Monthly Archives: January 2002

The management of this website directs your attention to Michael Kinsley's excellent article — "Listening to Our Inner Ashcroft" — over on Slate.  Click right here to read it, please.

• The Second Death of Religious Politics by Cal Thomas, Tribune Media Services
• Enron's Existential Problems by Jeremy Rice, The Spleen
• Let's Roll by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
• Enron is a Cancer on the Presidency by Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
• Media Blame Game Requires a Mirror by Joe Conason, New York Observer

The above links are to articles that the operator of this website believes contribute to the national debate. He does not necessarily agree with all or any of what they say…and you won't, either.

When I got my satellite dish, I got something like a hundred different channels, all of them — that first week — running Hello, Dolly and/or Guide for the Married Man.  While I can always find something on I want to watch, I am amazed at how limited the selection is; how so many channels run the same shows.  I wish someone would start The Old Sitcom Network and run some old situation comedies that are not I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver, M*A*S*H, Taxi or The Jeffersons.  Where the hell is Sgt. Bilko?  Why is no one running He and She?  Car 54, Where Are You?  Or any of two dozen other great shows we could all mention?  For a time, the Game Show Network disappointed me, rerunning The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and a few other awful ones,
ad nauseam.

They still do that but lately, they've made up for it by offering great delights via their Late Night Black-and-White series.  Each night between 1 AM and 3 AM — 4 and 6 in the East — they run three episodes of vintage game shows.  (Putting them in 40-minute time slots mean that they get run relatively uncut, instead of being trimmed to allow more commercials.)  After a brief period wherein they recycled all the episodes they'd run recently in a similar Sunday night slot, they're now running shows that probably haven't been seen anywhere since they originally aired in the fifties and early sixties.

The episodes of Beat the Clock, hosted by Bud Collyer, are as dreadful as I recalled…but the original What's My Line? is enormous fun, especially when it reflects TV history — like guest panelist Johnny Carson being wished well on his new job hosting The Tonight Show, or Julie Andrews popping over from playing in My Fair Lady to be Mystery Guest.  My father always hated the show because, to him, it had a palpable air of snobbery and the arrogance of the New York literati.  I see very little of that.  Mostly, I see people having fun and the occasional wonderful outbreak of utter spontaneity.

Even better are rebroadcasts of old episodes of I've Got A Secret.  Garry Moore took game show hosting to a high art form, and it's amazing how witty Bill Cullen and Henry Morgan managed to be.  There are moments on all these shows — and especially on a forgotten show that GSN occasionally airs called The Name's The Same — where it's obvious that some briefing of the panelists has obviously occurred.  It's not that they were given the right answers but that they were given the wrong questions.  That is, the producers obviously told certain panelists to ask certain questions that would get huge laughs…like Arlene Francis, quizzing a man she didn't know sold mattresses, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use your product together?"  But both Cullen and Morgan got some amazing quips off, seemingly without benefit of such preparation.  There are also installments of I've Got A Secret that show obvious traces of the humor of Allan "Hello, Muddah" Sherman, who was then its producer.

Yeah, they're on late.  But that's why God invented TiVo, right?

I haven't seen it yet but several friends have previewed and praised Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon — a new series which debuts this Sunday on The National Network.  (The National Network used to be The Nashville Network and, like you, I didn't know about the change until long after it occurred.)  I've never met Kevin but, ever since seeing him at the Improv in his pre-SNL days, I've always thought he was funny and bright.  And, sure enough, he became one of the Saturday Night Live cast members with the longest tenure.

A pal of mine who wrote on the show while he was there used to describe him as "our Maury Wills," meaning that he rarely hit homers but you could always rely on the guy to get a single, steal second and somehow score a run.

After hearing that, I watched the SNL reruns on Comedy Central with a different attitude and, yes, that was an apt comparison.  Mr. Nealon rarely bowled you over with his comedy stardom but he was terrific in everything he did and made a lot of splashier performers look good.  No wonder they kept him around so long.

His new enterprise is basically Politically Incorrect but about things like U.F.O. sightings, folks who claim Elvis lives, E.S.P. and the like.  I'm told there will usually be one passionate believer, one outright skeptic, and then a couple of comedians plus Kevin, working the topic for laughs but also for truth.  Sounds like good reason for me — for the first time since I got my satellite dish — to figure out what channel TNN is on.  Perhaps you'll want to find out if you get that network and, if so, where it's located on your dial.

Happy year, happy year.  And wouldn't it be neat if we could wake up New Year's Morn and things really were different in undeniable ways?  You know: Like, the sky is yellow or toilet water flows in the opposite direction?  Then we wouldn't just have to tell ourselves it's a new time with new possibilities.  It really would be a different world.  Not that I think there's anything wrong with just declaring a Fresh Start and trying to make things better…

I was going to make a couple of predictions here but lately, I haven't seen anyone in any venue make a prediction that was worth the time it took to read it so I figured, why add to the clutter?