Around the dial

Let's start this week at bare-bones e-zine, where Jack welcomes a new writer to the Hitchcock Project. It's Dick Carr, author of the first season episode "The Big Switch," a story of gunfighters and possibly divine intervention, with a stirling cast including Gene Barry, Darren McGavin, and Ellen Corby.

At Classic Film & TV Cafe, Rick applies his "Seven Things to Know" talent to Zorro, the late-1950s Walt Disney-produced series for ABC, starring Guy Williams as the famed masked crimefighter. Did you know that Annette was a big fan of Zorro and appeared on four episodes?

The Secret Sanctum of Captain Video goes the graphic route, with this Kung Fu story "The Rising Storm." Excellent artwork in this adaptation, which reminds me that I really should go back and watch this series again at some point.

Roger takes on the 1995 Columbo episode "Strange Bedfellows" over at The View from the Junkyard. Reading the description, the story didn't sound familiar, and I've got the Columbo boxed set. It made sense when I saw the 1995 date; we skipped most of the movies, which failed to live up to the standards of the original series. As for this episode? Sounds like we made the right choice.

A couple of anniversary recognitions from Terence at A Shroud of Thoughts. First, it's the 60th anniversary of The Fugitive, one of the great TV shows of all time. Next, it's 60 years for The Patty Duke Show, the series that made "identical cousins" a thing, even though the odds on that happening are something like a billion to one. (Like so much else, you can actually look it up online!)

At The Hits Just Keep On Comin', JB posts some random thoughts, including a review of what sounds like an interesting book, TV Snapshots: An Archive of Everyday Life, by Lynn Spigel. (Embedded is a link to another interesting piece, this one by Drew Magary, on the meaning a television set can have.)

David raises an interesting question at Comfort TV: what does it mean when we say a television character has "integrity"? Some interesting examples follow; I always enjoy it when someone measures television charactes as if they were actual people, and David does a very good job of it. Good comments here as well.

At Cult TV Blog, John wraps up (for now) his excellent series on The X-Files and the American Dream, and comes to some conclusions. You'll want to make sure to catch up on the latest entries from the past week, Thought-provoking as always.  TV