October 2, 2015

Around the dial

Hard as it may be to believe, this is the first blog post of October; we're now able to say, in all honesty, that Thanksgiving is next month.  Don't panic; it's still almost two full months away, but still.  Means we'll be watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown at the end of this month.  More important to us now, though, is what we're watching now.  Here are some of this week's highlights.

At Classic Television Showbiz, Kliph is back with a fascinating article on how the Mafia seized control of CBS primetime.  It hearkens back to the days of the "rural purge" at CBS, and while the two events aren't absolutely conjoined, they're not completely separate either.  It's pay-to-view, but for a good cause - financial support for the blog - and well worth it.

Television Obscurities reminds us that GetTV, one of the newer retro channels, will be offering reruns of two throwbacks from the day - The Judy Garland Show and The Merv Griffin Show.  It starts later this month, but I'll have a pre-review of them next week.  Garland's show has been available on DVD for a while, and there was a great boxed set of Merv shows a couple of years ago, but it's nice to see shows like this making it to a wider audience.  Now if only I had access to GetTV...

Made for TV Mayhem has a piece on one of those '70s TV movies that has the kind of title we love: Doctors' Private Lives.  If that isn't an inducement to watch, I don't know what is.  John Gavin, one of the movie's stars*, has a wonderful description of the plot: “Barbara [Anderson] plays my wife, and Donna [Mills] plays a widow with whom I become involved. But only physically and emotionally. It doesn’t go any deeper than that.”  Well, then.

*Fun fact: in a few years, Gavin trades movies like this for a juicer role, that of U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, appointed by his old friend President Ronald Reagan.

Continuations of excellent, thought-provoking series reviews at two sites: Cult TV Blog, with his examination of apartheid in The Prisoner, and more of The Hitchcock Project at bare-bones e-zine.  I wish I had time to get back to these kinds of long-form essays more often, but I've had a different writing project taking up most of my free time lately.  More on that to come.

At Comfort TV, David muses on something that I must have been thinking of without being aware of it: does watching an inordinate amount of television from 30 or 40 years ago alter your perception of how time passes?  As I mentioned to him in response, shows from, say, 1980 on seem far more recent than they are, while shows from the early '70s backward seem much older than they are.  Question: do I need a new hobby, or a therapist?

To explore these and other pressing questions, I'd suggest you come back here tomorrow, same time, same channel, to see what our next TV Guide has to offer. TV  

1 comment:

  1. I just discovered your blog and wanted to thank you for the nice comment about my Hitchcock articles! I read the last batch of your posts and really liked them. I wish someone would put scans of TV Guide complete issues on a disc or online somewhere. They would be a great research tool.

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