Apocalypse Theater

How does one approach the end of the world?

The End of the World, capitalization required, isn't nearly as prominent a topic as the Post-Apocalyptic World. For one thing, The End doesn't come with zombies or vampires or other cool special effects. As Eliot says, it comes not with a bang, but a whimper. For another, it tends to be a very personal experience; everyone prepares for death in their own individual way, even (especially?) when one is surrounded by people.

Lois Nettleton faces "The Midnight Sun"

In The Midnight Sun, one of the most famous of Twilight Zone episodes, the earth is dislodged from its orbit and heads for a rendezvous with the sun. Rod Serling, who wrote the script, paints a grim portrait of life near the end: deserted streets, empty shelves, water usage limited to an hour a day, law and order essentially nonexistent. As the thermometer soars past 130°, our protagonist Norma collapses, only for us to discover that it has all been a fevered dream on her part. The earth is moving not closer to the sun, but away from it, and as the last survivors face their inevitable death from freezing, Norma has been dreaming of how nice it would be if it were warm. As I said, the end affects people differently.

The 1990s revival of The Outer Limits presented a story called The Inconstant Moon, based on a short story by Larry Niven, in which a professor of physics observes a blinding flash reflect against the surface of the moon, leading him to believe that the sun has gone nova, and that there are only a few hours left to live. Knowing the end is coming encourages him to confess his love to a female friend; they marry and prepare to spend the last night on earth together. The nova turns out to be "merely" a solar flare which, nevertheless, wreaks destruction and death, leaving the professor and his wife one of the few alive. The end of the world does not come for some without the promise of love.

In 1960, Playhouse 90 broadcast Alas, Babylon, an adaptation of the novel by Pat Frank, in which a nuclear war breaks out between the United States and the Soviet Union. As with movies like The Day After, the point of the story is how the survivors react in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust, and the time prior to the war is given over to the crumbling geopolitical environment that leads to the inevitable nuclear confrontation. Having been tipped off to the pending war by his Air Force brother, Randy Bragg spends the waning days gathering friends and family around him, and taking what action he can to provide for their survival. His ingenuity, combined with the individual talents of those with him, enable them to hang on until the Air Force arrives the following year. America has won the war, but at a fearful price; for her 45 million survivors, it is the end of one world and the beginning of another.

A Canadian movie from 1998, Last Night tells of the imminent end of the world, scheduled for midnight. The cause is never explained, but the end has been some time in coming. At first society breaks down into panic and violence, but as the last night approaches, a modicum of civilization has returned. Patrick, a widower, attempts to help Sandra, a young woman looking for her husband, with whom she has a suicide pact. Her efforts having failed, she and Patrick sit on the roof, awaiting midnight, each holding a loaded gun to the other's temple. In the last seconds, they discard their guns and embrace in a kiss, as the world comes to an end. Love triumphs, not in the same way as in The Inconstant Moon, but affirming the importance, the need, for human contact and compassion.

For Ted Turner, the end of the world was part of his mission statement for CNN. He vowed that his news network would survive until the end, and, in fact, would be around to cover it, including a video of a band playing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the last thing to be broadcast on the network before the ultimate sign-off. That's another story, of course, but one has to admit that the end of the world as a period on a business plan is novel, if nothing else.

A revival meeting prepares people for the end in "On the Beach"

The premier end-of-the-world story is probably On the Beach, written by Nevil Shute in 1957 and given an adequate movie adaptation by Stanley Kramer in 1959. As in Alas, Babylon, the end is triggered by a nuclear war, but in this case the focus is on Australia, where the world's remaining survivors wait for the radiation to reach them. It is an extended meditation on the situation described in Last Night, an extended period of waiting (over a year), knowing that death is certain. Cars and buses are now pulled by horses; a necessary state of denial keeps people going from day to day, planting gardens they'll never see bloom and moving up the date of the fishing opener because the original date would have been—too late. In order to ease the suffering, the government has provided everyone with a suicide pill they can choose to take, rather than suffering the horror of death by radiation. Having preordained the ending, Shute concentrates on how each character faces the end. For Commander Towers, in charge of an American submarine, it means carrying on with his duty while buying gifts for his wife and son, both of whom are certainly dead back in America. He falls in love with Moira, a young Australian who has been drinking her way through the waiting; their love remains platonic, however, because is is, after all, a married man. As the end approaches, gasoline reserves suddenly become plentiful, and the final Australian Grand Prix is held, with many drivers choosing to die in reckless moves rather than wait for the world to kill them; Moira decides to make something of herself by taking secretarial classes, and Towers determines to take his submarine and crew out beyond the reefs, where he will scuttle it and the men will go down with the ship.

It is this, more than anything else, which echoes in what we've seen the last few days. Sporting events are canceled, stores and restaurants are shut down, schools are closed, people are laid off or told to work from home. It does feel almost as if one is expected to sit at home and wait for death. A statistician would point out that even the most dire prediction of two million American dead pales when compared to the death toll of On the Beach (100%) or Alas, Babylon (roughly 150 million Americans), but in some ways it's like a game of viral Russian roulette; the odds favor the players, but the house will still get its share, and nobody knows which is which.

Personally, I think that while those seeking to contain the virus—to "flatten the curve," so to speak, through the noxious term "social distancing"—while they mean well, and while they may well be right, we're losing something of our humanity in the process. Not our will to live, so much; if anything, it's symptomatic of clinging too tightly to life itself. Rather, I think we're loosing what it means to be alive, living and breathing social creatures. As we see in these examples, man has been created as a social creature, one meant to be with others, to love and be loved. For a people that have become obsessed with the phrase "quality of life," and have demanded the right to kill themselves if they find that quality to be sufficiently impaired, we seem to have become awfully lax in adhering to that in the face of this threat. Only the young seem to have continued to insist on living life their way, and while part of it is their derision for boomers, there's another aspect that suggests that they, however imperfectly, understand the importance of hanging on to routine, of actually living rather than merely existing.

Life is, after all, a risk. And in this surrealistic way of life, with deserted streets and closed buildings and people cowering behind curtained windows, helpless, intimidated by a media that acts as if panic is merely a selling point, it becomes more and more important for us to remember that. We are not living in those worlds; we're living in this one. Life is worth living, and live is to be lived. Remember: nobody gets off this rock alive.

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Here's Bishop Sheen talking about "Fear and Anxiety," which you'll hopefully find helpful.


 TV  

What's on TV? Saturday, March 14, 1970

We're in the Big Apple again this week, and I enjoy these trips to New York, having never been there in person myself. You don't see the variety of local programming on Saturday that you see the rest of the week, but I always like to see what's on Saturdays, the best day of the week. You'll notice that Channel 8, WNHC, has a lot of high school basketball; it's the Connecticut state high school basketball tournament, with different regions based on the enrollment size. You'll also see that WNDT, the NET affiliate in NYC (now WNET, one of the larger and more influential PBS stations in the country) has college hockey on. If I'd had the opportunity, I might have watched that; I always have been a sucker for sports on educational television.

This week in TV Guide: March 14, 1970

To fully appreciate Eric Sevareid's interview with Neil Hickey about bias in television news, it needs to be put in proper context, and that's going to require a little bit of work from yours truly.

It starts with Vice President Spiro Agnew's famous speech in Des Moines, Iowa on November 13, 1969, in which he lays out the argument that a liberal media bias exists. The network news divisions, according to Agnew, dominate the political debate, with the power to "make or break" policies, reputations and campaigns, through their coverage and commentary. He charges the media with operating in an echo chamber; they "read the same newspapers, and draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement of their own viewpoints." The result is "a narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture." In the end, "For millions of Americans, the network reporter who covers a continuing issue. . . becomes, in effect, the presiding judge in a national trial by jury." To say that Agnew's speech stirs up a hornet's nest is an understatement. His charges are hotly rebutted by members of the media; meanwhile, NBC reports that more than 85 percent of those contacting the network support Agnew's views.

Fast forward three months, to the February 28, 1970 issue of TV Guide, and Edith Efron's interview with Howard K. Smith. Entitled "There Is a Network News Bias," Smith asserts that the news bias is, indeed, real, beginning with the liberal political composition of the staff. Liberals, says Smith, by definition have "a strong leftward bias"—"Our tradition since FDR, has been leftward." He denounces the "conformism" of network newsmen: "They react the way political cartoonists do—with oversimplification. Oversimplify. Be sure to please your fellows, because that’s what’s 'good.' They're conventional, they’re conformists. They're pleasing Walter Lippman, they're pleasing the Washington Post , they're pleasing the editors of The New York Times, and they're pleasing one another.” To say that the media is out of touch with the middle class is an understatement: "Joseph Kraft did a column in which he said: Let’s face it, we reporters have very little to do with middle America. They’re not our kind of people . . . Well, I resent that. I’m from middle America!" Smith, who in fact considers himself a liberal, nonetheless says that conservatives get the short shrift from his colleagues, who respond with party-line, "automatic reactions." "If Agnew says something, it’s bad, regardless of what he says. . . "I'm unwilling to condemn an idea because a particular man said it. Most of my colleagues do just that."

Provocative, eh? This week's letters section is devoted entirely to responses to Smith's comments, which editor Merrill Panitt says "is running about 15-1 in favor of Smith's position." A typical missive says "It takes a great deal of courage and integrity to reprimand publicly one's colleagues. If we had more network newsmen of his stature we wouldn't have to worry about bias and fair coverage." One writer asks, tongue-slightly-in-cheek, "Is he interested in being President?"

With this established, it's now time to turn to Eric Sevareid, who is equally adamant that there is no bias in the media. In an interview with Neil Hickey, Sevareid discusses the difference between news values and judgments and personal biases. While acknowledging that "we have fallen into at least some shallow ruts," he insists that for the most part, stories are selected based on "ingrained reflexes on what is news and what isn't." Why, then, do so many people believe in the existence of a liberal bias in the news? "I don't know what the word liberal means," replies Sevareid, "except a kind of open-mindedness, a basic humanitarian view of life and concern for people." He has, in fact, been accused many times of being too conservative, by youth groups, protester groups, radical groups. "A lot of people say a lot of things," Sevareid concludes.

He also dismisses Smith's claim that the media operate in an echo chamber. "I haven't had a serious conversation with Howard K. Smith, I suppose, in 10 years. I haven't run into Huntley or Brinkley in two or three years. It's ridiculous." Agnew's accusations, which stirred up so much of the controversy in the first place, are "demagoguery," the "conspiracy theory of history." It's easy to whip the public into believing in this kind of argument once it's made public; "Joe McCarthy had a majority of Americans convinced that this government was crawling with Communists. It simply was not so."

Much of the discussion, as has been the case all along, surrounds the Vietnam War. "[T]he war has torn up a lot of things here," Sevareid says; the economy, the nation's youth, the draft, and the relationship between the media and the Nixon administration. He feels that Agnew's, and by extension Nixon's, criticism of the media has simply stirred things up. "This Administration was not doing that badly with the press. But this attack has exacerbated things, made lots of people angry. It's scapegoat politics."  Even so, he feels that Nixon has had "very decent treatment" from the press.

Finally, he reiterates his belief that there is no media bias. "Every letter I've ever received in my life that accused me of bias was simply someone who disagreed with me. I have never had a letter yet from anybody who says, 'I agree with you but you were not fair to the other side.' Never. Never."

Once again, this is not the end of the story. In the April 4 issue, the letters section features this response from a reader who rebuts Sevareid: "The suggestion is not that the networks are filled with liars but rather with liberals, not that they conspire to slant news but that they all share a point of view, and consequently cannot help but bias their presentations by their very honesty." Once again, Merrill Panitt notes on the number of letters TV Guide has received; they're running 37% pro-Sevareid, 63% anti-Sevareid. Either Sevareid is right that the public can be stampeded, or Smith is right that there's the media's of touch with the middle class. I suspect each of these sentiments would have a large segment of support today, which might explain why we're so divided today. Or not.

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.Throughout the 60s and early 70s, TV Guide's weekly reviews were written by the witty and acerbic Cleveland Amory. Whenever we get the chance, we'll look at Cleve's latest take on the series of the era. 

One of life's eternal mysteries has to be why some actors are natural-born stars, while others, with evidently more talent, wind up as supporting players. (Perhaps it's not right up there with why I never seem to win the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, but it's a mystery nonetheless.) And so it is with Tim Conway, who was easily the funniest man in any studio he was in, but only found success as a guest on someone else's show. This week, Our Cleve takes a look at Conway's sitcom follow-up to McHale's Navy, entitled—appropriately enough—The Tim Conway Show.*

*Wikipedia's typically understated description of Conway's 1980 comedy series: "The show should not be confused with the spring 1970 sitcom also called The Tim Conway Show or with The Tim Conway Comedy Hour, a comedy-variety series which aired in the fall of the same year, both also on CBS." Besides Conway's name, the other thing that all three shows had in common was that they were all ratings failures.

This version of The Tim Conway Show reunites Conway with his old McHale co-star, Joe Flynn. The two of them play owners of a one-plane airline that barely stays aloft. It perhaps says something about the success of this premise that Amory reserves the first half of his review commenting on the show's laugh track. And no wonder, since the laugh track has to do all the heavy lifting in this series. "A lesser laugh track might have found it hard going. But not this track." Typical scenario: the door to the plane won't open, when it does it hits Flynn in the head, after which the two try to get through the open doorway at the same time. "The laugh track holds its sides. Mr. Conway and Mr Flynn fall down. The laugh track rolls in the aisles." See what I mean?\

One reason why Cleve spends so much time writing about the laugh track is that it's currently a topic of debate due to what many viewers feel is its intrusiveness. Of course, the other reason is that there just isn't that much to say about The Tim Conway Show. The cast, as he points out, is not to blame for the show's inadequacies; "few of the troubles here are of their origination." It's just that—well, it's never a good thing when a show is so dependent on one star to carry the mail. The laugh track performs heroic work, but even it has to run out of steam sometime. Tim Conway is a smash hit on The Carol Burnett Show, just as he is every time he guests on someone else's program. It is, as I say, a mystery.

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Artis Gilmore (L) takes on Lew Alcindor

Sports, anyone? College basketball is the big story this week, with the NCAA and NIT tournaments both going strong. We've been over this terrain a few times, so I'll try not to be redundant, but in this day when we've become accustomed to everyone—and I do mean everyone—having a bracket, some of this still bears repeating.

The 1970 NCAA tournament started out with 25 teams, and ran over three weekends. This Saturday, two of the four regional finals are televised, beginning at 2:00 p.m. ET on NBC; the double-header you get depends on where you live. Since we're looking at the New York Metropolitan edition this week, the two games are the East Region final from Columbia, South Carolina, where St. Bonaventure, led by Bob Lanier, heads for its only appearance in the Final Four by beating Villanova 97-74; and the Mideast Region final from Lawrence, Kansas, with Jacksonville (and Artis Gilmore) besting Kentucky in a magnificent game, 106-100, for their only Final Four trip. (Meanwhile, New Mexico State defeats Drake in the Midwest, and UCLA beats Utah State in the West). NBC's back on Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. for one of the two national semifinals, St. Bonaventure vs. Jacksonville, played at College Park, Maryland (home of the University of Maryland; capacity of Cole Field House is about 14,000 with standing room). The national championship game is scheduled for the following Saturday afternoon; UCLA wins again, defeating Jacksonville 80-69. You'll agree that this is a far, far cry from today's NCAAs.

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There's a show on Saturday night on NBC (7:30 p.m.), one of those that redefines the concept of "something for everyone." It's called The Switched On Symphony, and the starting point is Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.* The idea, explains Mehta, is that a good deal of today's pop music "has its roots in the classics." To prove his point, he's created a "musical college" of pop and classical performers for this one-hour special. The pop stars include Ray Charles, Bobby Sherman, Santana, and Jethro Tull. From the classical side, pianist Joao Martins, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman, and guitarist Christopher Parkening.** I don't think even the Boston Pops ever had that eclectic a lineup. And of course, the Philharmonic tops it all off with the theme from 2001, also known as "Thus Sprach Zarathustra" by Strauss.

*Fun fact: Zubin Mehta has been married, since 1969, to former actress Nancy Kovack.
**Fun fact #2: Pinchas Zuckerman was married to Tuesday Weld from 1985 to 1998.

L-R: Bolger, Haley, Hamilton

I know that's going to be tough to top, and to be honest I'm not sure we're going to be able to do it this week, though it's not for lack of trying. On Sunday evening at 6:00 p.m., it's NBC again, this time with the 17th annual presentation of The Wizard of Oz, which ties in nicely with a story featuring three of the movies stars, Ray Bolger (The Scarecrow), Jack Haley (The Tin Man), and Margaret Hamilton (The Wicked Witch) as they reminisce about the making of the movie, 31 years ago. What's shocking about it, in a way, is that none of them are that old—Bolger is 66, Haley and Hamilton 68—and yet, along with 83-year-old Billie Burke, who played The Good Witch, they're the only principles still living.

Tuesday is St. Patrick's Day, and WPIX celebrates with four hours of coverage of New York's 208th parade (12:30 p.m.), with 120,000 marchers, clans from all of Ireland's 32 counties, and more. If, like me, you're not into that kind of thing, you could watch WABC's morning movie, The L-Shaped Room (9:30 a.m.), with an Oscar-nominated, non-singing performance from Leslie Caron. And since I just watched a YouTube clip with Ernie and Cookie Monster, you'll forgive me for mentioning Sesame Street (9:30 a.m., WPIX), with Ethel Kennedy reading a story. Later that evening, WNBC carries a special, A Choice of Destinies (7:30 p.m.), a portrait of America reflected by five recent assassinations: John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. You could also choose Julia (8:30 p.m., NBC), with star Diahann Carroll, who in this week's cover story tells Carolyn See that her success is due, in part, to being "a black woman with a white image." See asks Carroll about accusations from the black community that she's a "sellout." "Of course," she replies sharply. "What else would I be? I've sold my talents for a job I'm not particularly crazy about. Isn't that what you do? Isn't that what most people do? I've been operating in the white world for 15 years." She's worked hard to get where she has, and when asked why, she replies, "For exposure. For an audience, for a reputation, for a wider public. You can't do very much without these things. And the gamble, too. Because if the series goes a third year, there's real money in it." Yes, in 1970 it was something to be a black person succeeding in the white world. How have things changed since then, I wonder?

On Wednesday afternoon at 3:30 p.m., it's coverage of the 21st annual Pillsbury Bake-Off, hosted by Bob Barker and June Lockhart. I don't know if this even exists anymore, and as a former Pillsbury employee I suppose I should know things like that, but it was a long, long time ago that I worked there, and things change. Speaking of change, the celebrities appearing on the program—not just the hosts, but Mike Minor, Anne Lockhart, and June Lockhart Jr., are all associated one way or another with CBS, so the network is obviously responsible for the program, but since it's on Hartford's WTIC but not New York's WCBS, I'm guessing it might have been taped the previous week. Or maybe not; at this point who really cares? At 7:30 p.m., it's a program that's definitely on CBS: Hee Haw, with guests Faron Young and Dolly Parton. I was never a big fan of Hee Haw (or of country music in general), but I have to hand it to them that they always had the biggest stars in the industry. No pun intended, of course.

Friday, it's another episode of Here Come the Brides (9:00 p.m., ABC), and that's the reason for Leslie Raddatz's article on the show's resident heavy, Mark Lenard. He says he's never considers himself to be the villain, and always presents his characters as fully-formed and well-rounded, and I think he always transmitted an elegance and gravitas in his portrayals. And, you know, Mark Lenard had a long and successful career as an actor, on stage, in the movies, and on television. But his most famous role—and, I daresay, the one you first thought of when you saw his name here—gets barely a sentence in Raddatz's article. After Lenard's appearance in the movie epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, "West Coast television appearances followed, most notably, before Here Come the Brides, the role of Mr. Spock's father in Star Trek," Sarek. He also played a Romulan and a Klingon, which pretty much covers it all.

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I generally like to end on a light note, and this week's topic comes from a feature called "Second Look" by Scott MacDonough, which is a kind of retrospective look at shows from the last few weeks. I admit that the utility of this somewhat escapes me; after all, in this pre-VCR era, unless you catch something in reruns, what good is it to know whether or not a show was any good? It's not as if you recorded it for playback later. And if it does show in reruns, you're probably likely to have forgotten what Scott said about it, anyway.

Be that as it may, he likes Ed Sullivan's tribute to the Beatles, "The Beatles' Songbook," shown March 1 on Sullivan's regular show, even though some of the covers were a bit iffy. "Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme belted out a fiery "Can't Buy Me Love" but massacred the lovely "Michele," while Peggy Lee's renditions of "Something" and "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" were flawless.

On the other hand, when a review begins with the phrase "Speaking of garbage," I doubt that there's anything flawless about what's to come, except perhaps for the insults. Such is the case with The Don Adams Special: Hooray for Hollywood, which aired February 26 on CBS and "desecrated our fondest memories of many a movie classic. Don Adams got Charlton Heston to host and Edie Adams (who should know better) and Don Rickles to guest in this ersatz satire of the movies. Heston narrated as if he were delivering Commandments 11 through 20, while Adams' ribs at the flicks accented leers and sneers."  Ah, but what, you may ask, did he really think? "[I]n co-writing, co-producing and co-starring in this fiasco, Mr. Adams didn't accomplish much. He merely showed how a little talent can go a short way." Let's hope you feel more kindly toward the rest of this issue. TV 

Around the dial

One thing about the coronavirus: since we're all supposed to be self-isolating, it gibes us plenty of time to look at the best from the world of classic TV.

At bare•bones e-zine, Jack's latest look at Stirling Silliphant's contributions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents brings us to the fifth-season episode "The Crystal Trench"; as always, it's a fascinating look at what a gifted writer does in the process of adapting an almost perfect story.

I'll admit that but I have trouble staying away while I'm watching TV, even with shows that I like, but at Comfort TV, David talks about three shows that put him to sleep. I won't spoil the surprise; let's just say that I can't argue with any of his choices.

I don't think anyone is apt to fall asleep during the Twilight Zone classic "The Incredible World of Horace Ford," written by Stirling Sillipant's contemporary Reginald Rose, and Jordan tells us about it at The Twilight Zone Vortex.

I hope you're checking out Ed Robertson's great show TV Confidential, and Bob Crane: Life and Legacy reminds us that the next three shows feature Carol Ford and Linda Groundwater talking about their Bob Crane biography.

At Classic Film & TV Café, Rick takes us back to one of the features on the old NBC Tuesday Mystery Movie: The Snoop Sisters, starring Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick. Maybe the mysteries are nothing to write home about, but the acting is good, and the guest villains are wonderful!

And last but not least, I'm back on Eventually Supertrain this week, doing some Bourbon Street Beat with Dan; also, The Green Hornet and Shadow Chasers. Hopefully it's as much fun for you to listen to as it is for us to do!

Be brave; the weekend is almost here! TV  

What I've been watching: February 2020

Shows I’ve Watched:	Shows I’ve Bought:
The Wild Wild West	Doctor Who: The Moonbase
Star Trek: The Original Series	Doctor Who: The War Games
The Outer Limits

It’s often said that nostalgia is a way of reliving the past; detractors often accuse us of simply living in the past, as if we refuse to avoid or inhabit the present. I suppose I’d have to consult one of the doctors on The Eleventh Hour to find out the truth of that, not that I don’t on occasion get nostalgic for the days when I had more hair and carried fewer pounds. But then, you don’t want to hear me natter about a post-midlife crisis, or any such nonsense. You came here to read about old television shows, and by golly, I’m going to do my best to satisfy that desire.

Let’s take The Wild Wild West, for example. It’s the leadoff program on our Friday night viewing, having filled a role once occupied by The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and I link those two series deliberately, because they have a lot in common. Both series ran for four seasons, in each case the first season being black-and-white. Both owed a considerable debt to the success of the James Bond movie franchise; both featured a dynamic duo of suave agents dedicated to combating some kind of ridiculous, overly-complicated plot for world domination constructed by an absurdly colorful, egomaniacal villain living on the wrong side of sanity. In both shows the second banana served to soften the edges of the actor playing the hero, allowing the emergency of a humanity that might not otherwise be apparent to the viewer. And, most relevant to this discussion, neither The Wild Wild West nor The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are series that I watched regularly when they were originally on. It’s true that I might have been a bit young for them when they first started, but certainly by the time each series went off the air, I would have matured enough to enjoy the fast-paced action, the outrageous storylines, and the beautiful women that were hallmarks of the two.

So why didn’t I? I’m not entirely certain. It’s possible that the adults in the household wanted to watch something else, although I seem to have a vague memory of being told to watch U.N.C.L.E. once when I was bored and fussy, the idea being that this was the kind of show I ought to be enjoying. Certainly, at that age the most important thing on television for me was sports, but it’s impossible to think that there would have been a game on every single night that these programs aired. Barring some kind of regression therapy to take me back to the past, which might not answer these questions and certainly wouldn’t help me either grow hair or lose weight, I’m afraid we may never know.

I’m off on another tangent, aren’t I? All right, let’s get back to the point. If it’s true that I didn’t watch either of these shows back in the day, then it’s hard to accuse me of trying to relive the past by watching them now. Perhaps the best way to put it is that I’m trying to understand the past, particularly an era that for some reason continues to fascinate me. If this is what I’m doing, then I’m also discovering the added benefit that I enjoy both of these shows immensely.

The Wild Wild West stars Robert Conrad as James West and Ross Martin as Artemus Gordon, agents of the United States Secret Service working under the direction of President Ulysses S. Grant. We don’t often see Grant in the series, because their job isn’t to protect him bodily, but to foil plots that are usually aimed at toppling the United States government. West is the more prominent of the two, which you can tell right away because his name is part of the title (hence, the implicit pun, because West does indeed lead a wild, wild life), in the same way that Robert Vaughn was the titular Man from U.N.C.L.E. West is fast with his fists, with words, and with the ladies, which usually puts him in a fair degree of danger each week. And although he seems to specialize in extricating himself from these threats, it’s a good thing that he has Gordon, a master of disguise and dialect, backing him up.

Gordon, although he seems to spend a good amount of time unconscious as the result of the villain or his henchmen, is a good second to West for a couple of reasons. First, his disguises often allow him in to the villain’s lair, where he proves to be both clever and a tough customer to deal with, occasionally bailing West out at the last moment. Perhaps more important to us as viewers, though, Ross Martin performs that service I mentioned back at the outset: as David McCallum does with Robert Vaughn in U.N.C.L.E., Martin helps to soften and humanize Robert Conrad, who can often come across as abrasive and arrogant, without threatening his status as the show’s star. In West, Conrad’s ego is put to good use, as Conrad displays the confidence necessary for a hero, and his insistence on doing his own stunts is both effective and very impressive. The chemistry between Conrad and Martin, in fact, is one of the show’s best traits; although we’re not quite sure what the relationship is supposed to be at the outset, when the two agents refer to each other as “James” and “Artemus,” by the end of the first season they’ve become “Jim” and “Artie,” and their loyalty and devotion to each other is as great as that which they both show to their government.

I’d be way off base if I didn’t follow up on those colorful villains for a moment, the most famous and best-loved of them being the sinister Dr. Miguelito Loveless, played wonderfully by Oscar-nominee Michael Dunn. His appearances, from the very first, are one of the show’s highlights, but the over-the-top performances by various well-known actors each week ensure that West and Gordon face worthy rivals, to keep the show from descending into a complete cartoon.

I deliberately scheduled both The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Wild Wild West as Friday viewing not only because it’s historically accurate, but because they’re the perfect antidote to the workweek. After slaving over a desk for five days, who wouldn’t be happy to come home to such pleasant, reassuring company on the screen? It’s the perfect way to start a weekend.

My wife considers herself a purist when it comes to Star Trek: The Original Series, and so the enhanced special effects that come with the restored set didn't hold a lot of interest for her. We got the Blu Ray edition, though, because there was a sale going on at Amazon, and it seemed like the right thing to do. And boy, does it make a difference! It would be hyperbole to say that the new effects blew us away, because we're experienced television viewers who've seen a lot of special effects in the day, but it's difficult to describe how they bring Star Trek into, well, the present. It gives one the feeling of how it must have been to watch them during the original network run, even though they're much clearer now than they ever would have been then.

Original effects on the left, enhanced on the right

But for all that, the effects don't overpower what made the original Trek such compelling viewing. One of the things I always find interesting in these early episodes is how easy it could have been, as someone said, for the series to turn into The Mr. Spock Hour. He's an amazing character, even though he's not quite a finished product, with a superb portrayal by Leonard Nimoy. William Shatner, of course, is Captain Kirk, and these early episodes emphasize two things: the humanity of the man, and I don't mean that as charity, although that is present as well, but talking about the value of being fully human, something that neither machine nor Vulcan can replicate; and the importance to him of the Enterprise. As Harry Mudd tells one of his women, a Starfleet captain is married to his ship, and Kirk is a perfect example of this. DeForest Kelley's Dr. McCoy completes the trio that remains beloved for decades. All that, and special effects that are, dare we say it, out of this world? No, let's simply say that, like Baby Bear's porridge, they're just right.

t  t  t

I've alluded to it in the past, but I might as well make it obvious here: the only Doctor Who I'm interested in is the classic series. I'll live with Ecclestone, Tennant, Smith and Capaldi (and John Hurt as the War Doctor), but that's as far as it goes. You can probably figure out who I've left off that list, but from what I've read, I haven't missed anything in the last couple of years.

That's a discussion for another day, though. After all, the name of this feature is "What I've Been Watching," not "What I Haven't Been Watching." Allow me to mention two new acquisitions I haven't had the chance to watch—yet. With an opening on the Saturday night viewing horizon, it's time to begin planning a start-to-finish viewing of Doctor Who—the first time since I originally saw them 30-some years ago. One of the reasons I haven't done that yet is that I haven't yet succeeded in replacing my old VHS versions with DVDs. And in case you haven't checked lately, the price of some Doctor Who discs is off the wall, bec ause they've gone out of print in the United States. They haven't in England, however, and because 1) I happen to have a region-free DVD player, and 2) the Region 2 discs are less expensive, I've been filling in the gaps, particularly in my Patrick Troughton collection.

The Troughton era suffered greatly from the BBC's policy of wiping video tapes in order to reuse them; until the last few years, less than a dozen of his stories had survived, and the balance existed only as telesnaps, a combination of the original soundtracks (they survived the purge) and still photos that had been taken, as I recall, during episode rehearsals. However, in the past few years copies of additional stories have turned up, found in the storerooms of former British colonies, and storiesthat only partially existed were completed by animating the missing episodes.

With the addition of The Moonbase and The War Games (the final Troughton story), I only have two more to buy; then I'll have the full Hartnell and Troughton collections. I figure that will take over a year to go through, by which time I'll be able to fill in some more gaps down the line. Providing coronavirus doesn't get me, I might get the complete series one of these days. And you'll read about it here. TV