Around the dial

This week, a particularly good installment of the Hitchcock Project at bare-bones e-zine, as Jack shows how Bernard C. Schoenfeld's touch resulted in a faithful adaptation of an R.E. Kendall short story, while making one little tweak that packs a wallop.

In Hondo-speak, that wallop would be called whoopass, and there's some to be had over at The Horn Section, as Hal reviews Hondo's twelfth episode, "Hondo and the Ghost of Ed Dow." By the way, I had no idea that Hondo, which ran a grand total of 17 episodes, was on TNT for ten years.

At Garroway at Large, Jodie looks back at Election Night 1960, a marathon of waiting and watching and waiting into the morning hours, as the Kennedy-Nixon deadlock drags on. But the real highlight is when tonight becomes Today, so to speak, and a certain Garroway makes an appearance.

Meanwhile, Jordan at The Twilight Zone Vortex presents a terrific list of a dozen TZ episodes that show how heavily the series was influenced by film noir. I really enjoy lists like this; they serve to remind me how great some of these episodes really are.

It's snowing here in Minneapolis as I write this, which makes the beach picture at Some Polish American Guy even more inviting. It's "The Two Million Dollar Hustle," the final episode of B.J. and the Bear. Don't let the moment pass without checking it out. Good Gravy!

Cult TV Blog travels back in time to 1966 and the Doctor Who story "The Smugglers." It's actually a reconstruction, the original being one of the infamous "lost episodes" that invariably add an aura of mystery to the story. I don't watch the new Who anymore, but I wonder: in years to come, will people look back on current episodes with the same affection that they have for those that have been rediscovered or reconstructed? Something about the thrill of the hunt.

Television's New Frontier: the 1960s looks at Gunsmoke in the year 1961, a year marked by change—most important, the show's expansion from 30 minutes to an hour. Was it the right thing to do? Read it and judge for yourself. But isn't that what you always do anyway? TV