Friday, May 29, 2009

Recommended Reading

There are folks who are horrified at the prospect of taking terrorists (or alleged terrorists, and I wish that distinction mattered to more people) and moving them to prisons in this country. As Fred Kaplan notes, our prisons are already full of dangerous terrorist-types.

• Posted at 4:03 PM · LINK

Meat Politics

Not that this has any bearing on whether he's a good president of not...but Barack Obama likes my favorite fast food hamburger.

• Posted at 11:50 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

This is kinda neat. It's a cut-down version (opening, commercials, credits) of The Bob Newhart Show...but not the Bob Newhart Show that you probably remember. This was before that one. It was a half-hour variety show he did on NBC from 1961 to 1962 that received great critical acclaim and many awards. It was somewhat noteworthy for having received an Emmy after it was cancelled, a circumstance that provoked a very funny acceptance speech from Mr. Newhart on the Emmy telecast. After that speech, a lot of folks probably wished they'd watched the thing.

It led to Bob's second series, which was also not the sitcom about the psychologist. Two years later, he surfaced as one of the rotating stars of a CBS variety hour called The Entertainers. You can read about this one over on this page of the Old TV Tickets website. And by the way, we wish the clowns who run that site would do us the courtesy of updating it once in a while.

One of the interesting things I noticed about the clip below is the name of the announcer at the end. It's Dan Sorkin. Mr. Sorkin was the Chicago disc jockey who "discovered" Newhart and who said to Warner Brothers Records something like, "Hey, I know this guy who's really funny and ought to be a comedian." The rest became history so it's nice to see that Bob decided to reward his benefactor by bringing him along.

Here's six and a half minutes of the forgotten Bob Newhart Show...

• Posted at 11:30 AM · LINK

More on Leo Dorfman

Paul Levitz, lord high master of DC Comics, reminds me that among the many achievements of Leo Dorfman was that he created a comic for that company called, simply, Ghosts. It was one of those anthology titles filled with disconnected stories about ghosts and as Paul says in an e-mail to me, "...while it wasn’t a fan favorite (then or in retrospect), it was a disproportionately good seller. When Leo passed, editor Murray Boltinoff never found a satisfactory replacement, and a lot of the title’s distinctive character faded (ouch)."

During the same period, Leo was writing a lot of scripts for the ghost comics that Gold Key was publishing — Twilight Zone, Ripley's Believe it or Not, Boris Karloff Mystery and Grimm's Ghost Stories. One of the editors there told me, "Leo writes stories and then he decides whether he's going to sell them to DC [for Ghosts] or to us. He tells us that if they come out good, they go to us and if they don't, they go to DC. I assume he tells DC the opposite."

By the way: I always thought it was odd that Gold Key was publishing ghost comics hosted by two actual dead human beings, Boris Karloff and Rod Serling. I never wrote for those books when I was working for that company but if I had, I would have tried to write the host's intros by having them say things like, "This story is so chilling, I had to come back from the great beyond to share it with you..."

• Posted at 11:28 AM · LINK

Jay

Jay Leno's last Tonight Show is tonight. It won't be a tearful farewell. It won't even really be a farewell since he'll be back on TV in a similar, earlier position in a few months, Still, this is a good time to say the following, which is that I like the guy. I think he's done a fine job with the program the last seventeen years...and I admire his sheer survival when so many predicted he'd crash and burn in seventeen weeks. Once upon a time, TV columnists were labelling his selection to succeed Johnny the biggest mistake in the history of broadcast television. That was before he was finishing first in his time slot...a feat he has managed for roughly the last thirteen years.

And throughout those thirteen years, there were still folks betting against him, fearlessly predicting his lead could not hold and that it would soon crumble. Rumor has it that NBC's decision to displace Leno with Conan O'Brien was founded in a belief at his own network that Jay would wear out his welcome by '09. Didn't happen, of course...just as most predictions of Leno failure haven't happened.

I've been a fan of Jay's since I first saw him back at the Comedy Store, back in the days he owned but one car and a motorcycle. He'd zoom around on the latter, doing standup several times in an evening at this club or that. He was so tireless they called him Robocomic. Hard work doesn't always guarantee success in show business — nothing does — but if you have anything to offer, hard work can make a fair amount of difference. It did with Leno. So did his reputation for just being nice to others, including some he might have viewed as competitors.

Though a big fan of Mssrs. Carson and Letterman, I was never one of those who believed that Dave "deserved" The Tonight Show and that there was some grave injustice in him not getting it. TV never works like that and besides, I think a strong case can be made that Leno had earned the job by guest-hosting so long for Johnny, doing a very difficult job and succeeding in both the ratings and key demographics. One of those thoughts that many in the industry believed but no one dared speak aloud is that Johnny Carson was able to stay on top those last few years largely because he had Jay as his guest host. Folks forget how often Jay sat in and how he managed to draw pretty much the same numbers but skewing younger.

I've generally liked the Leno Tonight Show, though I feel like neither he nor Dave have been trying very hard for some time. In interviews, Jay has often bragged about his hard work and told the story of how he was writing monologue jokes one night and he flipped on the TV, saw one of his competitors at a basketball game and thought, "Ha! That guy won't have a good monologue for tomorrow's show." The moral, of course, is that Leno gets ahead while the other guy's goofing off...and that's a good moral that makes you wonder why Jay spends so much time playing Vegas and/or fixing cars in his Burbank warehouse.

Still, I enjoy his show most of the time, even though I occasionally TiVo-skip enough to watch him (or Letterman) in about twenty minutes. And I really enjoy the fact that Leno triumphed over all the predictions of failure, showing up all the people who thought NBC would be forever humiliated by their decision. In the last decade or so, he's turned into one of the few right decisions they've made over there.

I have some thoughts about how his new show will fare and how Conan will do as Tonight host. I'll try and post them over the weekend.

• Posted at 9:51 AM · LINK