Around the dial

Let's get back to normal here and start off the week right. Since we could all use a good laugh, John at Cult TV Blog  has the answer: the Monty Python Science Fiction Sketch. I think it marks the first time I ever heard the word "blancmange," and life hasn't been the same since.

At Comfort TV, David continues his series on "Still Stuck in the 1970s,"which is as good a catalog as you're going to find explaining why so many of us of a certain age despair at what our culture has been. Be sure to go back and read part one here. Extremely thoughtful.

Jodie is back celebrating Dave Garroway's birthday, as well as marking the anniversary of Garroway at Large, and what better way to celebrate than with a throwback to Dave's radio DJ days, a series of records called "Dave Garroway’s 11:60 Club Favorites."

It's the return of Love That Bob at The Horn Section, and this week Hal is reviewing the 1955 episode "It's Later Than You Think." It's the third-ever episode of the show, so fans might recognize a few changes from what they're used to, and it's by all definitions a classic.

The latest star to enter the obituary roll for 2026 is the great Sam Neill, and not surprisingly we've got a pair of tributes to him, beginning at Classic Film and TV Corner, and continuing at A Shroud of Thoughts. At the latter, Terence also commemorates Hal Williams, Officer Smitty on Sanford and Son as well as many other TV roles.

Who knew that Sherlock Holmes was so popular in Russia? Well, now you do. At Cult TV Lounge, we read of The Treasures of Agra, one of a series of Holmes TV movies made between 1979 and 1986 that became quite the thing over there. Fortunately for all of us, the Russian DVD set includes English subtitles!

At Mavis Movie Madness, Paul takes a look at the first season of Bronco, which true classic television fans will remember as having started out as a "replacement" for Cheyenne when Clint Walker, worn out by the gruling schedule, walked off. It may not be as well remembered, but it holds its own.

And this week's A-Team episode at The View from the Junkyard asks the question, "Where is the Monster When You Need Him," a question which I've asked myself many times through my life. It's a show-within-a-show episode, among other things, and asd Roger mentions, it makes a point of who the real monsters are. TV

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Around the dial

t Cult TV Blog, John continues his "Tony Wright Season " by looking at two episodes of the 1954 Sherlock Holmes series, starring Ronald Howard as Holmes and Howard Marion-Crawford as Watson. It's a fun series, and the two episodes in which Wright appears are no exception.

David is up to Wednesdays in 1977 in his review of 1970s primetime television at Comfort TV. It's another dominant night for ABC, with a new hit in Eight is Enough and a returning one in Charlie's Angels; let's see what the other networks have to offer in competition.

Television presenter Robert Symes was a well-known personality on the BBC when he hosted The Model World of Robert Symes, a series dealing with his love of various types of models, which he would build and operate. Read all about it this week at Silver Scenes. 

If you watched any kind of variety show in the Sixties and Seventies, you probably saw Neil Sedaka performing at some point. Sedaka died last week at the age of 86, and Terence looks back on his legendary career at A Shroud of Thoughts. 

"The Island" is the latest episode of The A-Team to come Roger's way at The View from the Junkyard, and Face is the face of this episode, in which our heroes battle the bad guys, a drug gang trying to control a, you guessed it, island.

I've written before about Clellan Card, who played Axel, the beloved kids' show host of Twin Cities television, and Minnesota KidVid continues its look at his work, concentrating on the period 1953 to 1960. They don't make 'em like Axel anymore!

At Cult TV Lounge, it's a look at the 1999-2002 series The Lost World, based on the sci-fi adventure novel of the same name by the man responsible for the stories in the series that kicked off this trip around the dial: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A great way to wrap up the week! TV

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What I've been watching: June, 2025

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows I’ve Added:
Adventures in Paradise New York: A Documentary Film Sherlock Holmes	Danger Man

If it seems a little lame to be writing about a series I'm watching for the second time, then I'm afraid I'll have to plead guilty. Thursday evenings have been problematic for a while, between finishing work on the book (Darkness in Primetime, for those of you scoring at home, or even if you're just watching) and keeping up with this here blog. What makes them more challenging is that the Friday "Around the Dial" feature can't really be finished until Thursday, to make sure I include as many blogs as possible. Additionally, if I've fallen behind on my weekend TV Guide essay, Thursday evening becomes an advantageous time to catch up. Therefore, it had become a kind of "To Be Announced" evening, one in which I might be viewing, or I might be typing. What better way to fill in a tentative gap than with a rerun of a beloved series that won't suffer if I happen to miss a week here and there?

This all brings us to Jeremy Brett's definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the succession of adventures bearing the Holmes name. I won't take a lot of time to recap, because I've written about the show before, but suffice it to say that Brett, who played Holmes from 1984-94 is everything you'd want Holmes to be: quirky, quick-witted, self-assured, occasionally tortured, frequently arrogant, and virtually always right. He's also surprisingly nimble, of body as well as mind, and I bring that up because it points out how important the physical portrayal of Holmes can be. That physicality projects not only his determination, but the rapidity of his mind; and his body language establishes that, for the criminal, he truly is a dangerous man.

Holmes is aided in his sleuthing by his loyal comrade, Dr. Watson, played by David Burke in the first season and Edward Hardwicke in subsequent seasons. This is a Watson who is very smart indeed, a far cry from the bumbling Watson we see in Nigel Bruce's portrayal; he's not at the level of Holmes, of course, but he's learned well from his compatriot, and each episode contains a bit in which Watson demonstrates how he's picked up on the art of observation, often listing the very same clues that Holmes has seen. The difference, of course, is that Watson frequently fails to come to the same conclusion—that is, the correct conclusion—as Holmes, and the cutting retort from Holmes can sometimes be painful, to us as well as to the good doctor, who is the most loyal of friends. Holmes is always quick to temper his remarks, though, and there's no doubt that when he compliments Watson, it is no mere flattery. The chemistry between Brett and both of his Watsons is excellent; it makes them a truly compatible, and formidable, team. Throw in literate, even elegant, scripts (many by John Hawkesworth) and period details that create a perfect atmosphere, and you've got just the thing for those nights when you're looking for a break. Oh, and did I mention that since plugging the Holmes repeats into the schedule, I haven't had to spend even one evening working on the blog? No mere coincidence, I suspect.

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The second half of Thursday night's dynamic duo—and, if I'm being honest, the program most likely to get preempted if I do have work to catch up on—is Adventures in Paradise, or if we're going to be precise about it, James A. Michener's Adventures in Paradise, which ran on ABC for three seasons and 91 episodes between 1959 and 1962. The show has the look and feel of a Warner Bros. production, with an exotic location, and impressive list of guest stars, and a hunky hero who winds up being involved in solving mysteries. Not all the time, perhaps, but more often than you or I are probably called upon. (The last mystery I had to solve was tracking down where I'd left my missing brain.) 

It's not a WB show, however, but one from 20th Century Fox, and the man responsible for it as co-executive producer was Dominick Dunne, who, prior to reinventing himself as a true crime author and raconteur par excellence, was a television executive looking to cast the lead in his new series. As Dunne tells it, the studio had been screen-testing "all the best-looking young actors in Hollywood" for the part, and Ron Ely had the inside track. Then, along came Gardner McKay:

One day in a coffee shop, I saw, sitting at a nearby table in a languid pose, reading a book of poetry, a startlingly handsome young man with attitude, whom I later described to Martin Manulis, the head of television at Fox, as "a little Gary Cooper, a little Cary Grant, a little Ty Power and a lot of Errol Flynn." He was at the time, in the parlance of the town, nobody, absolutely nobody, but his attitude declared that he was somebody. I dropped my Fox business card on his table and said, "If you’re interested in discussing a television series, call me." He did, and we tested him. Gardner’s test was certainly not among the top three or four in the acting department, but as the production staff sat in the projection room, we’d keep going back to it, and one of us would say, "This guy’s got something." Finally, we gave him the part. 

That's exactly it, I think; it fits my perception of the series perfectly. Watching it, you come away with two things: McKay's not a great actor, by any stretch; and there's something about him, a presence that makes you certain of two qualities that all television heroes have to have: everything's going to turn out right in the end, and the villain of the piece is going to be sorry he tangled with him. He also comes across as a very interesting person—McKay, I mean, not the character he plays, Captain Adam Troy, although Troy is a pleasant-enough character. And indeed McKay was an interesting man: he wrote books and plays, was a newspaper drama critic, and taught a writing class. He didn't really like acting, although, as Dunne says, he liked being a star, and he was good at it.

The point is that, while Adventures in Paradise is not great television, it is fun television, another reason I make the comparison to the WB detective shows. Each week Captain Troy and his schooner Tiki III, sailing the South Pacific "looking for passengers and adventure" and finding it; else, where would the series be? I don't know if your life is going to be dramatically enhanced by watching the episodes available on YouTube, and you're not going to be taxed if you do something else while you're watching it, but I've never found it less than enjoyable, and sometimes you just aren't in the mood for hate-watching a series.

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In 1999, PBS premiered a documentary series called New York, which was about the history of the city so nice they named it twice. It was directed and co-written by Ric Burns (brother of Ken), and at the time of its premiere, it was far behind schedule and was shaping up to last far longer than its scheduled 10-hour duration. Finally, the decision was made to release the first five episodes (ten hours in all), covering the years 1609-1931, on five consecutive nights in November 1999; the concluding episode (which quickly ballooned to two episodes) would air at a later date. 

As fate would have it, those two episodes, dealing with the city from the Great Depression to the present, aired on September 30 and October 1, 2001: 19 days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. The final episode was quickly edited to include a reference to the terrorist attack, and then, in September, 2003, came yet another episode, a three-hour special that focused solely on the Twin Towers and their own history. In all, the series ran for eight episodes and 17½ hours. 

Watching it again for the first time since its original run, I'm struck by several things. First is how overwhelmingly unlikeable the city is, and how exaggerated in importance it is. Note that I said "importance" there, not "influence," because there's no question that New York City pulled the strings in this country for many years, for good and ill. What hits you, though, is how much ill there is to it: not only an obsession with democracy and diversity that even the series can't convince you has been successful; but the sheer arrogance of it all, the idea that the rest of the country really is "flyover" territory, good only for providing tourist dollars. (And wouldn't it be great if one could get the dollars without having to deal with the tourists!) For decades, people have looked at New York as not really being a part of the United States at all, but something separate, strange, alien. New York serves to reinforce that attitude two, three, four times over. When you see the famous "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline from the 1970s, you want to stand up and cheer.

And yet.

New York: A Documentary Film is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating, compelling documentary series I've ever seen. It comes by that honestly, with a cast of colorful characters that rivals any fictional series television ever came up with, from Al Smith to Fiorello La Guardia to Robert Moses; an architectural history that spans Central Park, the Empire State Building, and the aforementioned World Trade Center; a history that does seem to encompass the whole of American history; a remarkable place, all in all, with something that other places just seem to lack. Even the hatred one might have for the city has to acknowledge this.

And the series, for my money, is the equal of anything brother Ken ever produced. David Ogden Stiers's overall narration is superb, neither cloyingly emotional nor deadly dull; the voice talent, provided by well-known actors and personalities reading letters, newspaper articles, and speeches, is completely appropriate, letting the written words speak for themselves; the commentary, from noted historians and public figures, is both knowledgeable and articulate, and even if you disagree with what they're saying, you can't stop listening to them. The combination of paintings, still photographs, and video (some of it quite remarkable) is riveting, and the score, primarily that composed by Brian Keane, is heart-rendingly evocative.

The final three episodes, which cover New York's fall into disrepair and disgrace, its recovery and rejuvenation, and the horror and heartbreak of September 11, are the most outstanding parts of this series, but without the previous five episodes to set the stage, they wouldn't be nearly as good, which is one reason why the entire 17½ hours need to be consumed. And at the end—or is it? Another two episodes have, for some time, been said to be in the works, bringing the series up to date—a viewer comes away from it exhausted and exhilarated, inspired and disgusted, and understanding that great cities, like great people, can inspire both love and hatred at the same time. And why shouldn't that be the case? After all, a city remains, ultimately, a collection of people: good and bad, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, admirable and dissolute. In the case of New York, it just seems to have more of all of it than anyplace else. And perhaps that's just the way they'd have it. TV  

Around the dial

During its nine-year run, The Facts of Life aired five Christmas episodes, and this week at Comfort TV, David ranks those five episodes, from worst to first. There's still time to add them to your pre-Christmas viewing list!

At Garroway at Large, Jodie looks back at the past year, which included the publication of Peace, and what's ahead for the future. There's also a video of Dave with Arlene Francis and Betty White; as Jodie says, what better way to get ready for Christmas?

John visits the wonderful world of Sherlock Holmes at Cult TV Blog, with the 1968 episode "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Watson. I quite enjoy Cushing's Holmes, and John's review helps explain why. As a bonus, John includes a recipe for Christmas pudding, and a couple of podcast recommendations!

Remembebr how, at Drunk TV, Paul had just received the complete box set of Bonanza? Well, this week, he's back with a look at the show's excellent first season, which sets the stage for the following 13 seasons. This set is a textbook example of how a complete series collection ought to be done.

Let's keep with the Western motif for a moment, as Television's New Frontier: the 1960s looks at the 1962 episodes of Cheyenne. It's the seventh and final season for television's first hour-long drama with recurring characters, and while it doesn't have a final episode per se, the season seems to serve as a fitting end to the popular series.

It's the 40th anniversary of the classic A Christmas Story, which we watched a couple of nights ago, and at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence celebrates the anniversary with some great background information that's sure to increase your appreciation for the film. 

Can you imagine the original Star Trek without James T. Kirk? That's the question Mike asks at The View from the Junkyard, and he answers it with the animated episode "The Slaver Weapon," an outstanding and thought-provoking story written by Larry Niven, one of the genre's greats. 

Variety looks at the 100 greatest TV shows of all time, and before I've even looked at it, I can tell you two things: 1) it will be controversial, and 2) it will be weighted toward more contemporary programs. Nonetheless, it's here if you're interested!

I'll be back tomorrow with the TV Guide Christmas issue from—well, stick around and see what year we visit this time. However, for those of you who may be offline or traveling on this holiday weekend, let me take the opportunity to wish you all a safe and blessed Christmas, and to end with links to a couple of beloved local favorites from my youth: "Walking in My Winter Underwear" from Lunch with Casey, and "The Night Before Christmas" from Axel's Treehouse. I don't think you need to be from the Twin Cities to enjoy these! TV  

This week in TV Guide: December 18, 1954

As I've said many times before (many, many times), these Christmas editions of TV Guide are among my favorites. Next week we'll be looking at  Christmas Day 1971, while this week takes us right up to the Eve of the big day—you can just feel the excitement build! I'll have more about the Christmas Eve programs in Monday's retro TV listing, but until then we've got plenty to look at:

Saturday leads off with the much-loved special The Spirit of Christmas (5:00 p.m, WNBQ), with the Mabel Beaton marionettes. It consists of two stories: an interpretation of "The Night Before Christmas," and a devout rendition of "The Nativity." It was originally broadcast in Philadelphia and spread throughout the country, sponsored without commercial interruption by local telephone companies (in this case, brought to you "With the Holiday Best Wishes of Illinois Bell Telephone Company.") or shown in schools (before Christmas was made persona non grata in the public education system). Alexander Scourby brings his distinguished voice as host, and narrates "The Night Before Christmas." The Spirit of Christmas is fondly remembered by several generations who grew up with this as part of their annual Christmas viewing; as you'll find with many of this week's shows, it's available on DVD, and can be seen on YouTube. 

Saturday continues with Oldsmobile's December Showcase presentation of Victor Herbert's perennial holiday favorite, the operetta "Babes in Toyland" (8:00 p.m. CT, NBC), using the framing device of a little girl, lost in a department store, being entertained by a story-telling Santa while waiting for her mother to find her. Dave Garroway is our Santa, Dennis Day is Tommy Tucker, the hero of the original Herbert story, Wally Cox is Grumio, the bumbling assistant toymaker, and Jack E. Leonard is the evil Silas Barnaby. The show survives in a B&W kinescope, but it was originally broadcast in brilliant color. The evening ends with The Cheaters (12;05 a.m., WBBM) a screwball comedy (though it's listed in the guide as a drama) that sounds like a Yuletide knockoff of the far more successful My Man Godfrey with Joseph Schildkraut in the William Powell role. It was a Christmas standard for many years, having fallen into the public domain.

Sunday afternoon's cultural ghetto presents a holiday alternative to the NFL on DuMont (Cleveland vs. Detroit, 1:00 p.m.), beginning with Bishop Fulton Sheen's "No Room at the Inn" (1:00 p.m., WNBQ), a special Christmas broadcast in support of the World Missions of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, for which Bishop Sheen is the national director. At 3:00 p.m. on NBC's Zoo Parade, the humans and animals of Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo gather for the show's fifth annual Christmas celebration, with host Marlin Perkins (pre-Wild Kingdom) reading from his book One Magic Night, a fantasy about Christmas and animals. At 4:00 p.m., CBS's Omnibus presents a Christmas tryptich of stories and music from the Cloisters in New York. The program comprises the medieval play "The Second Shepherd's Play," singing by the Vienna Choir Boys, and a reading of Christmas stories for children, presented by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Unfortunately, and in an early demonstration of the need for VCRs, this is up against the Hallmark Hall of Fame's annual presentation of Amahl and the Night Visitors on NBC, with Bill McIver in his third appearance as the crippled shepherd boy whose faith and generosity brings about a miracle. (You can see McIver in the role in the commercially released 1955 production.) Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians give us a pleasant half-hour of Christmas music on General Electric Theater (8:00 p.m., CBS, and in color!), and the evening concludes with seasonal storylines on Father Knows Best (9:00 p.m., CBS) and The Loretta Young Show (9:00 p.m., NBC). 

Monday begins a parade of Christmas episodes from series looking to get in on the fun. On Caesar's Hour (7:00 p.m., NBC), Sid and Nanette Fabray play a married couple faced with spending their first Christmas apart. Voice of Firestone (7:30 p.m., ABC) presents opera soprano Eleanor Steber in a half hour of Christmas music both sacred and secular, while Medic (8:00 p.m., NBC) and December Bride (8:30 p.m, CBS) both stage their plots during the season. Dinah Shore (6:30 p.m., NBC) and Jo Stafford (6:45 p.m., CBS) both dedicate their 15-minute Tuesday shows to festive singing, while Meet Corliss Archer (7:30 p.m., CBS), Meet Millie (8:00 p.m., CBS), Fireside Theater (8:00 p.m., NBC, with Dorothy Malone), Armstrong Circle Theater (8:30 p.m., NBC), Life with Father (9:00 p.m., CBS) and It's a Great Life (9:30 p.m., NBC, with Frances Bavier) all use Christmas as a backdrop for their plots. 

On Wednesday, Arlene Francis' Home (10:00 a.m., NBC) continues its Christmas week with "gift suggestions for college and career girls," poetry from the Bible, read by Beatrice Straight and Kevin McCarthy, and a Christmas play by students from Edgemont School in Montclair, New Jersey. Moving to primetime, Disneyland's 1954 Christmas Show, "a tribute to our Latin American neighbors," sees Donald Duck on a tour of South America with some of his fans, including Pablo the penguin, Jose Carioca the debonair parrot, and others. (6:30 p.m., ABC)

Thursday's highlight comes courtesy of CBS's showcase for spectaculars, Shower of Stars (7:30 p.m., brought to you by Chrysler and broadcast in color!) It's a musical rendering of A Christmas Carol, with a score by Bernard Herrmann, script and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, and starring ◀ Fredric Marsh as Scrooge and Basil Rathbone as Marley, with an all-star supporting cast (including Bonnie Franklin as one of the little Cratchits). It's perhaps the most lavish version of A Christmas Carol to appear on television, and the first one anywhere to be done in color. In the good news-bad news department, there's no surviving color version of the program, but you can watch it in a B&W kinescope. If you already know how the story ends, go to NBC at 8:00 p.m. as Joe Friday and Frank Smith investigate the strange theft of the Baby Jesus from a church's Nativity scene in the annual Dragnet Christmas episode "The Big Little Jesus." 

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So why does Imogene Coca look so dour on the cover of this week's issue? Well, she's a worrier (something I can identify with), and her new series (Saturday nights on NBC) gives her plenty to worry about. For one thing, the show—her first solo venture after Your Show of Shows—is off to a shaky start in the ratings, leaving Coca to turn the reins of the series over to NBC. Her typical weekday consists of reading mail, answering letters and studying scripts, all before breakfast, and spending the afternoon in rehearsals and conferences with writers and directors, before heading home for dinner and watching some TV. (It helps that she pounds down up to 20 cups of coffee a day.)

On Saturday, the day of the show, she memorizes scripts, in-between interruptions by press agents, show aides, neighbors, and phone calls. She and her husband leave for the theater around 1 p.m., where she deals with missing scenery, ripped costumes and changing choreography. She works in some time to wash her hair, and nervously nibbles on a ham sandwich. "This is the worst time for me," she says. "This is the time my stomach always starts to churn. I'm thankful our show is black-and-white. I'd hate to turn green on color TV." No wonder she looks like she does on the cover.

Alas, the effort will be in vain. Like her former co-star Sid Caesar, Coca is unable to replicate the magic of Your Show of Shows, and The Imogene Coca Show lasts only one season. Nevertheless, her place in television history has been secured.

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You might find this a little hard to believe, I know, but apparently you can't trust everything you see on television. (And we're not even to the quiz show scandals yet.) 

The incident that brought this to light, which occurred a few weeks ago, occured on an episode of the aforementioned Shower of Stars, with singer Mario Lanza as special guest. What Mario did was insist to the press that he was actually singing on the program, when in fact he was lip-synching to a record the whole time. Lanza, like Richard Nixon, discovered the real crime is always in the cover-up, or the denial. The process, the technical term for which is dubbing, is actually a common practice in the entertainment industry, and Donald O'Connor is credited as being the first star to bring it to television. Since then, it's become a favorite on shows like The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Milton Berle Show. Jo Stafford decides which of her songs should be dubbed based on the amount of physical movement involved in the performance, and Les Paul and Mary Ford say it's impossible to reproduce the sound of dozens of voices and electric guitars without help. Not everyone feels this way, though. Dinah Shore says she'd "rather be caught dead" than synch her songs, and other performers—Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Martha Wright, and the cast of Your Hit Parade, to name a few—say they're "foursquare" against it. 

Naturally, there are pros and cons to the whole thing; Stafford thinks the quality is most important, while Shore believes it destroys the intimacy of television, the very thing we've talked so often about at this site. And in a comment that foreshadows why the quiz show scandal was such a big deal to so many people, Dinah adds that "On TV you're offering your whole personality—and you can't pre-record that." Or pretend that you know all the answers, for that matter.

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There are some non-Christmas highlights this week, believe it or not. Ed Sullivan has a star-studded lineup on Sunday's Toast of the Town (7:00 p.m., CBS) , with apperances from Hollywood by Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame, Olivia de Haviland, Broderick Crawford, Charles Bickford, Robert Mitchum and director Stanley Kramer, all of whom are currently shooting the movie Not as a Stranger. In addition, James Mason and his seven-year-old daughter Pamela appear in Star of Bethlehem, a short that Mason produced and directed. (Of course, you can see it on YouTube.) Back in New York, Ed's joined by Sam Levenson, Patti Page, Julius LaRosa, and the Chordettes. Too bad there's no Hollywood Palace for comparison. 

You can see more stars on the Look Magazine Awards (Saturday, 7:30 p.m., NBC), as the magazine presents its annual TV awards to the year's best shows and stars. The catagories aren't given (if, in fact, there are any), but we've got a list of the honorees: George Gobel, Fred Coe, Jack Webb, John Cameron Swayze, Groucho Marx, Ding Dong School, Cavalcade of Sports, Omnibus, Garry Moore, Tost of the Town, See It Now, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and the United States Steel Hour. Not a bad lineup, if you ask me. 

Robert Montgomery Presents (Monday, 8:30 p.m., NBC) begins a multi-part adaptaton of David Copperfield (one of Dickens' other stories) with Rex Thompson as the Copper man. WGN presents a Chicago Symphony concert on Wednesday (8:00 p.m.), conducte by the orchestra's legendary maestro, Fritz Reiner. No Christmas music, but they do perform Beethoven's 6th, certainly a star turn if ever there was. There's also the regular weekly assortment of boxing matches—two on Monday night, one on Wednesday (taking Christmas Eve off), but aside from the entertainment factor, there are no fighters of note. And among local movies, there's the Sherlock Holmes classic Dressed to Kill (Tuesday, 10:00 p.m., WGN, part of a week of Chicago TV debuts), with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as literature's most famous crimefighting duo (until Batman and Robin, that is.)

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Finally, speaking of that great detective, there's a new, syndicated Sherlock Holmes series on your television set, and this week Ronald Howard, son of the late actor Leslie, talks about his unique take on role. Unlike Rathbone's high-strung and kinetic Holmes, Howard says, "Mine has a more ascetic quality, is deliberate, very definitely unbohemian, and is underplayed for reality." Producer Sheldon Reynolds says Howard's portrayal more closely resembles that of the early Holmes stories, before Arthur Conan Doyle tired of him. And that's not all there is different about this series. Holmes' trusty sidekick, Dr. John Watson, is not the "perennial brainless bungler" of other versions. As played by H. Marion Crawford, this Watson is "a normal man, solid on his feet, a medical student who gives valuable advice." In other words, according to Reynolds, "a perfect foil to Holmes' youthful buoyancy." Howard says he wants to make Holmes a fallible hero, and I have to admit that I prefer my Holmes to be on the omniscient side, but there's still a warmth to his portrayal that's won him praise from Holmes fans.

There are 39 half-hour episodes in the series, and it's actually pretty good. I wouldn't put it in the same category as the mercurial characterization by Jeremy Brett, and it doesn't have the charm of the Rathbone movies, but given the difficulty in fitting a Holmes story into 30 minutes (not to mention that only a few are based on Doyle stories; most of them are originals penned by American writers), it's a worthy addition to the Holmes canon. And you don't need a detective to discover that. TV  

What I've been watching: March, 2020

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows I’ve Bought:
The Occult History of the Third Reich The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich	The Ernie Kovacs Show Whodunnit?
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Somehow or other our Sunday night viewing had settled into a pattern of a documentary on the Third Reich and an episode of a Sherlock Holmes story. The fact that this has been going on for a number of months serves as a testimony not only to the number of documentaries about the Nazis—they’re legion—but the number of series built around Sherlock Holmes: Basil Rathbone, Ronald Howard, Douglas Wilmer, Peter Cushing, and now Jeremy Brett.

The fascination with Nazis started with two superb movies: Downfall, starring Bruno Ganz in what has to be the definitive portrayal of Adolf Hitler; and Conspiracy, the disturbing movie on the 1942 Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was drawn up, with Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci. That was followed by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, her account of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, one of the greatest cinematic pieces of propaganda ever made, which captures Hitler at his most mesmerizing. There were series such as Architects of Darkness, which included some incredible home movies of Hitler, some taken by Eva Braun, and did well to explain how and why Hitler became Hitler. One of the most fascinating was an extremely interesting, but very odd, documentary series called The Occult History of the Third Reich, which traced Nazism from a grotesque goulash of Germanic folklore, the Völkisch movement, Aryanism, Eugenics, antisemitism, paganism, and mysticism, and how Heinrich Himmler hoped to convert the SS into a new religion. After watching those, I'd defy anyone to not be fascinated with the subject.

Although the supply of Nazi documentaries seems to be limitless, and probably is, after a bit it tends to get a bit repetitive, which made it a perfect time to segue to the three-hour adaptation of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, produced by the great David L. Wolper, which aired on ABC in 1968 in three one-hour episodes shown on consecutive nights. The fact that a network would spend three prime time hours on a black-and-white documentary about World War II says much not only about the quality of the program, but how television has changed since then.

Were it not for the fact that the legacy of the Third Reich goes beyond horrifying, I'd be tempted to refer to the hierarchy of the Nazi party as a motley group of colorful misfits, but that's a little too Runyonesque for what was essentially a band of gangsters. There was Julius Streicher, (publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer); Josef Goebbels (who understood, better than today’s politicians, how to use the mass media); Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe (whose disastrous advise to Hitler may have saved England during the Battle of Britain); Himmler (who emerges as one of the most interesting, as well as disturbing, of the Nazis); Albert Speer (a brilliant organizer who might have won the war for Germany if Hitler had given him control); and that's just the supporting cast, because any documentary about the Third Reich is going to have Adolf Hitler as the star.

Inside the Third Reich (the television series) isn't necessarily the definitive account—you couldn’t possibly do that in three hours, and it doesn’t even begin to get into the things, such as the Völkisch movement, that made Germany so susceptible to Hitler. Shirer has often been accused of a bias against the German nation and its people, and I think that's an accusation that is not without merit. What the series does, however, it does exceptionally well. We get footage of Hitler and the Nazis that is startlingly clear, quite unlike some of the grainy footage we’ve become used to seeing over the years. We see interviews with some people very close to Hitler and other members of the hierarchy (and several appearances by Shirer himself). It's all set against the backdrop of a pulsating, discordant score by Lalo Schifrin in which one can hear traces of his music for Mission: Impossible, and framed with a dignified narration by Richard Basehart.

I don’t pretend that a review of the documentary is a review of the book; as I said, you can’t cover a book of over 1,200 pages in such a short time. But as television goes, informed and enriched by multiple viewpoints and areas of interest, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich serves as a fitting epitaph to a time in history when the leaders of a modern nation tried to reinvent it into a Medieval killer state. And it reminds us, as events in the Middle East in recent years have shown, that there are those out there who would love to reboot the whole thing.

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The Third Reich is probably one of the few topics that could make a series on crime and punishment look lighthearted by comparison, but while Sherlock Holmes is the detective story par excellence, much of the charm and insight comes from the inner workings of the main character himself, Sherlock Holmes, and in the case of television, that of the actor playing him.

The Holmes routine began with the series of movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and while they weren’t exactly true to the canon established by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—as far as I know, Holmes never took on the Nazis or flew to Washington, D.C.—they were true to the spirit of the character, often using the bones of other Holmes stories to tell their tales. Most important, they were fun. Ronald Howard (son of Leslie) starred in a single-season half-hour series that was kind of lightweight, but again, fun. Douglas Wilmer’s take, from 1965-66. casts Holmes as serious, sarcastic and determined, with an arrogance that is both bracing and fully justified. Dr. Watson, played Nigel Stock, is still a boob, but more bumptious than stupid—after all, the man is an M.D. Fewer than a dozen of his episodes still exist, but they're terrific. Wilmer only played Holmes for one season; when it came back in 1968, Peter Cushing took over the role, with Stock continuing on as Watson.

That leaves only the definitive Holmes, Jeremy Brett. (Yes, I know there are other movies and series that are perfectly adequate, even excellent. I liked Robert Downey Jr. myself. And while Benedict Cumberbatch is fun—a word that always works well with Holmes—I prefer my Sherlocks as period pieces, or at least in that spirit. Besides, there's only so much room here.) Where was I? Yes, Brett—who played Holmes from 1984-94 and is everything you'd want Holmes to be. He's quirky, quick-witted, self-assured, occasionally tortured, frequently arrogant, and virtually always right. He's also surprisingly nimble, of body as well as mind, and I bring that up because it points out how important the physical portrayal of Holmes can be. That physicality projects not only his determination, but the rapidity of his mind; and his body language establishes that, for the criminal, he truly is a dangerous man.

Brett is aided, in this first season, by David Burke as Watson. This is a Watson who is very smart indeed; not at the level of Holmes, of course, but he's learned well from his compatriot, and each episode contains a bit in which Watson demonstrates how he's picked up on the art of observation, often listing the very same clues that Holmes has seen. The difference, of course, is that Watson fails to come to the same—that is, the correct—conclusion, and the cutting retort from Holmes can sometimes be painful, to us as well as to Watson, who is the most loyal of friends. Holmes is always quick to temper his remarks, though, and there's no doubt that when he compliments Watson, it is no mere flattery. Their chemistry is great.

Throw in literate, even elegant, scripts (many by John Hawkesworth) and period details that create a perfect atmosphere, and you've got just the thing to cleanse the palate after an hour with the Third Reich. TV  

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