Around the dial

I love to start the week with something provocative, don't you? What's that, you say? You don't? Well, if that's the case, feel free to skip down to the next link, which isn't provocative, only interesting. For the rest of you, this article at Human Events is a few months old, but I just found out about it: Bill Hurrell writes about how the series Glee may well have marked the start of the woke movement in television. Agree with him or not, it's precisely this in-depth treatment of television as a cultural avitar that this site is all about. 

One thing you can be sure of in an episode called "A Man Greatly Beloved" is that there's more to it than meets the eye. Find out what Sir Cedric Hardwicke's secret is when you read Jack's review of this 1957 Hitchcock story, based on Sarett Rudley's script, at bare-bones e-zine.

Is there anyone out there who wouldn't want to be The Man With the Power? Well, these kinds of things can be more trouble than they're worth, and at Cult TV Blog, John looks at how complicated it can be in the Power episode "The Mind Beyond." 

You may recall that awhile back, David began a quest to watch at least one episode of every prime time network television series to air in the 1970s. Find out how he's doing at Comfort TV, where he's up to Monday, 1970. How many of these shows do you remember?

Despite the snarking about how unrealistic sitcoms of the classic TV era are, Leave It to Beaver is, paradoxically, more popular now than it was when it originally aired. Read about the show's 1962 episodes this week at Television's New Frontier: The 1960s.

Two obituaries of television stars from the '70s and '80s feature at A Shroud of Thoughts, as Terence pays tribute to the careers of David Birney and Joanna Barnes, both of whom died at the end of April; Birney aged 83 and Barnes 87, and both of them leaving us with plenty of fine performances.

Finally, at Classic Film & TV Cafe, Rick has an interview with Samantha Glasser on the inaugural Columbus Moving Picture Show, which takes place May 26-29 of this year. Given that we now live about three hours from Columbus, we might have to consider this trip; if not this year, then in the future. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? TV