  The medium demands more of its audience now; it has had to break new ground to remain vital.  The Wire isn’t a better series than The Defenders, but it is more complicated – more characters, longer stories.  I know television enthusiasts who can’t make that transition.  Their taste remains excellent up to a certain cut-off date and after that, they just can’t cope with some element of newfangledness, whether it’s dramas without heroes (like The Sopranos) or sitcoms without laughtracks.

Weinman’s post comes in response to a similar screed by another blogger, one Rose Woodhouse, that is so condescending, self-contradictory, and blatantly attention-seeking that it doesn’t bear serious examination.  What strikes me most about Woodhouse’s piece is how transparently the author clings to her comfort zone.  Even though her post is called “Old TV Is Bad TV,” and she argues that “almost all TV made before the 1990s is crap” and “the last ten years totally trumps the previous fifty,” Woodhouse offers not one single early television show that she personally despises, or that she considers undeserving of a reputation as a classic.  There is, however, a long and faintly apologetic list of exceptions that Woodhouse enjoys, including The Prisoner (“pretty cool”), Your Show of Shows, and “the TV movie of Marty” (by which I suppose she means the live broadcast of Chayefsky’s original teleplay).

The question that comes to mind is why, if fourteen television programs made between the fifties and the eighties gave her some degree of pleasure, Woodhouse doesn’t feel the urge to explore those decades further, in the hope of finding more to like?  I guess it’s just easier to put those fourteen on permanent repeat (or perhaps file them away, with due self-congratulation, as dutifully-endured classics) and just dismiss everything else as crap.  I wouldn’t ordinarily single a relatively obscure blogger over this (and a teacher, no less, although hopefully not of writing, since she employs phrases like “love me some Dick Van Dyke” and “Roots and All in the Family are the best on non-cultural information merits,” whatever those are).  But last year the New York Times ran a specatularly dim-witted and instantly infamous op-ed piece called “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” in which some dunce named Dan Kois gave himself a high-five for failing to understand and/or avoiding altogether certain modestly demanding films, such as Meek’s Cutoff and Solaris.  It seems to me that incuriosity is never a defensible stance for a critic to take – and while that is a terribly obvious, Criticism-101 observation, it is apparently one that the Times either doesn’t get or will gladly disregard for a shot at going viral.  At least Kois got paid handsomely to rationalize his disengagement.  Any of us who write for free and take the same attitude should maybe think about taking a nap instead.