Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once defended the Death Penalty by pointing to a certain convicted killer whose guilt was inarguable and whose crime was about as horrible as any ever committed in this country. That man, who he said clearly deserved to die, was Henry Lee McCollum
Henry Lee McCollum has been pardoned after spending three decades in prison. Turns out he was innocent.
Jeff Keller wrote to ask…
What's the deal with these Mentalist reruns in Letterman's old time slot? Late night isn't the place for that kind of thing and I'm worried that that lead-in will kill off James Corden's show, which I'm beginning to like a lot. Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 until Colbert is ready? My second choice would have been to air Letterman reruns and my third choice would have been to have guest hosts like they did to fill in between Craig Ferguson and Corden. Why aren't they doing any of that?
Well, first off, it's not just The Mentalist going into that time slot. There will also be Big Brother reruns and some original programming at that hour before Dr. Colbert takes up residence. Secondly, if you leave aside Letterman's last few weeks when his ratings were way up due to the big Grand Finale, Mentalist reruns are drawing about the same numbers he did…with a show that cost a lot more to put on.
Years ago, a fellow I knew in programming told me a theory he had. He was not involved in programming late night but if he'd ever gotten in there — this was at ABC — he planned to push to forget about talk shows and put on hour dramas instead. I'll try to explain his working premise here…
Late night is all about keeping people from going to bed. A lot of the "battle" between Jay and Dave was not about who could get more people to tune in at 11:35. It was who could get those viewers to stick around longer. During the time Dave was beating Jay, Jay was often getting more viewers from 11:35 to 11:50 (i.e., the monologue) and then Dave would dominate the next 45 minutes as Jay's audience went to bed or switched to something else, including Dave. When Jay overtook Dave, a lot of that was because Jay's viewers were just sticking around longer.
On a late night talk show, every time you conclude a segment, a chunk of your viewing audience turns in for the night. You might turn off a talk show halfway through because you have no interest in the second guest…and a pretty hefty portion of those watching Jay or Dave did that. On the other hand, if you watch a detective show halfway through, you're less likely to turn it off. It's unsatisfying to not find out whodunnit or to see the bank robbers get caught. Folks can say, "Let's watch the first part of Jimmy Fallon before we go to sleep." They're not as likely to say, "Let's watch the first part of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."
At least, that was his theory…and as some of you remember it was tried, pre-Letterman, at CBS. They scheduled cop show reruns under the blanket title of Crime Time After Prime Time. It wasn't a total failure but getting a hit talk show in there looked like a better use of the time. (My friend's answer was that CBS ran the wrong cop shows there — ones selected for their cheapness than their quality. "Talk shows fail when they aren't any good either," he noted.)
That friend is no longer in programming but the ratings the last week or so for The Mentalist would suggest that his theory is not wholly without merit. That will not stop The Coming of Colbert but if as some predict America just tires of all talk shows some day, we might see more of this, at least at 11:35. I have a hunch people would not commit at 12:35 to watching an hour show you kinda have to see through to the end. Then again, as DVR usage becomes more commonplace, the actual times that shows air become increasingly less significant.
(I would guess that if you put a show like that on at 12:35, most people would simply not start watching because they wouldn't want to commit to staying up until 1:35, whereas they can start watching a talk show at that hour and bail when they get sleepy. Originally, back in the Steve Allen days, that was the reason for putting talk shows at 11:30 but the country now stays up later than it used to. That's why TV stations no longer sign off for the night.)
I wouldn't worry about Corden. He's probably getting a big Get Out of Jail Free card right now. If his ratings were to tank — and they haven't yet — CBS would not blame him for being unable to hold an atypical lead-in. They'd just say, "Well, he's not compatible with the shows we have on now. Let's wait and see how he does after Colbert." Once the new Late Show debuts and goes through a few months to find its levels and get the bugs out, that's when Corden will face his real test.
A show in his slot is judged mainly by how well it maintains the viewing levels of the last fifteen minutes of the show before it. He's not expected to hold all of it but trouble is afoot if he loses most of it. If Colbert's show is a hit and Corden keeps a reasonable portion of the viewership he inherits each night, he'll be fine. Personally, I think that's the most likely outcome of the change. If Colbert flops — which I sure don't expect — then poor ratings for Corden will be the fault of his lead-in, not him. So he's in a pretty good position.
Why they didn't put on Letterman reruns? My understanding is that Dave didn't want that. He wanted his end to be clean…and he owns those shows.
Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 for the interim? Well, this is speculation but maybe Colbert didn't want that. What if James did great at 11:35 and then Stephen came on and didn't do as well? It may also be that CBS views Corden as long-range work-in-progress and wanted to keep him in the Minor League (so to speak) until he's more ready for the Big Time.
Why didn't they have several months of guest hosts? Probably because it would have meant assembling an entire staff and production crew and finding a studio and building a set. The guest hosts who followed Ferguson used his stage, his set, his crew, etc. Letterman's set-up though had to be dismantled right away to begin prepping for Colbert so that was not an option. Filling with guest hosts would have been a lot more expensive than running The Mentalist and whatever else they'll have on there. And it just may be that someone at CBS wanted to audition a return to late-night hour dramas just in case Colbert doesn't beat any Jimmies.
John Cleese on Twitter…
Jonathan Chait reports the demise of yet another "fact" that Global Warming deniers have used to delay doing anything about Global Warming. Any day now they'll be down to claiming that the "science is still not settled" because there's a middle school Chemistry teacher in Biloxi who hasn't made up his mind.
Last time I mentioned Climate Change, I got a couple of e-mails from people who said, approximately, "Don't be ridiculous. It is the height of foolish arrogance for Man to think that he can change the weather!" I hope that's not so but I do know that if our weather's going to get more extreme, we should build levees and better drainage conduits and fix bridges and roads and do all sorts of things to prepare. That, Man can certainly do.
One of my favorite movies was made from one of my favorite musicals and they're both 1776. As you may be aware though, the movie has had a checkered and beleaguered history of being trimmed. For its original release, much material was hacked out including what was arguably the most important song.
Once upon a time, the deleted material was deemed irrevocably lost. Then someone found degraded copies of some of the footage and we had a home video release using much of that. Then someone found original, non-degraded copies of some footage and…well, there have been many versions available. We now appear to have a "definitive," near-perfect restoration.
Interested in the numbers? The original theatrical release ran 142 minutes. The new Blu-ray contains two different versions — a "Director's Cut" that runs 165 and an even longer cut that runs 168. I have not compared them but film scholars are all saying the longest version is the one to watch. They also seem to be unanimously impressed by the quality of the video and the color correcting that has been done on it, plus there are also new commentary tracks, deleted and alternate scenes, screen tests and other supplemental goodies.
Maddeningly, the Amazon listing for this new release gives 142 minutes as the running time. Don't believe that but do use that link to buy it and watch it. Or wait 'til a month from today and watch it on an appropriate day. It's a great movie and it deserves to be seen at its best.
There's a new one of these "challenge" things that's a bit saner than dumping a tub of ice water on yourself. It's to show support for Veterans by doing twenty push-ups. Hey, I could do that. I mean, I did it when I was 17 and like climbing Mount Everest — which I'll also get around to doing one of these days — once you prove you can do it, you never have to prove it again. Here's Jon Stewart rising to the challenge…
You'll notice that one of the people he calls out is John Oliver. Here's Mr. Oliver taking on the dare. I don't want to cast aspersions on the man but I have the odd feeling he cheated a bit…
A big theme of the political posts on this blog is "Follow the money" — and oddly enough, it's a point that even the rightest of right-wing readers here seem to agree with. We all know Ben Carson has no chance of being president. He probably has no chance of (and no interest in) holding any elective office. Even my Conservative friends all seem to agree that much if not most of what he says that makes headlines is nonsense.
So why does he say these things? Because he's getting very rich saying them. There may be other reasons but for most people in this country, that would be reason enough.
Ted Cruz got in some trouble the other day for telling a joke about Joe Biden…
While speaking at a GOP dinner in Michigan on Wednesday, Cruz delivered an oft-told stump speech line poking fun at Biden, mentioning his name and then saying, "You know the nice thing? You don't need a punchline," according to the Detroit News.
"Honestly, it works," Cruz said, according to the news report. "The next party you're at, just walk up to someone and say, 'Vice President Joe Biden' and just close your mouth. They will crack up laughing."
Immediately after the speech, Cruz knew he'd erred when several people reminded him that Biden's son, Beau, had just passed away from brain cancer. Cruz promptly issued an apology.
Okay, here's the thing: Isn't this Lewis Black's joke? I don't remember where he did it but I'm pretty sure he did that joke a few years ago about one of our previous veeps, the eminent Dan Quayle.
I just sent a question about this to Mr. Black, who'll be on Bill Maher's show Friday night.
Arthur W. Upfield (1890–1964) was an Australian writer of mystery and suspense novels, best known for books featuring his creation, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force. His works were highly acclaimed and popular, but nothing in this article should be taken as my personal recommendation of them since I've never read one. My mother though read several and enjoyed them greatly…which brings us to a tale from Christmas of 1963.
At the time, I was avidly collecting comic books, primarily from two sources. One was just buying them new. Comics then came out on Tuesdays and Thursdays and were sold in drug stores, supermarkets and dedicated newsstands. It was an absolute "must" of my life to hit such establishments on those days, preferably at about the time the employees were unbundling that day's shipment and putting them in the rack.
The other source was used bookstores, of which there were then many. I believe at some point it was an "easy entry" business, meaning it didn't cost much to start one. You just needed a rented store, a lot of shelves and a ton of old books. I'd hit these establishments up often and buy old comic books, which were then a nickel each and, in most shops, six for a quarter. There are comics I bought that way and still own that are now worth mucho dinero.
My father usually drove me to these stores and every once in a while, my mother would come along and buy herself an Upfield novel. They usually had a lot of them and she'd buy one or two to read.
My mother was different from me in many ways and this was one. I would have bought them all. That is, I would have bought copies of every Upfield book I saw but did not yet own and then I would have just read them at my leisure. I'm not sure I can explain why she didn't do that. It wasn't the money. Used, the books only sold for one or two dimes each.
Sometimes when I was heading off to prowl old book shops, she'd say, "Hey, if you see any Upfield books I don't have, please buy one for me." She gave me a list of those she owned, which was about eight of the books the man had published. That gave me an idea for her Christmas present that year. I decided I would get her The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library, meaning one copy of every one of his books she didn't have. These are all paperbacks we're talking about so they weren't expensive but there was the challenge of getting them all…and I had about three weeks.
I walked up to my favorite bookstore up on Pico Boulevard which sold used books but could also order new ones for you. The proprietor had a reference volume that showed me the names of all the books Mr. Upfield had published. Some were on his shelves. Some others were still in print so I had him place orders for those. When I left, I had ten of those books either in my mitts or on their way to me. Over the next few days, I hit three other shops I frequented and found six more of them. Then a sweep of three stores downtown near MacArthur Park yielded only one more.
I had let my father in on my mission, of which he highly approved, and swore him to secrecy. He drove me to some of those stores where I bought old comics and then I got him to drive me to two stores I never visited because they didn't carry comics. Fortunately, each of those deprived bookstores did have some Upfield books.
Christmas Day that year fell on a Wednesday. I remembered that and I just looked it up to check and I was right. So my deadline was Tuesday and when I awoke Tuesday morning, I had procured all but one of the books. I suppose my mother would have been just as delighted by a Christmas gift of The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library (minus one) with an I.O.U. but I was determined to find the last one that day. Oddly enough, it was one of the more recent ones. Earlier Upfield books were still in print but not this one, the name of which I do not now recall.
I had one last store to search — a place called Yesterday's Books down on Western Avenue. It was a big, frightening place with books filling three floors of a structure that should have been condemned long before I or Mr. Upfield were born. Their inventory was largely unsorted and as I entered, I had the feeling that the book I needed was definitely in there somewhere. The formidable challenge was to find it.
I had given myself an arbitrary time limit there of 45 minutes. That was how long it would be before my father came back to pick me up. I asked the proprietor where books by Arthur W. Upfield might be and was disheartened by his reply: "Almost anywhere." I could search all I wanted but he was not going to be of any help whatsoever.
So I searched and I searched and I did find numerous Upfield books but not the one I needed. Fifteen minutes went by…thirty…I could hear the seconds ticking away on me. Every time I came across the wrong Upfield book, it bolstered my certainty that the right one was hiding somewhere on the premises. But could I find it in time?
Forty-two minutes after I began searching, I moved a stack of dusty volumes and there under it, deliberately hiding from me, I saw what I saw: The missing Upfield book. Feelings of triumph and joy overwhelmed me as I grabbed it up —
— only to find it was not the book. Just the cover. The insides had come loose and were nowhere to be found. Damn.
I was about to admit defeat when it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't have to do that. Why surrender when you can lie?
Well, maybe not lie but buy myself some time. I remembered where in the store I'd last come across an Upfield book that I already had. I took it and the loose cover to the cash register and asked the guy how much for the both of them. He just charged me for the complete book and threw the cover in for nothing. In the car, I proudly informed my father I had found the last book in my quest. No point in letting him in on the fraud I was about to perpetrate.
Once home, I got some glue and a knife and performed surgery. I removed the cover from the whole book and glued the loose cover onto it. What I wound up with looked just like a real copy of the last book I needed to complete The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library…as long as you didn't open it.
Then I gift-wrapped the entire pile and stuck it under the tree. Every so often that evening, I'd catch a glimpse of the present and I'd have an ominous flash-forward: My mother would open it up, love the present I'd so ambitiously assembled for her…but say, "Hey, there's something odd about this one book…"
The next morning, she was thrilled with what I'd gotten her. Beaming with joy, she went over to a bookcase in the living room, rearranged a few things so as to clear space and placed her Upfield collection there, spines out, all lined up and looking very official.
Since the stand-in book was one of the later ones, I said to her, "If I were you, I'd start at the beginning and read them all in sequence, including the ones I already read." She said that sounded like a peachy idea and I breathed a sigh of relief. That meant I had several months before she got to it — several months to find a real copy and make the switch. Three or four weeks later, on a hunt for comic books I didn't have in a store in Santa Monica, I found a real copy and swapped it in. "She'll never know," I thought to myself.
Forty or forty-five years later, we were having dinner one night. My father was gone by then and my mother and I didn't talk too much about the past because it sometimes caused her to miss him a little too much. But that evening, she started remembering fond moments from past holidays and I decided it was time to unburden my secret and to confess my little bit of chicanery involving her Upfield books.
"I had found all but one," I explained to her, "and time was running out…"
She finished my sentence: "…so you somehow made a fake book with the right cover but the wrong insides. Then later, you found a copy of the real book and secretly switched them on the shelf."
I was startled…truly startled. I asked her "How did you know?" but all she'd do was smile and tell me, "I knew."
I never could lie to my mother.
Daniel Larison on the problems the Republican Party has with holding up Ronald Reagan as its idol. Larison says it's that too many voters don't remember the guy. I think it's that plus the fact that a lot of current G.O.P. policies are outta step with what Reagan said or did.
Stephen Colbert shaves…for now.
Friends keep asking me how I think his Late Show will do. Well, given that the show doesn't exist yet and even he probably doesn't know exactly what it'll be, that's hard to say. I just think the guy has the talent and appeal to do a very, very good and popular show…and I don't think America is so in love with either Jimmy that they can't be wrested away. Actually these days, with DVRs and delayed viewing, it isn't even a matter of stealing viewers from your competitors. A lot of people watched Dave and Jay. I expect a lot of people to watch Stephen and one or more Jimmies…
I predict that in the 2016 presidential election, I will get the exact same number of electoral votes for the office of President as Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Bernie Sanders, Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee, all put together.
Ken Levine saw the touring company of Motown and had almost the exact same reaction that I did, except that he left out that everything was too damn loud.
James H. Burns has a nice little essay about going to see the Mets play.
Lee Goldberg gets some mighty odd mail…and some of the same stuff that we all get.
Joe Brancatelli has lots of stuff you'll want to know if you ever rent cars at the airport.
Bob Elisberg writes about why Jeb Bush is unlikely to be the G.O.P. nominee. It pretty much comes down to the same reason I think that: No one in the Republican party wants to be put in the position of defending his brother's track record.