Around the dial

Before we dip into the past, a word about tomorrow. I have a new issue of TV Guide, one that won't be ready by Saturday. That means two things: first, that I'll have something else up tomorrow, something that I promise you'll really like. (As Rocky the Flying Squirrel would say.) Second, on Monday you'll see an unprecedented double-feature: not only "This Week in TV Guide," but the program listings as well, It'll be a long piece, but I think you'll agree afterwards that the two-day delay was well worth it. And now we return to our regularly scheduled program.

I always enjoyed the Twilight Zone episode "Printer's Devil, partly because of the pun in the title, and partly because Burgess Meredith is, as always, delightful to watch. The Twilight Zone Vortex has all the details on one of the best of the hour-long TZ episodes, written by Charles Beaumont and directed by Ralph Senensky.

At Cult TV Blog, John takes a look at "Queen's Pawn," an episode of the legendary '70s police series The Sweeney, starring John (Inspector Morse) Thaw. One of the things that John comments on is how the show portrays the Britain of the time; not in the same manner, but with the same effect, as Naked City. It's a show that gives you a contemporary look at what things were like "back then."

The TV Guide of March 25, 1989 is on tap at Television Obscurities, and among other things it reminds us of when the Academy Awards were held at least a month later than they are today (and they used to be even later than that, in early April). Among other things, Merril Pannit reviews Mission: Impossible (the newer version, not the original), which he calls "pure escapism" fun.

In his Saturday Evening Post column, Bob Sassone talks about why Jay Leno is right when he says late-night television is too political and too boring. ("It doesn’t even matter if I agree with a lot of what they say," Bob says; "I still find myself veering away from Colbert and Kimmel and watching reruns of Perry Mason or Friends.")

At bare-bones e-zine, Jack continues his Hitchcock Project on James P. Cavanagh with Edmund Gwynn's final screen appearance, in the 1957 episode "Father and Son." I'm assuming most of you have seen Miracle on 34th Street, where Gwynn plays Kris Kringle (and wins a Supporting Actor Oscar in the process); this , but if that's all you know him from, you're really missing something.

I don't consider myself anywhere near an expert on Sherlock Holmes; like others, I consider Jeremy Brett the definitive Holmes, and Basil Rathbone the most enjoyable Holmes. I don't stray far from the classices, but Realweegiemidget Reviews takes us to a revisionist Holmes, one in which our hero thinks he's Sherlock. It's the TV-movie The Return of the World's Greatest Detective, and the Holmes is: Larry Hagman. I'll bet he wouldn't have needed so long to figure out who shot J.R. TV