Around the dial

Back again for another look at the classic TV blogosphere, and as usual there's plenty to read. Here are some that caught my eye.

Remember Robert Vaughn? Alas, while his Man from U.N.C.L.E. sidekick David McCallum reaches new audiences on N.C.I.S. (must have a thing for shows with initials, no?), Vaughn may well be better known to today's viewers as a commercial spokesman for lawyers.  And that's too bad because, as Rick points out at Classic Film and TV Cafe, Vaughn's a pretty interesting guy.  I've always identified with Vaughn's smug, pretentious turns - even in the first season of U.N.C.L.E., he manages to make the good guy smarmy.  But as the series progresses into satire and then camp, Vaughn begins to grow on me.  His reactions and takes to the sometimes bizarre events surrounding each week's caper are delightful.

I've said this before, but I'm going to have to check out The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.  Now that we're got MeTV back in Dallas, I have no excuses for not setting the DVR to early Sunday morning.  And if I'm lucky, it won't be long before I catch the 1960 Christmas show, an episode Joanna Wilson recounts this week at Christmas TV History.  I know I've seen Dobie before, in after-school reruns - I can't tell you about any episodes, but I sure remember his pose mirroring Rodin's The Thinker.

One of the newer blogs I enjoy is Dixon Hayes' TV When I Was Born, not only because of his wonderful writing, but we're close enough in age* that his memories are quite similar to mine.  This week Dixon writes about a show that aired the day he was born: The Garry Moore Show.  I've written about Moore a couple of times in the last few weeks, and Dixon covers well Moore's unlikely, unorthodox variety show stardom.

*I'm not telling you which of us is older, though you can figure out Dixon's age easily enough from his age when various shows aired; I've left more subtle clues throughout the blog's history, but they're there if you look hard enough.

At Comfort TV, David Hofstede touches on something near to me - he asks if watching television can be a hobby.  David talks about assembling TV "theme" viewing for things like the start of baseball season, which I think is very cool.  We do the same thing in the Hadley household at Christmastime, and we've got a batch of TV shows and movies that make theme appearances throughout the year (Great Pumpkin at Halloween, Grand Prix before the start of the F1 season, Rhubarb before the World Series, 1776 and The Music Man for the 4th of July, and so on.  I commented at his blog that my writing may be a bit more than a hobby for me, but the act of watching television is, as always, a simple pleasure, and collecting favorite series on DVD is as good a hobby as it gets.

Finally, you might have noticed on the sidebar a logo for this year's "Summer of MeTV Classic TV Blogathon" - as was the case last year, yours truly will be part of it on June 2.  I could tell you what I'm writing about - but better that you check out the lineup at The Classic TV Blog Association and find out about the other great articles on tap.  You won't want to miss this one!

And you won't want to miss Saturday's TV Guide recap, either - see you then! TV  

Around the dial

Time to take a quick spin through the classic TV blogosphere and see what we can come up with. Something good, no question.

At Comfort TV, David talks about the real way to watch retro TV: by duplicating a network's lineup for an entire evening. I must admit to being prone to this nerdish behavior myself, although I'm more likely to mix and match networks and eras instead of trying to duplicate a single point in time, ala David. For example, our Saturday night lineup features Perry Mason. Mannix and Mission: Impossible from CBS, though they didn't all air at the same time. My real goal, however, has been to duplicate the programming from a specific day's programming, as listed in TV Guide. Good luck with that, right? But you'd be surprised at how close you can get.

The Onion's AV Club has become one of my favorite classic TV sites; it's got a great lineup of features, from episode-by-episode rundowns of programs like The Twilight Zone and classic Doctor Who to articles that analyze the appeal of a given series. One of the best is the feature called 100 Episodes, which focuses on those series that reached the landmark number of 100 episodes - the generally considered minimum number of episodes for a series to go into syndication, and future immortality.

Bill Simmons' Grantland website may seem like it's sportscentric, but it really embrases all of pop culture, and in "Murder, Inc.," Andy Greenwald explores a question that I've written about several times, one that is as relevant to today's culture as it was in the 60s: how much violence on television is "too much"? One can't help but wonder - isn't this an example of something that never gets beyond the talk stage?

At Awful Announcing, the gang flashes back to a time which we might consider remarkable today: when 24/7 sports programming seemed on the way out. I vividly remembere how much sports USA used to have (although a lot of it came before we got cable in Minneapolis), but I'd completely forgotten the days when ESPN carried Nation's Business Today for two hours on weekday mornings. Now that you mention it, I actually watched that show each morning before heading off to work. It was a hell of a lot better than what ESPN has on nowadays.

And the reason for that can be found in this fascinating and depressing Deadspin article that breaks down the content of ESPN's flagship SportsCenter broadcast for an entire year. Among other things, we learn that a team's economic value is even more important than its won-loss record when it comes to getting coverage on SportsCenter. Blech.

In fact, that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to find another article to sign off on, and here it is: Joanna Wilson's recap of Christmas TV History's Christmas in July. If that thought doesn't bring a smile and warm memory to you, I don't know what will.

That's it for today - see you on Saturday for This Week in TV Guide. Not-so-fun fact: I had to rebuild this one from the ground up after a technical malfunction ate my homework. You'll have to let me know if it still comes out alright! TV