Posted on 10/04/2009 5:49:46 PM PDT by JLS
Get a hit drama in here, stat!
Just a couple weeks into the fall television season, the prognosis is not looking good for NBC. To wit:
(Excerpt) Read more at insidetv.aol.com ...
Some nice casting choices and the music and atmosphere is high quality.
Now if the writing and acting is good we may have a winner!
Tina Fey left the show a few years ago.
These clowns cancelled “Las Vegas” and left stuff hanging in the last episode.
They are the worst.
ABC is a spinoff from NBC, they used to be NBC blue and red, they were forced to spin off their “weaker” network. Guess that worm has turned.
I’m not familiar with RTV, but I have heard of “The Bold Ones”, although it went off the air the year I was born, so never saw it in prime time. I remember watching the CBS Sunday Night lineup in the ‘70s even when I was little, but the best were starting to fold by then (such as Mary Tyler Moore) and All in the Family became Archie Bunker’s Place. I still watched them faithfully along with my other CBS childhood favorites, such as The Jeffersons, Alice, One Day At A Time, until they were all gone by 1985.
By then, the relatively newer NBC shows were dominating on Thursday nights, and like the prior CBS ones, I watched those all faithfully until they folded one by one, Cosby in ‘92 (its finale, alas, airing right after the riots were occurring in L.A., which I narrowly escaped being in, the only regular show they aired in between the live news coverage), and Cheers in ‘93. The crap that slowly replaced these shows was largely forgettable. I hung on to watch Seinfeld and Frasier, but I really detested “Friends”, aimed at my age demographic. I thought the people on the show were idiots. Frasier was the last sitcom I watched with any regularity on NBC until it, too, folded in ‘04 (but they moved it around the schedule, so I was missing it towards the end).
The sitcoms on the other networks in the ‘90s and ‘00s were either silly or aimed at kids (I did watch That ‘70s Show and Bernie Mac on Fox, two fairly good ones, but started gravitating towards rougher-edged comedy or semi-comedy ones on HBO and Showtime, like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “Californication” (though the latter can be a bit hard to take and “Curb” is more like a vulgar version of “Seinfeld” if it only featured George Costanza)). Comedy Central still has “South Park”, but cancelled a rapidly declining “Reno 911!”, both of which I like.
I don’t watch too many dramas (aside from the daytime soaps, which my former fiancee unfortunately got me hooked on, especially the ABC ones). I got tired of the grind of either the cop/lawyer shows, that was overkill (I loved “Miami Vice” in the ‘80s, but that was more stylized/eye candy stuff), especially the CSI and Law & Order (I watched the latter in its early years, but it got tedious), and I absolutely abhor the reality tv shows which have replaced the dramas and sitcoms because of cheaper cost... and now I see NBC has eliminated the 10PM ET/9PM CT slot entirely to do Leno so that they 5 hours a week less to fill.
I find myself now clicking on TubeTime on OnDemand, where they put some of my old sitcom favorites from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s astonishing to watch them now, an entire show devoid of wall-to-wall sexual innuendoes, which grow tiresome and often unfunny as we see them today, and yet the show manages to be quite funny. “What’s Happening!!” for example. You don’t have debased and despicable characters, and they retain their dignity. Contrasted with reality shows today where debased, despicable, and no dignity seems to be the daily fare. Too often it makes me ill.
I think with the advent of personal computers and computer games in the ‘80s and ‘90s and the internet in the late ‘90s and the expansion of cable tv from a few channels to hundreds in the same period ultimately caused the decline of the networks, so even if you had skilled programing gurus like the late Brandon Tartikoff, you’d have a big problem. Quality is the other problem, and declining revenues to do good shows and ensure quality (the reason ABC can keep producing 3 hour long soaps is because some of the actors have agreed to pay cuts, otherwise drastic measures would have to be made).
However, in getting more “choice” in channels and other entertainment options has resulted in one serious problem for our country, and that is cultural balkanization, we no longer have the shared cultural events that we once did when our viewing options were limited. I think that had a habit of uniting us as a country, that we had a common reference point with what we watched, but now, it’s worse than I’ve ever seen it and it’s an ever widening gulf.
I loved the Bold Ones and I would go out of my way to watch it today. Also “The Name of the Game” was excellent, in my opinion.
I’m so very happy about Friday Night Lights and Chuck coming back. I wish they were on now, but I will take it when I can get it. My ability to not download Friday Night Lights episodes after they air on DirecTV is going to be severely diminished this year with NBC not airing it until the summer.
They might be available on Usenet. I didn’t look last year. I may rather wait and see them on in HD on my TV.
They were available last year from some places, but the wait wasn’t as long then. It would be nice if they were on Hulu, but I’m sure they won’t be for obvious reasons.
And Hill Street Blues.
-PJ
I caught up on all seven seasons of Adam-12, and am now almost done with season two of Emergency!.
-PJ
No, don’t have that. Already shelling out a fortune for Comcast. I wonder about cancelling the bulk of it, since I rarely watch the movie channels (so much of it is junk).
I checked for RTV, and although there lists an affiliate for Nashville (with the call letters WKRP, I kid you not), I went through all the channels on my Comcast system, but they don't carry it. There's so many channels now, it's hard to keep up, though. I did just find "ThisTV", however.
"I remember "Archie Bunker's Place," especially when Edith passed away, it was very sad to see Archie in their bedroom all alone and talking to Edith while holding her slipper."
Haven't seen that ep in awhile, it's still heartbreaking. My grandfather, a Scottish immigrant (a generation older than Archie, fought in WW1), adored the character of Archie, he only got to see the first 5 seasons or so of the show before he died. I don't think he could've handled watching that episode, because he buried 2 wives when they were still young (30s for his first wife, 47 for my grandmother), and Edith was very similarly named to my grandmother, Edna. I could've pictured that scene with my grandfather packing away their belongings.
"Yeah, Cosby was a classic. I miss Alf too. Family Ties as well. I liked the discussion between Alex P. Keaton and his parents. I also remember "Quantum Leap" too, during the LA Riots in 1992, there was debate whether to show the week's episode or not, it is where Sam leaped into a young Black medical student who got caught in the 1965 Watt's Riots."
Funny that Michael J. Fox wasn't a Republican but a Canadian Liberal. He might've been a mild influence (his character, at least) in making me a Republican. I liked "The Golden Girls", too, and that had its series finale only about a week after Cosby did, I remember seeing it in Amarillo, Texas en route home from our California trip (we were in San Diego, spending the day in Tijuana when they read the verdict in the trial - had they read it the following day instead, we'd have been (no joke) driving through South Central L.A. at that time of day. We had to give L.A. a wide berth and went to Las Vegas, instead. They were rioting there, too, which we didn't know until we got there).
"Yeah, it seems like comedies today and for the last 15 years or so have appealed to the lowest common denominator. Some of them degrade into sex humor, I'm not a prude, there is a time and place for it, plus it gets trite real fast. "South Park" is fun though."
I'll tell you where it really started, and that's when Fox was launched in 1986, specifically "Married With Children." People don't remember now how much of an uproar there was when that show premiered, threats of boycotts and the like. I was starting junior high school and my mother did not want me watching that show. One of the shows producers, Michael Moye, had previously done a favorite show of mine on NBC which sadly only lasted a season, the Jason Bateman vehicle "It's Your Move" (after Bateman was forced off another favorite show of mine at the time, "Silver Spoons", because he outshone Ricky Schroeder and was clearly endowed with an exceptional comedic gift). MWC was SO different than all the other sitcoms up to that point, which almost always had some sort of moral to them, this show was just vulgar and had no interest in having any redeeming quality. It was funny to a degree, but these weren't the kind of people you'd ever want as neighbors, let alone as friends (they were pretty rotten people).
The second show to lower the bar was the one that was essentially launched as the anti-Cosby, that being "Roseanne." The argument for that one was that it was a more "realistic" portrayal of the White working class, messy house, unattractive looking parents, pain-in-the-ass (or weird) kids (albeit not as over the top as "Married..."). My former fiancee and her family loved that show, they felt more like they could relate to it as working class (and also from Illinois), but me personally, I didn't really know many people like that (I was sort of in that vague area, below the level of the Cosbys but above the Conners). The main problem I had with the show, as with "Married..." was that both featured families that reveled in their low-class status (I don't mean in income, because you can be rich and have no or low class) and mocked those such as Cosby's Huxtable's who were trying to portray an ideal family, one whose children were taught to go out and achieve, to get an education, to make themselves better people, and to be decent human beings. Cosby was trying to accomplish something positive here, and he was mocked for doing it, and I thought that ultimately was a real shame. The culture at large would certainly be better for trying to emulate the Huxtables rather than the Conners or the execrable Bundys.
Notice, too, that once a lot of the '80s NBC shows were cancelled one by one, they started to replace family-style shows with more urban, younger singles-themed, until there were, IIRC, no family-hour/family-style shows left on. Once it was "Friends" and that other dreadful show, "Will & Grace" (which seemed less an exercise in comedy, but a pure-PC show which made it a rite of passage for umpteen high-end actors to make a guest appearance to show they "approved" of the agenda of the show, which was my main problem with it - the same exact thing that happened to "Ellen" on ABC, which started out as a "Friends"-style ensemble, and when the lead decided to go public with her orientation, turned it into an unfunny PC "ram-the-gay-agenda-down-our-throats" exercise). Also equally offensive were actors, tv execs and other talking heads telling the public they MUST watch these shows and be tolerant/accepting of their agenda. Since when did we expect unfunny sex-laden PC shows to be mandatory viewing for the public ? Whatever happened to entertainment ? Or uplifting the public ? More lowering of the bar to pure filth and garbage, for which got awards for their "courage." I watched an ep of "Will & Grace", and I never laughed once, the people on the show were horrible, just shrill caricatures of human beings, people you wouldn't want to know in real life.
"Mom loves the CSI/NCIS shows and they are OK, but there are SO MANY OF THEM! They spawn out like a family or rabbits it seems. I mean they are high tech versions of the old board game, Clue, when you think about it. I mean there are only so many ways you can say, "OK, Colonial Mustard did it in the dining room with the alien laser pistol." B-)"
Yeah, I know, absolutely ridiculous. CBS should be renamed the CSI channel (just like NBC be renamed the Leno/L&O channel).
"Jay Leno, NBC is rolling the dice on this one and I don't think it will work. Will a show geared for the 11:30 PM timeslot work at 10:00 PM. I don't know, my gut tells me no."
We'll find out soon enough. I don't really watch those late night shows anymore. When I was finally allowed to stay up, I watched the last years of Johnny Carson, followed by Letterman (before he transmogrified into the despicable, vicious old Commie sex pervert), and Bob Costas. I knew when Carson went off the air (also in '92, like so many of those quality '80s shows), that was going to be the end of an era, and the start of a really crap newer one. I never really warmed up to Leno, I mean, he was OK when he filled in for Carson from time to time, but I just thought he was missing something. I stuck with Letterman when he went to CBS and appreciated his bringing back Tom Snyder, who did a real class-act show following Letterman's (and Snyder really improved with age, I was too young to watch his "Tomorrow" show when he preceded Letterman in the '70s, but caught clips of it, and he could really be hard to take, and abrasive and in-your-face). Tried to watch the guy that took over from Snyder, but lost interest over time. Watched Conan a bit, but I could take it or leave it.
I was thinking, too, you know the real problem with these shows over time went far beyond the host, it was the guests themselves. In the old days (well, pre '90s), you had people you wanted to see and wanted to hear tell stories, wanted to hear perform & sing. Today, it's wall to wall garbage. The guests suck, the music sucks worse. Vacuous twits that aren't interesting and have nothing much to say. Pretty faces and empty souls. When the old timers passed away, there just were fewer people I cared to see interviewed. It seems like the last old-timer left is Don Rickles. Rickles is a national treasure, and I hope he lives to 200. When he dies, we're really going to lose something special. The last non-PC comedian who could get away with anything, yet he has not an ounce of personal vindictiveness in his schtick, all for laughs (contrast that with Letterman's passive-aggressive hatefulness, he's not only a nasty, vicious old bastard, he believes everything he says, and probably is even darker than that. I made the comment that after he had his heart surgery, they merely removed it, because he certainly lacks for one now).
"Yeah, I have to remember, it was a different time and place. The late 1970's and 1980's. You still had the big three networks, lots of indie UHF stations and for the last half of the 1980's, a fledgling FOX network. You have a good point, even if I had ten Brandon Tartikoffs, or a army of them, you might not still be able to catch that lightning in the bottle again. At that time, if your cable system had 15 or 25 channels, that was a lot then, we have hundreds now."
Exactly.
"One of my hobbies is collecting old radio programs. I have a collection of old NBC Monitor Beacon clips from 1955 to 1975 and there was an interview with John Chancellor in 1975 on how diverse radio has become at that time. He said back in the day where radio united the nation more and more people listened to most of the same things but starting in the 1960's, you had divisions starting where you had easy listening stations, news, talk (what there was with the then "fairness doctrine"), rock, pop, have metal, soul, urban, Black and so on and Chancellor noticed how divided we have started to become whereas we used to be more united as Americans, not a person from Pittsburgh, Chicago or Nashville, but Americans. I'd like to pull that clip from my other computer and trasfer it to my new "$300 Wal*Mart Special" but this flu is making me achy and I don't want to go through it right now. B-)"
It was an excellent observation. Although, absent choice, if we're all listening to the same thing or narrow band of options, we're more like a Communist country. So there are upsides and downsides to choice and an expansive number of options. I don't think we could go back to it, either. I can't imagine where we had just one time to catch a show and if you missed it, you were crap out of luck. I like to be able to watch a show in my own time if I can't do so when it first airs.
"Getting back to TV, there was the same thing up until around 1990 or so although we saw cracks much earlier. Ed Sullivan's show is a good exhibit where he always had something for everybody, Topo Gigo for the kids, The Rolling Stones for the teens, stand up comedy for the grown-up's and opera for the high-brows out there. I don't think Ed Sullivan would do well in today's world."
Worse, Sullivan was unattractive (resembled an uglier Dick Nixon) and he had a weird speaking voice (couldn't say "show", always said "shoe"). A face for radio, as they used to say. You'd have people kill today for the ratings he got, even on his worst show.
"I do long for those days, I really miss the early to mid 1980's a lot and when I dream I'm back then, when I wake up, it is a bummer. It does nt seem too long ago for me, yet seeing what is going on now, it is a different era and it does seem long ago. It's funny how we went from Reagan to Obama in 20 years. If you told me that in 1984 or 1988, I would have laughed you all the way to the Moon."
Yeah, I don't know what happened. It's like the country was like the equivalent of a frog being slowly boiled alive. You can't toss 'em right into the boiling water. You put them in cold and slowly turn the heat up until its too late for the fella. I feel like I woke up in "The Twilight Zone", it's that bad. Clinton's election in '92 was a bad sign, I was 18 and that was my first election, and I was absolutely convinced he was going to destroy the culture, so much was ending that year from the good ole '80s. It was seriously depressing for me. Even winning the Congress in '94 wasn't really enough to stop the cultural slide as I had personally hoped. Flash forward 15 years and I can say with a straight face, this isn't the country I grew up in anymore. Something just died, and I don't know how we can ever get it back again. Not to say the '80s was Nirvana, it had downsides, and I had my own problems then, I just couldn't have imagined it would be this far gone by now. :-(
The last I heard, “Life” was definitely cancelled. (Sob! I loved that show!) But they always brought it on in January, not in the fall. Maybe if all their other shows tank in the ratings, they might bring “Life” back to life? One can hope.... :)
The one I watch isn't an HDTV, another one in the house is, but with the switchover to digital, you can't get anything without a converter box. Even prior to that, with the rabbit ears or the old antenna we had on the roof, our signal was highly subpar. Hard to believe we made do with that for the first 9 years we lived here until cable became available around 1982/83.
"Didn't hear about the Las Vegas rioting. Thank God we didn't have any here in Pittsburgh. We did have one when Martin Luther King was assassinated but it was small."
The L.V. rioting was underreported. When we were in San Diego (La Jolla) preparing to leave the morning after (we drove cross-country), it threw our trip plans into disarray. We were going to drive along the coast through the O.C. to Long Beach, see the Spruce Goose and Queen Mary (my mother rode that ship in the '50s in an Atlantic crossing), and then proceed up to downtown L.A. through South Central. Because it was pandemonium (at least how the news covered it - in fact, we didn't even know rioting had started in L.A. until late in the evening when we got to a restaurant and wondered why everyone in the joint was watching the tv in the bar, we soon found out), we realized going there was highly unwise. We went up the interior instead through to San Bernardino and up into the mountains - from there, you could see the smoke from the fires off in the distance towards L.A...
We drove out to the desert and spent the night in Barstow (that I remember well, since Cosby's finale aired then, I watched it alone in the motel room when the folks went out to dinner). Next morning, we made the heretofore unlikely side-trip to Death Valley (it was a little too hot to be visiting, just a smidge past the tourist season - I think it was 110 near the lowest point when we went), we then drove into Las Vegas in the evening (remember, Death Valley & Vegas were not a part of our trip plans, this was the substitute for L.A.). Now, we got to the outskirts of the city on the NW side and stayed in some large motel. We went to have dinner in the casino area and I said, within earshot of other diners and the staff, that I wanted to go down to see the Strip lit up at night (the only worthwhile thing to see there, frankly, and I was underage for gambling, just short of 18). I almost set off a panic in the restaurant when several people told me point blank, "You can't do that !" I'm like, "Well, why not ?" They said there were isolated attacks by Blacks against White motorists along the Strip, tossing garbage cans through windshields, etc (because everything was focused on L.A., all that "minor" stuff was being ignored by the media). I was annoyed, but what could we do ? We had made the trip to Vegas for nothing. We did go down there the next day in broad daylight without a problem, but it wasn't the same. Never did go back there since, and a lot of the old hotels that made up the Vegas I saw on tv growing up have now been demolished.
"I think Alex P. Keaton and his sister Mallory assured us that we were not alone in being conservative and it was a help. Damn, I miss those days. I know Michael J. Fox is liberal though. He came out for stem cell research, I have no problem with that although using them from aborted babies is wrong, but adult stem cells are OK."
Justine Bateman sure was hot, even if she was a bit of a dope (well, the character). Like Fox, my aunt has had Parkinson's now for over 30 years (she was in her 30s when she contracted it, now almost 70). For the first decade or so of it, the symptoms weren't much noticeable. By the mid '80s to late '80s, she started getting the shakes and tremors more noticeably and needed higher and higher doses of meds. By the mid '90s, it necessitated risky brain surgery to control the worst parts of the symptoms, but it effected her speech to the point that she became incoherent. She is now in the most advanced stages and no longer speaks and suffers from dementia (looks like a shrunken, little old lady, older than her age). I've not seen her in 13 years just prior to her surgery (partly because my own health went downhill in the '90s and I could no longer travel), I don't think I'd want to now, sadly. :-(
"Hmmmm..... I remember having a similar dicussion about MWC with a fellow Christian co-worker back in 1994 or so. He made the same point as you where they showed Al Bundy to be a man who's all thumbs and a bumbling fool. Even "The Simpsons" do it as well with Homer. He thinks it was a plan to make men look bad, they did their job, but they also made most women look like skanks."
I enjoyed The Simpsons for a time (it was essentially launched with MWC as a cartoon segment during the Tracey Ullman Show commercial break lead-ins), but grew tired of it. Of course, it wasn't the first show to portray the male leads as bumbling (I mean, look at "I Love Lucy", where Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz could be dunderheads). But it's one thing to be funny dumb and mean-spirited dumb, and I think The Simpsons went too much for the latter, and MWC was exclusively the latter. I could tell from the studio audience alone on MWC, those people were like animals from the zoo being thrown red meat, a lot like the same audiences you'd see later on garbage shows like Jerry Springer. Once you start lowering the bar, it's hard to set it back up again (and when you try to, you get mocked for doing so by the cultural elites, y'know, the same idiots that think Roman Polanski didn't "rape-rape" young Samantha Gailey).
"Ricky Schroeder was cool as well and he is a well known conservative today. One time I saw Schroeder "riding shotgun" with Charleton Heston on Bill Maher's show. He did a good job."
Oh, I don't mock Schroeder now. When I mentioned "Silver Spoons", the unfortunate dust-up that occurred between him and Jason Bateman, and the insecurity from Schroeder's parents because Bateman clearly was upstaging Ricky (they didn't even want Bateman to have an opening intro credit), which led to his being effectively dismissed from the show, and it was never as good from that point on. Ricky had "pet friends" that were inferior to him and wouldn't challenge his supremacy as star (although even young Alfonso Ribiero, who also had a comic gift, had to be restrained a bit). At the time, I harbored ambitions of going into show business, I took drama courses and the like, and was always found to be the "superior actor" during our shows and plays, but I was a pain to work with, and I liked upstaging people. The drama teacher tried to fix my wagon with giving me an unholy level of individual roles at the end of season variety show, twice as many as anyone else (6 or more parts, I was in EVERY sketch, which isn't the norm), but I went in and executed every part flawlessly, from playing a weary old janitor (at the ripe old age of 9) in an "interpretation" of the theme from "Cheers" (then only in its second season) to an impersonation of the legendary Roy Acuff (well, this is Nashville) trading terrible puns with another girl playing Minnie Pearl, all the while I had to do yo-yo tricks while doing the dialogue (and I had no idea how to yo-yo). All this in front of a crowd of between 500 to 1,000 people. What's amazing is I did the whole thing without so much as breaking a sweat. I found the key is to disregard all the eyes on you and just stare over the heads towards a point on the back wall (well, I know it worked). I can't believe that's over 25 years ago now. Don't know where the time went...
"Another show I liked was "Wonder Years," when that show ended, I was bummed when Kevin said that his father passed away "two years later in 1975." (the show ended in 1973). My parents divorced when I was 10 in 1976 so it hit home since I didn't have much of a father figure when I was young."
That was a good one, too (I had a crush on the actress playing Winnie, she was my age at the time, but was playing a few years younger to the other actors). That was a buzzkill when they said the father died, and it killed any reunion show possibilities, too. It's funny if they did the show now, it would be set a year after its 1988 premiere. When the show did its finale in '93 was actually the night I technically graduated from high school (a year late). I didn't technically attend the school, I had an assigned teacher to my house (due to ill health on my part). My parents actually attended the graduation that night while I watched the finale of "The Wonder Years", which sounds a little odd on its face, given that I never attended a single day of class there. It would've been weird for me to have gone and collected a diploma in a robe amongst hundreds of complete strangers, y'know ? So my parents picked it up for me. Rather anticlimactic. Lot of backstory to that, several people on FR already know it. Not pleasant.
"The Huxtables were upper middle class, maybe lower upper class, but still they told their kids to get out there and learn something, make something of yourself, at least don't be a burden on society. Maybe they are/were seen as the 1980's version of the Cleavers from "Leave It To Beaver," but still it was a standard to aspire to. You might not make it 100%, but even if you make it 70, 80 or 90 percent of the time, you're doing good. Still I do see the Huxtables as realistic."
Cosby himself opted to end the show not with some big, explosive finale or some weird crap, but something very simple and poignant, that of Theo's graduation from college. Anyone who watched the show from the start realized that the Theo from '84 might never have ended up that way, as a bit of a slacker and later learned he was dyslexic, but he overcame that. Cosby was always an enormous booster of education, especially in the Black community where it has often been sorely lacking. He used to wear sweaters/t-shirts on his show to advertise Black colleges and the like. It was a big deal when he advertised Meharry in Nashville (where my father worked for 3 decades), and he delivered the commencement address on a few occasions. He knew that having Theo graduate might inspire other young Black males to improve themselves (the fact that aired on the night by sheer coincidence of the Black rioting in L.A. was astonishing, and rather a sad reflection on the state of affairs).
"I'm sure there are Conner families out there, but "Roseanne" is like the lowest common denominator, certainly not someone to emulate. You can have the income of the Conners but still you should have your pride and sense of shame to guide to to a better standard."
Plus the show got ludicrous towards the end, I stopped watching actively in the last 3 seasons. I think they killed off the father, then won the lottery, and a whole bunch of weird stuff, totally unrealistic. But certainly not a lot of positive messages. Roseanne, of course, has since turned into a classless pig and rabid, hateful moonbat.
"Yeah, it seems like a lot of shows have PC agendas or just want to be crude with sexual references or be political. Crap, when I watch TV, I'd like to escape from that for a while."
I was watching the soap "One Life To Live" today and they have a Mayoral election going on in the show, set in an upscale suburb of Philadelphia between the two female leads on the show... each trying to outdo the other in being as far-left as possible (specifically on gay rights). I found it remarkable how out-of-touch the writers are, especially in this climate, with the one woman (usually the villainess) initially as the more "Conservative" (of course, the right-winger has to be the bad guy, the former Mayor having ostensibly been a Republican, opposed to gay rights, who was running a drug-dealing ring out of his office selling to kids), with her trying to not only be pro-gay marriage but now pretending to be a lesbian wanting to marry her campaign advisor in order to win votes.
They even have her using Zero's campaign slogans, too. I don't know about you, but if the writers got out and paid attention to the country, they'd realize that a radical social agenda is next to irrelevent in a municipal election that is more likely to be about crime, making sure garbage is collected, good schools, roads are maintained, illegal immigration, etc., especially in an environment of astronomical unemployment unseen since FDR's Great Depression. They still think it's 2006 or 2008, anti-GOP or allegedly anti-Conservative environment. In that fictional town of Llanview, you'd have a 3rd candidate in reality blasting both of the women for pandering to the perverts instead of clamoring for a more timely paving of potholes. They're acting like the city is San Francisco.
"It's like when I catch a Cosby re-run, it was nice to think how great the 1980's were and the fun times I had and I would give my left hand to relive them again. I have nothing against Ellen DeGeneres, in fact, I thought she would make a good hostess for "The Price is Right," but please, don't shove the homosexual, or any other, agenda down our throats."
I find her rather borderline grating (not as bad as the screeching harridans on The View, but you have to be pretty horrible to match them, with the despicable Whoopi and the old slut Barbara Walters). I tried watching "The Price Is Right" but Drew Carey looks out of place and uncomfortable. You can't replace Bob Barker. That class of old game show hosts doesn't much exist anymore. I was thinking Wink Martindale could do it, but he's long in the tooth as well. I was a fan of "Tic Tac Dough." Another thing I miss from the '80s were all the great daytime game shows. I loved Richard Dawson's "Family Feud." Even stuff like "$ale of the Century." Then you had Dick Clark's $64,000 Pyramid. And a whole host of others, now it's just all gone except for "Price." The only reason Bob Barker became such a treasured institution (his creepy backstage behavior of near Letterman proportions) is because he outlasted all the other non-syndicated game shows (although Pat Sajak, who started his career here in Nashville, and Vanna White still do their thing on "Wheel of Fortune", but that's a non-network show, although it still airs on our Nashville affiliate just before the evening primetime lineup). Of course, they have the Game Show Network with the old favorites, but I don't much watch those. It's just a shame they can't do any decent new stuff (I'm not big on that "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" or that other one they had "The Weakest Link" with that old English bitch who seemed to root for people to lose, which I thought was plain nasty).
"Yeah, I know B-) You have like 3 or 4 CSI's and now two NCIS'es Mom loves those shows, they're OK, but it is like if you eat a five gallon bucket of chocolate ice cream, even if that is your favorite, you're going to hate it for a while. NBC is putting all their eggs in the Leno basket."
They better hope Jay can carry the eggs to market without smashing them all. We'll know within a year how well he does. Of course, if I were Jay, or that old a$$hole Letterman, I'd just take all that money I earned and simply retire and go do what I wanted (although I hope Letterman is sued into the poorhouse, he earned it).
"Rickles is a class act. Others I can think up offhand are Jonathan Winters and Jackie Mason. Mort Sahl is a good one too. He started off as a comedian at the Jewish resorts in the Catskills. One time in 1967, subbing for a talkshow host on WNBC Radio, he made the point on how the Democrats botches up the wars and added "I know my history too, the question is, how long do we have left to write any?"
I've only seen a small amount of Sahl. Winters I saw as a youngster on "Mork & Mindy" doing his schtick with Robin Williams. I thought he was great as the menacing moving-man driver in "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", especially when he demolished the service station with his bare hands, so to speak. Jackie Mason ABC tried to give him that "controversial" sitcom "Chicken Soup" (why it was controversial, I don't even remember, it seemed like it aired for about 2 episodes and got canned). Mason is a Conservative, and he does a comedy routine from time to time which gets put up here on FR where he goes after liberals. Jackie's problem, however, is that he is a bit too "Borscht Belt"-trained for public consumption, like a lot of the old-time Jewish comedians, for which a lot of people have trouble understanding. He mumbles in his routines that often requires you to re-listen to what he's saying (he's intelligent, without question, it's that his delivery is so deadpan and he's not entirely clear in his speaking, like you need subtitles). Rodney Dangerfield sort of came out of that same old school of comedy, but he kept the politics out of it and did a lot of bawdy, but funny stuff, I was a big fan of his. He was comic gold in "Caddyshack", and I still quote lines from him and Ted Knight's Judge Elihu Smails (Knight, of course, was a bonafide WW2 hero, and one of the most decorated, too, which a lot of people don't know). I was a loyal viewer of Knight's "Too Close For Comfort" where he was great playing more the straight man to the cloyingly earnest (and gay, but not out of the closet yet) Jm J. Bullock. I was heartbroken when he died during the run of the show, still far too young.
"I feel that was with The Bamster (Obama). Letterman, you hit the nail on the head. He was funny once but now very crass. Leno is OK, but Carson was one of a kind."
Carson was a liberal, but he didn't go overboard with it. If he got a bit too much with the politics, as he got a little too rough with Reagan in one monologue, I believe Nancy phoned him up and told him to cut it out, and he did. Imagine that happening today and the host complying. I think Carson was at his best when he had Rickles on, especially when Rickles broke his cigarette box while subbing and Carson lost it and crashed his "CPO Sharkey" show filming in the next studio over. Thinking of Rickles for a moment, he was like a lot of comedians the networks tried to shoehorn into traditional sitcoms (ditto Winters and Jackie Mason, not to mention the brilliantly gifted, but highly erratic Andy Kaufman, also gone too soon), often meeting with failure. Even trying that with big movie stars and entertainers, like Sammy Davis, Jr., who was usually far too big for the subpar crap they gave him (although he was fantastic in his first appearance on "All In The Family", but his later appearance on "Archie Bunker's Place", where Archie planted one on him was a bit more awkward and too deliberately staged and hokey - plus I doubt the Sammy from the first ep would've wanted to come across the bigoted Archie again, since his planting the kiss on Archie's cheek initially had a lot more weight and was so unexpected, and probably meant more to Sammy personally, considering all the racism he REALLY battled all his life on his rise to fame, and knew "telling off" Archie wouldn't be quite the same to him (or the White bigot viewers) as merely planting a kiss and leaving Archie absolutely floored. Comic gold expertly mixed with effective social commentary, that left you rolling on the floor in laughter. They can't do that effectively anymore with the hyper-PC crap so devoid of real humor - and try poking fun at the unfunny left, they are as bigoted and hateful as Archie started off, but unlike Archie, he was a veteran and pro-American, something that can't be said for most of the left).
"Yeah, he was like more of the host/ringmaster of the show who had the talent to look for good talent and/or had the ability to hire people under him to do so. Mom always said, "he had a big head." B-) Still he had his show from 1947 to 1971, a good, long run."
Although that was 24 years, you look at the period from say 1985-2009, it doesn't seem "as long" between then and now, but the gap from '47 to '71 was staggering, going from early post-war well into Vietnam when the culture changed so dramatically, and not entirely for the better. Imagine in '47 when you had to dress up to go out just about anywhere, but by '71, everyone except the older generation was dressing like slobs and hippies to go out to events. Look at '85 and we actually recouped a little in the style department in hindsight from '71, but today, I don't know, it seems like it's all over the map.
"Yeah, they say 1972 was the year the 1960's really ended. To me, like you, 1992 was the year the 1980's ended for me. When Clinton was elected, you would have seen a grown man cry at my house, me. Same with 2008 with The Bamster."
I was so disgusted when Clinton won in '92, I wanted to leave the country and move in with my aunt and uncle in Switzerland. That was my first election, and I was absolutely incredulous the country would elect that trash from my neighboring state and my phony Senator as Vice-President ! That was the "change" of that era, ick. Flash forward 16 years and my state of TN in the past election, it was like 1972. Zero was reviled here (most of the Dems here were for Hillary, very few were for Zero, except my Congressman), and the GOP won the legislature, so we went the opposite to most of the insane rest of the country. It was a GOP year here, as it will be even more next year, most likely.
"If I could have froze myself in suspended animation, I would have done so in the 1990's. Except for a few things, like South Park, Final Fantasy on the Playstation and the cartoon, "The Tick," the 1990's was kind of a humdrum time where our standards have fallen. I thought with 9-11 and so on, we would have learned from that but it has gotten worse, we got the Bamster last year. I feel like somewhere I have landed in the Twilight Zone or some weird, parallel world I slipped into without knowing."
The last half of it I was so ill I barely experienced it. The GOP should've been trying to reclaim the country but only did so on paper, all the while things crumbled behind the scenes, as you said. Such subpar leaders (even Dubya in this decade), a rising tide of mediocrity and scum and ever-declining standards. You feel the palpable decline of our country and too many pushing through and supporting things that will destroy everything our nation was founded upon, which may lead to another civil war. A house divided cannot stand, as Lincoln said, and when half the country has values, morals, and ethics polar opposite to the rest, how long will we stand ? Even if we win back Congress next year, the Governorships, etc., it may be a momentary backlash that cannot begin to correct the deep-rooted problems that have been growing and being cultivated by dark forces over the past several decades. It just seems now to be as bad as I've ever seen in my lifetime.
"I often joke where I keep on hoping that this is one BIG BAD DREAM and I will wake up and it will be 1983/84. B-D B-P If that was the case, man, I will have lots to write about. Three things though, how would I stop 9-11, the election of Bill Clinton and the election of Obama?"
You'd have to go back even further, at least with respect to the 20th Century. The mishandling of WW1, which would spawn WW2, Hoover's mishandling of the 1929 crash (letting it run its course rather than interfering, which would've stopped FDR), without FDR and the Depression and WW2, a totally different country. No spoiling rotten the generation of brats born to the parents who went through the Depression and wars, no cultural backlash, no far-left social radicalism and decadence, and everything else. We wouldn't recognize the country today, but I'll bet it would have exceptionally higher standards and a lot more personal responsibility and better morals with people unafraid to wear a Christian/Jewish ethic on their sleeves instead of hiding it away as if they're backwards or perverts.
"Had you come to me in 1984 and told me that we will have Barack Obama as President, after explaining who he is, I would laugh you all the way to the Moon."
Of course, if you explained how he was cultivated by the left and utilizing the disgusting exploitation of minorities and corruption of the Chicago political machine, how he'd get there would not be hard to understand -- but how the country would've been bamboozled enough and manipulated and lied to about who and what he is by the culture, the media, etc., and gone along with it is the more bone-chilling part. Of course, in 1984, I was a young Democrat supporting Je$$e Jack$on and Fritz & Titz, told Reagan was going to blow up creation, so I was part of the brainwashed (m)asses. But the difference was that I was just 10 years old.
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