The shows you hated but couldn't stop watching

Interesting article last week at The Ringer about the shows you hate yourself most for having watched, or, put another way, the shows that caused you to realize that the time spent watching them was time you'd never have back. In many respects, my journey into the heart of classic television was because of this experience; as I became more and more fed-up (i.e. angry) with the shows I had been watching, I started to invest more and more time building a library of shows that I was pretty sure weren't going to raise my blood pressure by another twenty points.

In some cases, the shows were ones I was familiar with and knew I was going to like: The Fugitive, Perry Mason, Hawaii Five-O, The Prisoner. Others, however were either shows I'd never watched (Naked City, Breaking Point) or programs that I remembered from growing up but hadn't really paid that much attention to (The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Peter Gunn); some, like the British drama The Human Jungle, I'd never even heard of until I started going down rabbit holes. Because for the most part I choose my own programming, it's hard to say that I have a show that, in retrospect, I'd consider a total waste of time. The closest I've come to that, however, is probably in the third season of Route 66.

Route 66 was a blind buy for me; of course I'd heard of the show, was familiar with the stars, knew the premise. Until I bought season one, though, I'd not actually seen any episodes. This isn't new to fans of classic television; we often depend on recommendations from others as to shows we might be interested in, and Route 66 was one of the more acclaimed shows out there. For me, the breaking point came with the departure of co-star George Maharis in the middle of season three. He and Martin Milner had spent more than two years traveling the USA in their Corvette, meeting interesting people and getting themselves involved in even more interesting situations, not all of them positive ones. I'd gotten more and more in the habit of muttering, under my breath, "Don't go there. Turn around and get out of town right now!" as they got involved in yet another affair that was really none of their business, one which they'd soon regret, after which they'd make some sanctimonious point.

As my wife pointed out, this was the whole premise of the series. "They're looking for adventure," she said. "They're not going anywhere in particular - why not get involved?" This was true, particularly since if Tod and Buz started playing it safe, Route 66 would soon become as interesting to the general public as one of those nature shows on PBS (no offense to nature fans out there). I might have had some misgivings, but I figured I could live with it.

When Maharis left the series, though, something happened. Until Glenn Corbett came on the scene as Maharis' replacement, Milner was left to carry the show by himself. It was true that he was probably the better actor of the two, and certainly the more professional (if some of the backstage stories can be believed), but without Buz to provide a certain balance, Tod came across as - let's be honest here - something of a prick, impetuous and with a chip on his shoulder, spoiling for fights, convinced that his answers were the best. It was at that point that I started working on other projects while the show was on, something I generally don't do when I'm watching a DVD. (After all, if I just wasn't in the mood, why not save it for another time?) It was as if I simply wanted to get it over with. When, in Corbett's first episode, Buz' character got into what I saw as a needless fight with him, I gave up completely. From that point on, Route 66 went on hiatus, and stayed there for more than a year. I wouldn't have called the past couple of years watching it a waste of time, but it was time to find something "better" to watch.

Eventually, as we cycled through our Friday night lineup, a couple other series we'd been watching came to an end, and it was time to reevaluate Route 66. To tell the truth, my main motivation was that 1) we'd already invested so much time, it was a shame to let it go to waste, and 2) I'd already spent the money on season three, so I might as well finish it, even if I decided against season four. So we went back and wrapped up the last half of the season. It did improve, somewhat; I actually came to view Corbett's character as more interesting and likable than Milner's, although they were basically too much alike to provide the dynamics required for the show to succeed. When the season ended, I felt as if I'd at least done my due diligence.

Now, as I mentioned, there is one more season to go, although most everyone agrees that Route 66 should have wrapped it up after season three. We haven't gotten it yet, and if there's any advantage to having waited this long, it would be because there's a better chance of finding it on eBay for less money. (We tried watching the streaming version on Shout! TV, but the signal kept buffering, so that's not the answer.) It's only 23 episodes, after all.

What about you out there? Are there any shows you've watched, either from the classic era or today, that have sucked the life out of you, that make you think you've wasted all that time for nothing?    TV  

Don't mess with the Men from U.N.C.L.E., and other Friday night fun

As some of you might recall, last summer I started what I thought would be a nice little project to fill some time - sharing with you the classic TV lineups we watch in the evening. Unlike many, we don't binge-watch shows, nor do we tend to watch the same shows every night. No, being the anal person I am, we have a set lineup for the three or four nights a week when we just relax from the pressures of daily life and settle down to an evening of retro TV.

Well, you can see how well that worked. I finished Saturday and Sunday, and even then I'd abandoned the idea of profiling each show, instead doing the Sunday night lineup in one fell swoop. And then the whole thing just kind of went away, as I found other things more pressing - or should I say interesting? - to write about. In time, I forgot the idea altogether.

But, lo and behold, I find myself today with nothing particular to write about, and - lo and behold - the idea came to me. Why not just finish what you've started for once? I couldn't really argue with that logic, so here's another look into our viewing habits - this time for Fridays.


The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
During one of my frequent times of underemployment, when I was temping while between permanent jobs, I got an email from Deep Discount announcing their Deal of the Day. It was a boxed set of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., complete in the fake attaché case, for something like forty bucks. Well, even though we were really trying to avoid big expenditures while we were were living under a reduced income, that seemed too good to pass up. Other people apparently thought so as well, because when I clicked on the button, the set was already on back order. It did come eventually, and found a place leading off the Friday night lineup.

I never much watched U.N.C.L.E. when it was originally on, and I'm not sure why. I remember once being grumpy about there being nothing on TV, and my mother suggesting I watch that. I did, but I don't think I got much out of it. I was aware of it, of course, what with the books and games and comics and other tie-ins, but it didn't have a whole lot of appeal to me. Of course, by the time I picked it up, I was ready for it - it was firmly entrenched in the classic TV oeuvre, and right about in the middle of the timeframe to which I increasingly found myself attracted. I knew all about the disastrous third season, when the show ratcheted the camp level up to 11 or 12 to compete with Batman, but while there were a lot of stinkers in that season, it was still fun.

I've never been a big Robert Vaughn fan; to me, he epitomizes the word "smarmy," but he turns out to be perfect for Napoleon Solo - once the producers realized the appeal of David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin, that is. McCallum's serious nature and ruthless edge balanced Vaughn's oily charm well, so that even when they were stuck in the most ridiculous situations (think "The My Friend the Gorilla Affair"), they were a winning team. By the shortened fourth season, when the show was finally cancelled, the turn to more serious storylines was an effective one, and it's too bad it wasn't tried earlier; we might at least have gotten a complete season out of it.

In short, it's a great show to kick off a Friday night.


The Saint

Vincent Price played him on the radio, and George Sanders and (more recently) Val Kilmer (!) played him on the big screen, but for my money, there's only one Simon Templar, and that's Roger Moore.

It's tempting, and fun, to look at this as Moore's tryout for James Bond, but this is a show that should be enjoyed on its own merits. Simon Templar, professional thief turned Good Samaritan (and occasional Avenging Angel) is a fascinating character, particularly in the black-and-white episodes, when he comes across as a good deal more ruthless than most TV heroes of the time. He seldom gets ambushed from behind, he rarely ever gets taken in by a femme fatale, and whenever the plot takes a twist you didn't see coming, he already seems to have been two or three steps ahead.

A word about that ruthless streak: looking back to the original source material for the series, the novels by Leslie Charteris, we see that Templar is often cast as someone trying to right a past wrong, and that he's not above killing those he refers to as the "ungodly" in his pursuit of justice. That side of The Saint is toned down a bit in the color episodes, when the show starts to take on a more Bondian feel, but it's definitely there in the early episodes.

Personally, I can't think of anyone other than Roger Moore in this role. He's smooth and suave, dryly humorous, confident in the extreme (if I could bottle a tenth of that confidence and use it myself, I'd be home free), and always surrounded by beautiful women. He'd be a charming dinner companion, and definitely a man to have on your side, but would you want to cross him in a dark alley when you'd been up to something you shouldn't have been? Not on your life.


The Untouchables

I'm convinced the writers on this series must have loved writing for Frank Nitti, the character played so well by Bruce Gordon. Whenever Nitti makes one of his occasional appearances as Eliot Ness' nemesis, Al Capone's enforcer while Scarface is in prison, he threatens to overshadow the entire cast. He always gets the best lines (impatiently watching Telly Savalas' scheme to transport illegal booze by running it through an underground piping system, Nitti snarles, "If there ain't booze coming out of them three holes, Pete's gonna put three holes in each of you."), and often has the air about him of a put-upon executive having to deal with underlings who just don't have the smarts to get the job done. It's a magnificent job of nibbling around the edges of the scenery while preserving a sense of real menace.

Of course, you have to have a protagonist for a show like this to work, and Robert Stack's redoubtable Ness is perfect. Yes, he's wooden in the role, but that's the way Ness should be played. As is typical of the era, you seldom see Ness at home; aside from the fact that he's married and has a child (shown in the two-part pilot), you never know anything about his personal life. He's mostly humorless, but has inspired great loyalty among his team of Untouchables because of his personal dedication and honesty.

Who am I kidding, though. The main appeal of The Untouchables, at least for the first couple of seasons, is the unbridled violence. Almost every episode ends in a huge shootout with the bad guys being filled full of lead before flamboyantly pirouetting to their deaths, often with their own machine guns still blaring. Virtually every car chase ends in an explosion, preferably crashing into a vat full of booze, which in turn produces another explosion. People were horrified at the time, which is one reason why it was such a big hit. Today, the violence looks tepid compared to what we've grown accustomed to, but for the time, it was sensational. Because of pressure from Congress and public interest groups, it gets toned down, much to the show's detriment.

The Untouchables won't receive any history awards, and it may not be included in any Golden Age of Television. It's just fun.


Route 66
I've mentioned before that this is the first series that I've ever dropped from our regular rotation. I've revived it in the last month, partly because we're still in the third (of four) seasons and already have the discs, and partly because thanks to Shout! Factory, we'll be able to watch the final season without having to buy them.

Route 66 was always preachy, thanks in no small part to Sterling Silliphant (who, nonetheless, could still uncork a doozy of a script on occasion), and this story of two young men (Martin Milner and George Maharis) driving a Corvette around the country in search of adventure and the meaning of life, provides what James Lileks would call an "inadvertent documentary" on America in the late '50s and early '60s. It's a time when America was still a nation that produced things, when ethnic neighborhoods still existed in most large cities, when someone could still make a living using their hands, when college degrees weren't used as a gatekeeper for even the most minor job. It's a wonderful look at the architecture of the time, at how America was still, for the most part, a regional nation full of dialects and quirks and everything we think of when we talk about a "melting pot."

Milner and Maharis, as Tod Stiles and Buz Murdoch, make for a great team of opposites. Tod's the idealist, the college educated young man with a penchant for thinking he can save the world one person at a time; Buz's education came from the streets, the school of hard knocks. He grew up in an orphanage, has seen the other side of life, knows that there aren't always easy answers. Of the two, he's the more likable, the one it's easier to identify with. When he leaves the series midway through the third season, he's replaced by Vietnam vet Linc Case, whose quiet, often thoughtful demeanor is too much like Tod's to provide the contrast required.

In fact, Tod really got on my nerves after awhile, which is why I wound up putting the show on hiatus for a couple of years. Every episode became a crusade of sorts, trying to change someone (especially a lovely female), increasingly settling things with his fists, falling in love too quickly, sticking around and becoming involved while you're shouting at the screen, "run, run away fast, these people are crazy!" I know they're looking for adventure, but sometimes enough is enough. And that's too bad, because I think Martin Milner was by far the most likable person in the cast; Tod just rubs me the wrong way. Linc's started to grow on me a bit since resuming the series; still, I won't deny that I'll be glad to see them reach the end of the road.

Waiting in the wings: Naked City (replacing The Saint), The Eleventh Hour (replacing The Untouchables)

Recently concluded: The Avengers


Next up: Thursday, if I remember to get around to it!

Sunday night TV: The FBI and The Rogues, two sides of the legal coin

Continuing a look at the Hadley Broadcasting Company's DVD viewing schedule,

Sunday Night Lineup:
The FBI
The Rogues

THE FBI'S STALWARTS: INSPECTOR ERSKINE AND SPECIAL AGENT RHODES

I
know I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating - the two greatest dramatic themes on television are Perry Mason and The FBI.  Each, in concert with its opening credits, summarizes its show perfectly: in Mason's case, Fred Steiner's music captures the single-combat warrior preparing to do battle on behalf of an unjustly accused defendant, while the jazzy, aggressive beat suggests the confident, determined man unafraid of taking chances - unafraid, really, of anything or anyone.  With The FBI, it's Bronislaw Kaper's majestic theme, set for the first two seasons against the symbols of Washington authority: the Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice, home of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  It makes you want to run right out of the house and sign up.

One of the things which I appreciate most about The FBI is its refusal to indulge in the private lives of its regulars; aside from the ill-advised addition of a daughter (Lynn Loring) for Inspector Erskine (engaged to Erskine's partner, no less), you rarely get a glimpse into the home life of its principals.  Who knows whether Erskine (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) lives in a house or an apartment?  What does Assistant Director Ward do in his spare time?  Do any of Erskine's partners (Stephen Brooks, William Reynolds) have any hobbies?  What are their favorite books?  What do they watch on TV in the evenings, aside from Quinn Martin programs?

Like Perry Mason, the story isn't about what happens outside the office, a blessed change from the soap opera-like obsession of today's programs and the quirkbot characteristics of their characters.  Instead, The FBI, like several series of the era, turns that focus on the guest stars.  It's one way to ensure a relatively constant supply of big-name stars, rather than the B-listers that populate most guest star rosters.  An early episode featuring Charles Bronson as a particularly nasty fugitive was a revelation; Bronson infused his character with a sensitivity and backstory that made him far more three-dimensional than the average criminal.  Not only was it a fine acting job and a well-written episode, it made the FBI's adversaries human rather than a foil for its regulars - something that today's series would do well to learn.

There's a crispness about the investigations in the show as well; without many of the technical shorthand that today's procedurals use, we're left to watch the Bureau's men engage in good, old-fashioned hard work, pounding the sidewalks and wearing out the shoe leather, following up on countless leads, most of which they already know will lead nowhere, seeing the frustration that accumulates as one suspect after another is crossed off the list, before hitting upon the one thread that leads to the next and eventually pulls the whole case together.  Again, it's a relief from the "and then a miracle happens" work of today's shows.

The casting is quality as well; Zimbalist has got to be J. Edgar Hoover's ideal FBI agent (no wonder the two of them were friends), and once Erskine's boss Ward (Phillip Abbot), gets off Lew's case (as he was for almost the entire first seasons), he becomes a supportive boss instead of a hard-ass.  I enjoyed Stephen Brooks as Erskine's first partner Jim Rhodes, but I also like William Reynolds, as Tom Colby.  And then, of course, there's the music!

But what I like the most about The FBI is that it's truly a throwback, not only in style but in tenor, back to a time when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was an organization of integrity and gravitas*, when the scene of an agent pulling out his credentials and solemnly saying, "FBI" put literal fear into the hearts of criminals.  Nobody, but nobody, wanted the FBI on their trail; look at how many times you hear them, even in movies not remotely connected with the series, talk about their fear of the FBI being called in the case. There was great dignity, even nobility, in the idea of being a part of the world's greatest police organization, which brings us back once again to the opening credits, and how The FBI portrayed an American justice that was, even if it never was.

*Yes, I know all about Hoover's excesses, and how the FBI had been used for political purposes, and all that.  This was an imaginary FBI, in a sense.  But it was the organization you wanted if you were dealing with kidnappers or extortionists or bank robbers or Communists.

***

THE FAMILY THAT STEALS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER: (FROM L) BOYER, YOUNG, NIVEN, COOTE; BELOW, COOPER 

It is a pity that The Rogues ran for only one season, 1964-65 on NBC, and a pity as well that it has never had a complete series commercial release.  But for those fortunate enough to have seen it during one of its runs on MeTV, or purchased it on the grey market, it is a delightfully offbeat, satisfying show - not as serious as Mission: Impossible, not as violent as The A Team, not as coy and self-important as Leverage.  What it is, mostly, is fun.

The tree stars of The Rogues, Charles Boyer, David Niven and Gig Young, play members of a most conniving family of con artists, the St. Clairs and the Flemings.  Gladys Cooper is the matriarch of the family, while Robert Coote plays Timmy, the loyal sidekick and master of disguise, who supports whichever lead happens to be appearing in the scam of the week.  From top to bottom, it's an outstanding cast.

The great thing about the show is that the family is often quite open about their goal: to bilk a rich businessman out of a significant amount of money.  The fact that the businessman in question is generally an asshole plays an important part in the plan, as it could be said they deserve what they've got coming to them, but sometimes they're just in it for the money.  On occasion the episode may start off with a smaller, self-contained scam which serves no purpose to the larger story other than to provide the family with seed money for the bigger sting they're about to pull.  Sometimes their scams go off without much trouble, but more often they're scrambling due to an unforeseen change in plans, and their adaptability is hilarious.  There are times when they don't end up with any money at all, due either to a narrow escape or a soft heart.

The writing is witty and literate, the plots significant without being wholly incomprehensible, the bad guys (Broderick Crawford, Telly Savalas and Darren McGavin to name three) are properly villainous, their innocent victims (either employees, family members, or those who've come out on the short end of the stick) satisfyingly innocent.

But there's no question that the star of The Rogues is, well, the stars.  Although it was not uncommon for two, or even all three, to appear in the same episode, one of them always takes the lead.  Boyer, as Marcel St. Clair, is a delight, his broad characterization often approaching laugh-out-loud funny, and his ladies' man approach being the perfect epitome of a Frenchman.  And yet, it is most unwise to take Marcel lightly; not only is he often the shrewd mastermind of the sting, but behind that light exterior there's an edge to his character (a former member of the underground) that can get quite hard when it comes out into the open.  This is a man, we are reminded, who could get quite dangerous when called on, even if it never happens in the show.

On the other hand, Niven's Alec Fleming is what you'd expect from the suave British actor: confident, let projecting an air of vulnerability; urbane, but with a twinkle in his eye.  Owing to his busy schedule with movies, Alec appears less frequently than the others, often appearing in a single scene, or on the other end of a telephone conversation.  Needless to say, his infrequent appearances are always highlights.

And then there's Young as Tony Fleming, the American cousin: a ladies man himself, and a born con man.  He's often wonderfully over-the top in his portrayals, able to present himself as anything from a wealthy industrialist to a down-on-his-luck bum.  He can even play a con man as cover for being a con man - how many people can pull that off?  Throw in Coote and Cooper, who are in virtually every episode (and were rewarded for their work with Emmy nominations for supporting actor and actress) and you've got a complete, flawless cast.

I called The Rogues fun, but the other word I'd use to describe it is "charming."  And they kind of go together, the two words, don't they?  "Charming rogue"?  That describes the Flemings and the St. Clairs to a T.  Gig Young once said in an interview that there were "a lot of people who liked The Rogues, and a lot of people who didn't."  Maybe they didn't want to see crooks hailed as good guys.  That's all I can think of, because there's no other reason you shouldn't be a fan of the con artists on the side of the Angels.

Mannix - the detective who put his best fist forward

SURE HE COULD USE HIS FISTS, BUT JOE MANNIX WAS PRETTY GOOD WITH A GUN, TOO

My first memories of watching Mannix concern the sequence shown during the opening credits.  Specifically, there are two images that caught my attention: a race car flying off the track and exploding, and a fist.  The exploding race car (an early '60s Ferrari) was easy enough to explain (although I was always disappointed that the racing portion of the episode was minimal), but what about that fist?  Well, anyone who's seen more than one episode of Mannix will understand.

Mannix, which ran on CBS from 1967 to 1975, was a series that always seemed to have one foot in the past and the other in the future.  For its first season, private detective Joe Mannix (the wonderful Mike Connors) worked for a corporate agency named Intertect, where his boss Lew Wickersham (Joe Campanella), a man who saw the future of detective work based in computers, massive research, and probability matrices, served the traditional role - usually performed by a police detective frienemy - of "being the man Mannix gives a headache to".  With the corporate way cramping his style, Mannix goes out on his own for the second season, where his secretary Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher), one of the first black actresses to play a prominent regular role on a drama series.  These were both forward-looking aspects of a series that, as Mike Connors himself once admitted, was a throwback to the noir detectives of the '40s, bearing little resemblance to the real world of the modern-day gumshoe.

Mannix was another in a long line of series that, at one time or another, bore the title "most violent program on television."  It was a title that the series earned; I can't remember, off the top of my head, an episode in which Joe didn't engage in at least one or two fist-fights with an adversary.  Often, at least in the first fight, Mannix would absorb an unusual amount of punishment, particularly for a good guy; he was always being clobbered from behind, belted in the stomach, bushwhacked in an alley, used as human target practice - you name it.  Sometimes he'd suffer more than one of these indignities, and other times he'd get them more than once.  No matter; by the time the episode wrapped up, you could be certain Joe's adversary would get paid back double.  At least.

Bob and Ray did a parody of Mannix called "Blimmix," in which the protagonist was invariably beaten to a pulp by a thug.  And in other hands the series might have been hard to take, were it not for creator Bruce Geller (who was also responsible for Mission: Impossible), stars Connors and Fisher, and a series of intelligently written scripts.*  That allowed the series to move beyond cliche and presented us with a three-dimensional protagonist; one who really did care about his clients, didn't let cynicism rule his life, and was capable of forming warm, genuine relationships with people both inside and outside of work.  Joe Mannix wasn't a misogynist, a man who drank to forget, a shady operator, a wisecracking smartass.  He was a man who liked what he did, believed it had some worth, and got a sense of satisfaction out of helping people.  He also showed you could have a close platonic friendship with a member of the opposite sex (Peggy in particular, though there were others), without hopping in the sack.  JoAnn Paul's And Now, Back to Mannix provides a great overview of the many qualities that made Mannix different from the run-of-the-mill detective drama/police procedural.

*We shouldn't forget about Joe Campanella; though he appeared only in the first season, he was a great foil for Mannix; long-suffering, frustrated, always wondering why Mannix couldn't just follow the rules like everyone else.  In the hands of a lesser actor, Wickersham would have come across as a pill, but thanks to Campanella it was easy to sense the intelligence and warmth behind the blustery facade.

But for all that, there's one very good reason Mannix shows up on my Saturday-night lineup: it's a good, fun program.  Yes, I like seeing Joe beat the crap out of the bad guy.  Yes, it's satisfying when the killer gets hauled away from the cops (even if it's not as satisfying as seeing him get the crap beaten out of him).  The stories are interesting at least and compelling at best.  And, in case it hasn't been mentioned already, Mike Connors provides the perfect combination of hard, two-fisted action and intelligent, compassionate understanding, without becoming a cartoon caricature in either.

It worked with the viewers: Mannix was a consistently solid performer in the ratings, won several awards during its run, and left the airwaves after eight seasons and 194 episodes only because of a dispute over the re-airing of episodes in a late-night timeslot.  Next to The Rockford Files, it was probably the most loved, most well-remembered PI shows of the era.  We could use something like it on TV again today.

Alas, the one thing that keeps me from watching Mannix every Saturday night is that the season sets aren't cheap, and they don't come up for sale very often.  (Another reason why eBay is a couch potato's best friend.)  But whenever the disposable income goes up, another season set goes in the collection.  And it's an investment well worth it.

So to recap, here's the summary of the Hadley network's Saturday night lineup:

Mannix
Perry Mason
Mission: Impossible
Mystery Science Theater 3000

Next time: we begin Sunday's lineup with the most heroic G-man ever to roam the television airwaves.

MST3K: how talking back became an art form

Last month I started a look at the classic TV shows that make up my weekly viewing habits. Today, we continue our look at the Hadley household's Saturday night with a show that made it from a local Minneapolis-St. Paul TV station to the big time - or at least basic cable.  

I was still living in Minneapolis back in November 1988, and because my grandmother didn't have cable TV, I wasn't able to watch the Thanksgiving night Texas-Texas A&M game on ESPN.*  Left to my own devices with the available over-the-air stations, I settled on Channel 23, one of the local independents.  It probably didn't mean as much to me then as it does now, but the fact that I'm able to recount the details means it must have made some impression.

*I did record it though, and got to see it when I got home.  A&M beat Texas 28-24, and I was happy.  Now that I live in Texas, I still root for A&M.

KTMA was having a science fiction marathon that Thanksgiving, and at 6pm they premiered a double-feature of supermarionation movies under the umbrella of a new series they called Mystery Science Theater 3000, hosted by a local comedian named Joel Hodgson*.  I figured, what the heck, why not?

*A friend of mine saw him doing standup in a local comedy club, and was invited to come up on stage and battle him in a game of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.  He lost to Hodgson, several times, after which Hodgson revealed he'd nailed the head of his robot down so it couldn't pop up.  Gotta love a guy like that.

The premise was pretty simple - science fiction movies with commentary provided by a guy and two robots, who appeared as silhouettes on the bottom of the screen.  The comments were snarky (although that's not what we called them back then), and laced with pop culture references.  I got it, liked it - and then I don't think I ever watched another episode.  Four months or so later I moved to Maine, where of course there was no KTMA, and pretty much forgot all about it.

A few months after that I read that Comedy Central was adding Mystery Science Theater 3000 to their lineup.  "Hey," I thought (or words to that effect), "I remember that show.  They made the big time - great!"  I probably started watching it after it debuted, showed it to my wife, explained how I'd first seen the show back in Minneapolis.  This time I kept watching it.

It was a funny show then, it's a funny show now.  We loved the jokes - they appealed to the absurd sense of humor we both have, and we even got most of the more obscure, foreign film-type references.*  There was the time Joel tried to play Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" on electric bagpipes made out of a vacuum cleaner, for example.  Or how any movie with Lloyd Bridges was laced with Sea Hunt jokes, while Peter Graves got the Biography treatment.  The dumber the humor, the better we liked it.  And let's face it, those movies were pretty bad.  No matter how much Joel and the 'Bots trashed them, they deserved it.

*But then, we like Dennis Miller too, so what do you expect?

One of the biggest appeals of the series was how "everyman" it was, creating a television show out of something that almost all of us do: talk back to the screen.  Of course, in the hands of these guys, riffing on bad movies became an art form.  But as we watched the show, we discovered something important: you didn't have to be well-educated to riff, you didn't have to have seen every Ingemar Bergman movie ever seen (although it helped), you didn't need to be a Hollywood star or even a television writer to do it.  Anyone could do it, and if you watched enough of MST3K, you could even hold your own with them.  Another thing we discovered: some people appreciated our talking during a movie - while others didn't.  The ones who did continue to be our friends.*

*I'll admit I can be somewhat irritating when I get on a roll, especially if it's during a show that my wife likes but I think is stupid.  Despite that, sometimes she can't help but laugh at something I say.  However, the fact that I know when I've pushed it far enough and it's time for me to leave the room is part of the reason we've been married 22 years.

Adam West, host of Turkey Day '94

The highlight of the year was the Turkey Day marathon, 24 hours of MST3K (as it had come to be called), starting at 11pm CT on Wednesday night and running all through Thanksgiving day and evening.  I didn't give up parades and football completely, but we were usually good for four or five episodes off and on throughout the day.  It really was addictive - the more you saw, the more you wanted to see.  I think it was Turkey Day, particularly the year when Adam West did the bumpers leading into and out of each episode, that sealed MST3K as one of my favorites.  I even survived the traumatic change from Joel to Michael J. Nelson as host - they were different, but both funny.  It was one of the few shows I've watched that really was laugh-out-loud funny.*

*My personal favorite: "It Conquered the World," with Peter Graves and Lee Van Cleef.  The movie actually holds up, which is more than you can say for most of them, but the commentary is priceless.  Check it out, particularly the period from the end of the movie through the closing credits.


When the show finally left the air quite a few years ago, it became one of those nostalgia things, fondly remembered but secure as a part of the past.  Then, a couple of years ago, it came back - kind of.  Shout!, which did the MST3K DVDs, restarted the Turkey Day tradition as a mini-marathon running on Shout!'s YouTube channel, with best-of (or worst-of) episodes from the show's original run.  Suddenly, it was back as part of our lives.  Then, last year, they included commercials for a coming theatrical event for RiffTrax, a live sort-of MST3K featuring Nelson and two of the voices from the show (but no robots, alas) riffing on a perfectly dreadful movie, Santa Claus.  It was a wonderful, hilarious evening.  And from that point on, MST3K was back as part of my TV lineup.

If you're a fan of the show, you know that a big part of its early days was the propensity of viewers to tape the show and then circulate the tapes to their friends - the high-tech version of word-of-mouth.  One of the by-products of that is that most of the episodes are on YouTube, many of them in pretty good shape considering the source.  Thanks to the wonders of Google Cast, it's now easier than ever to stream your laptop on to your television*, and with that a new Saturday night tradition, same as the old Saturday night tradition, was born.

It's the nightcap to our Saturday night viewing most weeks, and, as was the case last week when we saw an episode we hadn't seen before - "War of the Colossal Beast," a sequel to "The Amazing Colossal Man," it's a particular treat.  It's also a great way to go to bed with a chuckle, which, considering Sunday will always be "the day before we have to go back to work," is the very best we can hope for.

Next time: the detective who took a licking and kept on ticking - or sleuthing, as the case may be.

The brilliantly clever, ethically dubious world of Mission: Impossible

A couple of years ago I took on the task of listing my ten favorite shows of all time.  It proved a popular feature, so I've decided that this summer's project should be a look at the shows that make up my weekly viewing habits.  It's not exactly like it's the full broadcast schedule of the Hadley Television Network, but it's a pretty fair representation of what our household watches.  Note that not all of the Top Ten shows are represented in the current schedule, and many of the shows that are didn't appear in the Top Ten.  It just goes to show there are a lot of fun programs out there; not every night has to be filled with Golden Age programming.  

As each issue of TV Guide opened with Saturday, so we'll also start our night-by-night look with the best night of the week, and one of the best shows of its era. 

Has there ever been a show cleverer, with more intricate moving parts, than Mission: Impossible?  I don’t see much current television so I can’t say if any of the newer shows top it, but I certainly can’t think of anything since its debut that can compare to it.  Each week the IMF team would, on short notice, assemble a plan that required split-second timing, perfect execution, quick thinking in case something went wrong, and a willingness to put one’s life on the line for the success of the mission.  Oh, and it also depended on people reacting in the way it was anticipated they’d react, which meant an incredible amount of background information on the main participants in the mission.

All this was done with a team that put the mission before all else.  There were no soap opera elements to Mission: Impossible, no secondary stories to compete with the main thread.  The nearest you got to a glimpse of anyone’s personal life was the obligatory shot of Jim Phelps’ apartment* at the beginning of each episode, when the team got together to go over details of the mission.  Oh, there were hints that Jim and Rollin were personal friends, for example, but if the storyline didn’t advance the plot, forget about it.  No quirkbots needed, no room for padded stories.  Even the stars were replicable; only two of them made it through the entire series, and none of them were in every single episode.  No wonder I’m a fan.

*Or Dan Briggs, in the first season.

In the years since, the “sting” element of M:I has often been copied, but never matched.  Think of Leverage, for example.  It shared many elements of the intricate M:I plot, but there were significant differences as well, most notably the intrusive personal angle that would have been more at home in a serialized daytime drama.  As well, there were always little elements of the plot that were held back from viewers until they were sprung at an appropriate time, making them seem more like Saturday cliffhangers where you’re left thinking to yourself, “Hey, where did Commando Cody get that parachute from?  I didn’t see that when the plane crashed last week!”*  There were also similarities to be found in shows such as The A-Team, but they (rightfully) didn’t take themselves seriously enough to be real competition.

*Speaking of cliffhangers, Leverage had the annoying habit, which so many shows have nowadays, of ending the season with a faux cliffhanger, one that tries to convince us is full of suspense while we know damn well that Timothy Hutton isn’t going to be killed off when he just signed a contract for another year.  M:I handles this much better; we aren't supposed to believe the cliffhanger before the commercial is a “will they escape or not” moment – in fact, what appears to be a threat often turns out to be a critical part of the plan.

No, when it comes to developing a story that was all but unbelievable – except for the fact that someone actually had thought it up – , nothing can compare to Mission: Impossible.  It’s too bad that so many people know the title now through those awful Tom Cruise movies.  Well, actually, maybe they aren’t that bad, as long as you don’t try to pretend that it’s really Mission: Impossible.  Just leave that name off and go by the subtitle, and you’re probably all right.

Watching them on DVD over the last couple of years, I’ve come to an even greater appreciation of the acting and writing talent involved in the series*, which is why it will always remain one of my favorites.  There’s something else though, something I hadn’t noticed during the initial viewing.  Had it not been for my reading of Steven Stark’s Glued to the Set, I might not have thought about it at all.  On the other hand, given how American foreign policy has gone the last few years, I might have been all over it right away.

*In particular, Martin Landeau as Rollin Hand.  He has a ruthless edge to him that makes him the man I'd least want to run into in a dark alley - somewhat surprising, given his "regular" occupation as an illusionist.  When he and his then-wife Barbara Bain (Cinnamon Carter) left M:I, something vital left with them.

Often, IMF missions are concerned with events of great importance to national security.  Just this last weekend, I saw an episode where the team has 48 hours to find out the location of nuclear missiles aimed at the United States.  Otherwise, boom. If that’s not acting in the national interest, I don’t know what is.  But then there’s the first season episode in which they're charged with preventing the leader of a hostile government from rigging an election to stay in power.  And it’s this kind of episode that troubles me, because there is no overriding national security interest evident here.  Oh, I suppose the continued existence of this hostile government could result in one, but that’s hardly justification for a preemptive act against a sovereign foreign country, a direct intervention in their internal affairs in order to influence the outcome of an election – a rigged one, yes, but nevertheless one that is clearly a domestic issue.  In other words, something the United States has no business getting involved in.

That’s one example, but there are others, where the IMF is clearly overstepping what I would consider the appropriate bounds of American foreign policy.  A terrific episode from a few weeks ago involved making sure that the right man was chosen as security chief of another hostile government.  This involved discrediting his two opponents through means that were, at the very least, deceptive: everything from playing mind games to temporarily drugging one of them.  It makes for terrific television, but the morality of such action is dubious at best.

At times such as these, I tend to revert to the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas on patriotism.  Aquinas felt that patriotism, i.e. love of one’s country, when rightly ordered, was one of the cardinal virtues.  It’s why treason is such an act of treachery.  It’s also, though, why no citizen is bound to obey the unjust dictates of an unjust government – because love of homeland implies love of a particular code that represents the nation, one that an unjust law is betraying.*  However, paramount in Aquinas’ teaching is that the love which others have for their country must be respected as well.  That means a couple of things; for example, in expecting an immigrant to conform to the cultural norms of their new country, one shouldn’t seek to have them disregard everything from their own cultural heritage.  Second, it gives us guidelines as to how we should look at intervention in foreign affairs.  To meddle in such sovereign domestic situations, there ought to be an overriding national security question involved.  That isn’t always the case in Mission: Impossible, and it’s something to which I’ve become increasingly sensitive over the years.

*Not to mention God’s laws, to which, as Aquinas points out, every nation is bound as well.

This blog will not self-destruct in five seconds.

As always, we have to put M:I in context when we talk about something like this.  The show was created and came of age during the Vietnam War, a time of very muscular American foreign policy, with the Cold War demanding an active American involvement in the internal affairs of other nations, usually nations hostile to the United States.  The ends of that foreign policy often justified the means, which meant the IMF frequently was involved in setting up foreign officials to appear as if they were betraying their own country, involved in some nefarious act, or otherwise untrustworthy – even if they were simply doing their job, even if their suspicions were correct.  I think it’s that which bothers me the most, the idea that the ruthless security chief might be absolutely correct in his diagnosis of the situation, but will be set up by the team in such a way that he gets shot for his troubles even though he’s an “innocent” party, so to speak.  (Fortunately, none of the enemy agents are “innocent” enough to warrant our feeling sorry for them; they deserve whatever happens to them, just because they’re on the wrong side.)  And while they never applied the kind of torture that we’ve seen in real life over the past few years, the mind games they’ve inflicted on some people can certainly push the envelope.

As the war became more and more problematic at home, the muscular foreign policy became more of a liability, so it’s no surprise that later M:I plots would turn inward, toward such domestic fare as the fight against organized crime.  Whether or not such stories were as exciting, they were less controversial, which made all the difference.*

*One other type of plot I haven’t discussed much here is the one involving an tyrannical dictator, one who wasn’t freely elected and spends much of his time looting the national treasury and oppressing his people.  I’m a little more lenient in these cases; it’s much harder to claim the involvement of a sovereign national government, and often the mission itself involves something like tricking the despot out of the loot he was earmarking for the purchase of weapons which would then be used to crush the legal opposition.  It’s one thing to manipulate an entire country; scamming a tinhorn bully seems just a little more justified.

I’ve written before about my concerns regarding the ability of television series to influence public opinion through the actions of the regular cast.  When viewers see the stars of shows such as NCIS breaching an individual’s privacy with impunity, they learn to accept it as long as the suspect is guilty.  After all, we’re assured, the government only does this to guilty people, so if you’re innocent you have nothing to worry about.  Even today, I think there’s that tendency with Mission: Impossible, to want to excuse some of the more dubious missions because those are the East Germans or the Soviets or the Cubans we’re dealing with, and the Commies deserve whatever they get.  It doesn’t get in the way of my immense pleasure watching the show, but it does make me think, and sometimes the subsequent discussions with my wife about whether or not a mission is justified can be as entertaining as the program itself.

So when it comes to judging those iffy moments in Mission: Impossible, it’s best to remember that the show is a product of the Cold War, and to let that become food for thought.   Under no circumstances should it be allowed to interfere with the enjoyment of one of the best shows of its type – for that matter, one of the most enjoyable shows that TV had to offer in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.  Its presence on my Saturday night lineup should come as no surprise. TV

Next time:  a show that proved talking back to the television could be not only fun but profitable!