It's been said that Labor Day represents the end of summer. I've never been too crazy about that idea, because when I was a kid, the end of summer meant the beginning of the school year. Well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
But it hasn't exactly been a secret in these parts that I haven't been as present at It's About TV as I usually am. And it occurs to me that some of you might be wondering what's been going on. (Some of you, of course, probably don't care, but that's okay, because I don't care about what you're doing, either.) I tend not to talk about anything here that isn't television-related, so just because I know what I've been up to, that doesn't mean you know.
So: I've been busy. Very busy. I published my new novel, The Book of Revelations, in June. But if you think that was the end of the story, it was really more like the beginning. The months prior to publication were spent with editing, rewriting, design work, and pre-launch publicity. (One of the drawbacks to being an indie author is that you have to do it all yourself.)
And when the book actually comes out, that's when it really starts to heat up. I've appeared on several podcasts, not only promoting Revelations, but talking about the writing life in general, specifically what it's like to write both fiction and non-fiction concurrently. (TL;DR: it ain't easy.) I have another podcast coming up next week, in fact, and hopefully more to come.
That's not to mention the book tour, which is also ongoing. One of the things I've most enjoyed in this whole process is setting up my table at book fairs and getting to talk with people who share a passion for books. They might buy my book (I sold 22 at a book fair in early August), or they might not (I sold three at Barnes & Noble, which was actually three more than I'd anticipated), but even if they're just curious, it is always a pleasure to meet with and talk to them. And, surprise, they don't bite! I wouldn't say that I've gotten adept at hawking my wares, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than it is selling them online or through social media, let me tell you. You can see the complete lineup of my in-person and podcast appearances here, and it changes constantly. There's also my new video series, The 90-Second Author, in which I talk about the ideas, inspirations, and creative decisions behind my fiction. It comes up every week on my social media platforms, and you can see them on my YouTube channel here.
(L-R) A reading at Hyde Brothers Bookstore; my sales table at a book fair; with Danny, the beloved stuffed monkey from The Book of Revelations.
And then there's the flip side of being a writer: writing. Just after Revelations came out, and while I was starting to book appearances, I also managed to begin writing my next book. And as of last week, I've completed the first draft, which comes in at about 73,000 words; the same basic length as Revelations. My new novel is entitled Five, and the title has nothing to do with the number of books I've written, nor does it refer to how many months it took to write. What does it mean? Well, you'll have to buy a copy to find out. Still, I can tell you that, like Revelations, it deals with tortured souls trying to find a way out of betrayal and grief; and while Revelations will always remain the book most dear to me, and the one I take the greatest pleasure in, I think Five's going to be pretty damn good, too, and I'm hoping to publish it in June of 2027, the same time period as when I published Revelations.
There's a lot of work ahead for Five: editing, rewriting, more editing, more rewriting, design work, and pre-publicity. So that old adage about there being no rest for the wicked? Unfortunately, it's true. And yet I can't remember when I've enjoyed writing more. Not that I don't love writing about television; I do. But at the same time it's true that my passion, and my time, now rests more with my novels, and they are what I suspect will occupy most of my time for the rest of my writing life. Doesn't mean I'm leaving here, at least not for a while, but you might notice me talking about my novels more than I have in the past, even though they aren't about TV.
In my writing life, there's one mistake that I've made that I can rectify here and now: I assumed that, because you come here for my television writing, you wouldn't be interested in my novels. That may, in fact, be true, but it is an offense to you for me to assume that, and going forward, I'm not going to make that mistake. You can always find out what's going on by visiting my author website, www.mitchellhadley.com, but from now on I'm going to be more generous with my time here as well.
Hard at work, or hardly working?
So, you may wonder: what's next? Well, glad you asked that! The publishing company I own, Throckmorton Press, does publish authors other than myself, and I'm working with three new authors as we speak, in areas including fiction and poetry. That should either keep me out of trouble or get me in even more of it; we'll see which it is.
And that writing gig? Well, since I've retired, I've been writing my books (including Five) at the rate of one a year, which means it's not too early to start talking about 2028. Rumor has it that I've been outlining a story called Indifference, and I'm not indifferent to my feelings about it. Will it be the next book to see black ink on white paper? I can't say for sure, but a writer's got to write, doesn't he? TV
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This week's international issue reminds us that the United States and Canada aren't all that different, at least when it comes to television. Sunday features pro football, just as it is south of the border. And a good many American programs make the lineup on both CBC and CTV. No matter which way you look at it, it spells entertainment. This week's issue covers Washington and British Columbia, with Ted Turner's Superstation thrown in as part of the bargain.
It's time once again for the Fall Preview issue, and as I see it, there are three ways I can lay this out for you. I can, of course, try to cover everything, which would take a very long time, and if true, would mean that I am probably writing these words in July. I can concentrate on those shows that were huge successes, programs like Hill Street Blues that became a household name. Or I can do the opposite, look at the shows that failed miserably, which can be a lot of fun—especially if some of them were highly rated and had big names fronting them.
I'll admit that each of these three options has something going for it. I'll be honest, though: since I'm not writing this in July, but on the day before you're reading it, you can assume I've decided not to go the comprehensive route. The only fair way to decide this, then, is the age-old solution of flipping a coin. Heads I go for the winners; tails and it's the losers. And you're here to keep an eye on things to make sure I'm honest, right? So here we go—wait. What do you mean it landed on its edge? Yes, I know what it means, but—no, of course I'm not suggesting you'd lie in front of all these people. Of course I trust you. All right then, I'll just have to compromise and do a little of each. Fair enough?
A proviso, though: as we're warned in TV Guide, there's an actors' strike in progress, and some of the shows listed in this issue may be postponed, or even cancelled, because of it. I'll try to point that out as I go along.
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I mentioned Hill Street Blues (NBC), which is certainly the most acclaimed of the new shows, although it will come perilously close to being cancelled before it catches on. It won't actually air until January 15 of next year, and it airs on three different nights during that first half-season (including Saturdays!) before it finally settles down to Thursdays at 10:00 p.m.
The most popular series of the new batch—and, I might argue, the best—is probably CBS's Magnum, P.I., and it's pretty hard to bet against Tom Sellick's charm and an exceptional supporting cast; the Hawaii scenery doesn't hurt either. It's up against Barney Miller on ABC and Thursday Night at the Movies on NBC. It does a little better than Hill Street Blues in terms of debuting—it hits the airwaves on December 11. It does better in the ratings as well, finishing the truncated season #14, as opposed to #87 for the Blues.
Three new series base their hopes on the popular movies they're adapted from, and—well, one out of three ain't bad. rate. Breaking Away (Saturdays, ABC), based on last year's Oscar-nominated movie, actually premieres in November, but while it's heavily publicized by the network and even brings some of the same cast members as the movie, only seven of its episodes are broadcast, and it's actually off the air before Hill Street Blues premieres. Freebie and the Bean (Saturdays, CBS), based on the 1974 buddy cop comedy, it fares no better; seven and out. Harper Valley, P.T.A. (Fridays, NBC), birthed by both a popular movie and song, actually survives for two seasons, and I'd suggest that a big reason for that success lies in its star, Barbara Eden.
Imitation is, they say, the sincerest form of flattery. In Hollywood, it's also the surest way to survival. What other way to explain the resurgance of the prime-time soap opera, spawned by the success of Dallas and Knotts Landing. NBC has Flamingo Road on Tuesdays, with a big-name cast including Morgan Fairchild, John Beck, Mark Harmon, Howard Duff, Barbara Rush, and Stella Stevens, and it lasts two seasons.* CBS hopes to continue its success with Saturday's Secrets of Midland Heights, but even though it's produced by Lorimar, maker of Dallas, and stars Lorenzo Lamas and the pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton, it remained a secret to audiences and disappeared after eight episodes.
*It, too, was based on a successful movie, the 1949 hit starring Joan Crawford.
Closely related to the series based on a movie is the series spunoff from another series, and we've got a couple of those as well: Enos (Wednesdays, CBS), which takes Sonny Shroyer's character from The Dukes of Hazzard and puts him in his own series, actualy makes it through an entire truncated season of 18 episodes before Enos returns from whence he came. A spinoff of a different kind is Those Amazing Animals (Sundays, ABC), inspired by the same network's That's Incredible!, right down to having three hosts of its own: Burgess Meredith, Priscilla Presley and Jim Stafford. It's good for a full season.
Bosom Buddies (Thursdays, ABC) is almost a spin-off; its men-in-drag scenario is certainly reminiscent of Some Like it Hot, and while it lasts for four successful seasons, both of its stars went on to bigger and better things: Peter Scolari, and—especially—Tom Hanks. And there are two other ABC sitcoms that deserve some mention: Too Close For Comfort (Tuesdays), which, between its network and syndication runs for seven seasons, makes Ted Knight the second most-successful alum of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, right after Gavin MacLeod; and It's a Living (Thursdays), which played the same network/syndication parlay to six successful seasons.
And finally a brief moment of silence while we recite the names of those series whose names are, if not known only to God, remain nonetheless relatively anonymous: Ladies' Man (Mondays, CBS. Episodes aired: 15) and I'm a Big Girl Now (Fridays, ABC; couldn't make it even with Diana Canova and Danny Thomas. Episodes aired: 19) I've heard of the latter, not the former, but I just can't think of anything else worth saying about them.
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One of the continuing trends is the star-studded, epic scale miniseries (even though many of them are nothng more than two-part movies, but of course that isn't sexy enough), and for all the talk of coming attractions (Masada, East of Eden, The Gangster Chronicles), the biggest one of the season kicks off on Monday: Shōgun, NBC's $20 million gamble, a 12-hour adaptation of James Clavell's massive (1,152 pages) best-seller starring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune.
The 12 hours are spread out over five consecutive nights, with three-hour episodes on Monday and Friday, and two hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It's interesting scheduling, especially having it conclude on Friday; nowadays, I think we've become accustomed to Sunday being the big television night of the week, with multipart events skipping a night or two so that they can begin and end on that date. Having it air on consecutive nights is far more sraightforward, almost like the binge programming of today.
Shōgun is a huge hit for NBC, with the network garnering its highest weekly rating in its history. It will be nominated for 14 Emmys, winning three, including best limited series; it also wins a Golden Globe and a Peabody. Almost makes the rest of the season an anticlimax, doesn't it?
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One of the most anticipated sections of the Fall Preview is Judith Crist's look at the big-screen movies coming to television for the first time. Even with VHS and cable on the horizon, most of us still rely on the networks for the movies we missed in the theaters, or want to see again. Last year, there were 111 theatrical premieres on network TV, and that doesn't include 13 that had been announced but won't make it until this season. With that to look forward to, what are some of the highlights?
NBC's list is headed by two prestige hits from the middle of the last decade, both purporting to be based on true stories but with more fiction than fact: 1976's All the President's Men, with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman; and 1977's Julia, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. Other features include The Boys from Brazil, with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck; Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones; New York, New York, with Liza Minnelli as the last person to sing the theme before Frank Sinatra appropriated it as his own; and the 1970 documentary Woodstock.
Over at CBS, the emphasis, says Crist, is on "froth rather than 'class'," including the "wonderfully witty" Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe; George Hamilton and Susan Saint James in Love at First Bite; Same Time, Next Year, with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, and Foul Play, with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Their headliner is 1979's The Amityville Horror, which Crist calls "the most boring, illogical and inept horror movie to have made $35 million at the box office," which was quite a bit of money at the time; and The Champ, with Jon Voight, Faye Duanway, and Ricky Schroder.
Last but not least, ABC has a lot to offer, beginning with 1977's Saturday Night Fever, which made John Travolta a star; 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, which introduced us to the villain Jaws; Sally Field's 1979 Oscar turn in Norma Rae; Neil Simon's California Suite, and a doubleheader of Barbra Streisand: the "self-indulgent remake" of A Star is Born, and The Main Event. There's also Midnight Express, which details the horror of Turkish prison; and The Enforcer, Clint Eastwood's third turn as Dirty Harry Callahan. It's enough to make up for the "tedious, mindless" trucker movie Convoy.
All in all, says Crist, the season gives promise of being a good one for viewers. Even if you have to wait years, not weeks, for some of your favorites.
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In our hurry to look forward to the coming season, let's not forget that there are shows worth watching right now—depending on your tastes, of course. On Monday, it's the debut of Solid Gold (various stations throughout the week), with hostess Dionne Warwick welcoming Paul Anka, Irene Cara, and Johnny Lee. Hour Magazine, hosted by Gary Collins (and not to be confused with PM Magazine), debuts in syndication on Monday, while Alan Thicke premieres a weekday variety show; no, this isn't Thicke of the Night. Tuesday night gives two dubious changes: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson goes from its traditional 90 minutes to an hour, while Tom Snyder's Tomorrow expands to 90 minutes to fill in the gap. An hour has since become the standard for such shows; it's hard to call them "talk shows" anymore, since nobody ever sticks around to talk. It is, in my opinion, a great, great loss to television, as well as the art of conversation.
On Saturday night at 10:30 p.m., PBS broadcasts the world television premiere of the opera The Ocean Flight, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. The original title was Der Flug der Lindberghs, telling the story of Charles Lindbergh's historic transatlantic solo flight; Brecht, who would become disillusioned with what he saw as Lindbergh's wartime isolationism and Nazi sympathies, later changed the name and removed all references to Lindbergh from the text.
I was curious as to what it was like. Perhaps you will be, too.
There are some excellent movies on this week, starting with the Oscar-winning A Man for All Seasons (Sunday, 11:30 p.m., KIRO); it took me many years to warm to this movie and watch it all the way through, but now that I have, it's one of my favorites. (You should watch it, too; we may be living this way sooner rather than later.) The Man in the White Suit (Sunday, 11:45 p.m., CBUT) is a very funny Alec Guinness satire on modern business.And I quite like the movie Badlands (Friday, 12:15 a.m., CHEK), based on the 1957-58 murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.
Of course, we can't forget Casablanca (12:15 a.m., CBUT), can we? Otherwise, we'll never have Paris. TV
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The horror of September 11, 2001, is not just in the increasing number of Americans who don't remember it because they were too little or hadn't even been born yet. What remains a vivid moment in time for some of us, never to be forgotten, is for others, ancient history. And that's to be expected. Time marches on, after all, and new generations are evolving all the time.
No, I think for anyone who saw it unfold on television that morning, the true horror is the number of people who simply don't want to know about it, who don't even care. Their actions over the past twenty-five years have spoken louder than any words they may have shared on social media. One need only look at the current mayor of New York City to see how far the memory ball has fallen.
The governing principle of this website has always been to help people remember. Not just those for whom classic television is a fond memory, a warm reminder of a time that moves away from us at a rate of sixty minutes per hour, but for those who never knew that time. It serves not just as an educational tool ("see what you young whipersnappers have missed!") but as a chance to share moments that should be remembered, that must be remembered if we're to retain any kind of cultural memory at all.
Increasingly, people don't seem interested in that. If something didn't happen ten minutes ago, and if they weren't around to see it happen themselves, then for them it didn't happen. More importantly, they don't care if it happened or not. Whether they're stupid, willfully ignorant, or simply naive, the result is the same: without an institutional memory, can a country, or a culture, even continue to exist?
I remember where I was on September 11, 2001. I suspect that those of you who lived through that day do as well. That so many young people have never seen the footage of the planes crashing into the towers, or the towers themselves coming down, or the masses of people running in terror away from the debris cloud, is a commentary not just on them, but on all of us. That they don't remember the pictures posted all over the city, put up by desperate family or friends, asking if their loved ones had been seen by anyone, even in a morgue; that they don't recall the flowers laid, or the names read in solemn ritual, or that for a brief moment everyone seemed united in grief and rage; well, whose fault is that, anyway?
There was a time when Remember the Maine, Remember the Alamo, Remember Pearl Harbor, were all rallying cries, determined to ring out in an effort to remind people not to forget, not to let something become a dry recitation in the obituaries section of the newspaper. Instead, too many today seem determined to forget, to even deny the meaning of what happened on that day. They're too horrified, too sensitive, too afraid to offend, to share the truth of September 11. For those people, I have no time whatsoever.
For everyone else, though, take a minute to go back and watch what happened that day. It's not difficult to find on YouTube or elsewhere. If you saw it live, it might be painful, it might fill you with grief or despair or rage. Watch it anyway. The anger might do you good. It might stir you out of your lethargy. It might make you feel alive, or remind you that you are. If you never saw it, if you were too young or weren't yet born, watch it, and watch a civilization crumble before your very eyes. Because things haven't been the same since then. Those in charge won't let it be the same. Those who look to destroy the West, to obliterate everything that it stood for or accomplished, won't let it be the same. Those who say we must change won't let it be the same.
In a way, though, they're right. Things shouldn't be the same. We shouldn't let America continue to recede as a cultural memory. We shouldn't let our society devolve into further and further degradation. We shouldn't continue to disregard what we stand for; in fact, perhaps it's time to stand for something for a change.
Today shouldn't be a day for random acts of kindness, or paying it forward, or any number of slogans that sound nice and mean well. You don't need September 11 to remind you to do something nice, good, or decent; perhaps part of our problem is that we don't do them every day of the week. No, today is a day to remember. And to ask ourselves if we've learned anything in the intervening twenty-five years. Or if we even care.
Watch, and remember, and never forget. TV
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At first glance, nothing seems to pop out from today's listings, but a deeper look gives us some gems. For instance, this afternoon's Science Fiction Theater features Vincent Price as a police scientist; Ian Hendry, one of the originals on The Avengers, is being blackmailed into treason on Kraft Mystery Theater; future Oscar winner Beatrice Straight is on Route 66; Naked City highlights Martin Balsam as the guest star; more powerful, and more disturbing, are the turns by Frank Sutton and Robert Blake as a pair of psychopath brothers who meet a bad end; and Rhonda Fleming is "The Woman in Gray" on Hong Kong. Not bad, hmm? The listings this week are from the Utah-Idaho edition.
