Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

Talk about the latest movies and video releases here!
Post Reply
Message
Author
mkaroly
Posts: 6214
Joined: Fri Jun 17, 2005 10:44 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#91 Post by mkaroly »

Eric Paddon wrote:I literally blame the downfall of "Moonlighting" for driving me away from being a regular network TV viewer for good in the early 90s. Almost everything that debuted from that point on, I've never watched regularly during its first run because what happened with "Moonlighting" exposed the danger of how you can come to care too much about a TV show and then be disappointed by it. It makes you feel gypped for having been involved to begin with.
Yeah - ever since Moonlighting it is rare that I care about characters to that extent (though ST:TNG gets really, really close); in the former's case that crushingly depressing last episode still haunts me...lol...I think MASH was a show where I was really involved with the characters (though I was really young when it debuted and watched it mostly in syndication...I remember weeping when the final episode aired and I still do when I see it). ST:TNG had such a great bunch of actors and characters that it really holds up; and of those characters my favorites were Picard, Worf, and Data...especially Worf, as his character had a lot of depth and story to him. It doesn't get old going back and watching his story arc develop.

It's an interesting question to think about - was there ever a TV show you loved in which you were completely committed and invested in the characters only to be soured by how it all ended that it changed the way you watch TV? Or what experiences have you had with show arcs and final episodes that fulfilled you as a fan of a show in which you were completely committed and invested in the characters? I'll start another thread for discussion so as not to hijack this one.

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#92 Post by Eric Paddon »

I did some organizing of some vintage TV shows today that I only have boot off-air recordings of since sadly a DVD release of them is not likely to happen anytime soon.

"The Lineup"

-This was the best of the "Dragnet" knockoffs that emerged in the 1950s which benefited from location filming in San Francisco where it was set. It starred Warner Anderson and Tom Tully (both of whom ironically had been in "The Caine Mutiny" just before the series debuted, with Tully getting an Oscar nomination no less). Some episodes aired on a SF station in the 1980s from battered 16mm prints which is where these boots came from. It was still quite engaging and even better IMO than the TV version of 50s "Dragnet" which IMO was a better radio series.


"Switch".

-Two of Robert Wagner's three series (we won't count his brief fourth one "Lime Street") are on DVD but this one alas won't make it because the tape transfers used for previous cable airings were lost in the Universal fire in 2008 and they haven't been able to find another set. It's too bad because frankly I like this show more than "It Takes A Thief" where I never really warmed up to Alexander Munday. It's true that "Switch" used up its initial premise of doing reverse cons on con artists very quickly but it managed to last three seasons thanks to the chemistry of its cast with Wagner, Eddie Albert, Charlie Callas and Sharon Gless. Plus, it had some great guest stars too. One of the episodes I watched featured a terrific guest shot by one of the most beautiful TV actresses of the 70s, Barbara Rhoades, and after seeing this incredible Amazon force of nature wasted in so many bit parts (after her big debut in "The Shakiest Gun In The West" a decade earlier) it was great to see her get a spotlight role that showed she should have gotten her own Police Woman type series (and she also IMO would have been the best choice for Poison Ivy if that villainess had ever been shown on Batman).

"Project UFO"

-The Blue Book thread made me pull out the pilot and it still holds up well IMO, by not resorting to the exploitative X-Files approach but by giving us a good Webb style investigatory approach that IMO was marred only by the failure to let the two leads, William Jordan and Caskey Swaim have a more humanizing rapport in the tradition of Martin Milner and Kent McCord on "Adam-12". This was ultimately why Jordan left, to the show's detriment, and was replaced ineffectively by Ed Winter, which also coincided with a poor makeover of the music and also a dumbed down storytelling approach as well.

User avatar
Monterey Jack
Posts: 9712
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:14 am
Location: Walpole, MA

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#93 Post by Monterey Jack »

Started re-watching Lost for the first time since the show went off the air...already halfway through season one. What a great show.

User avatar
AndyDursin
Posts: 34185
Joined: Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:45 pm
Location: RI

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#94 Post by AndyDursin »

Yeah? Even with the fact that the whole series is nothing but the writers painting themselves into corners and coming up with unsolved "mysteries" that were nothing more than crap being thrown against a wall?

I watched every episode, and would never bother watching a second of it again. A colossal joke on the viewer.

User avatar
Monterey Jack
Posts: 9712
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 12:14 am
Location: Walpole, MA

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#95 Post by Monterey Jack »

I will never understand people complaining that Lost "didn't explain anything"...at least 80% of the recurring mysteries of the show WERE explained, in detail. Maybe the answers didn't satisfy many viewers, but they were there. Sure, some loose ends were left dangling (what was the deal with Walt?), but I still consider Lost one of my favorite television shows of the 00's...richly-textured, beautifully-produced, gorgeously-scored, and with a superb cast of characters I grew to deeply love by the end.

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#96 Post by Eric Paddon »

Studio One: 12 Angry Men (1954)

-This is the original live TV production with Robert Cummings, Franchot Tone and Edward Arnold in the roles later played in the film by Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and Ed Begley. I have never been a fan of the movie because I feel it is singlehandedly responsible for giving the public a misleading impression of what the phrase "reasonable doubt" means, not to mention the fact that Fonda's saintly juror IMO crosses the line inexcusably in a number of instances and is just as bad as the ones he ends up condemning.

-How does the TV production compare? One improvement over the movie is that the discrediting of the woman witness because she wears glasses and couldn't have seen what she said she saw is handled better. It is brought up that she wore glasses in the courtroom and they are described as bifocals. This is in contrast to the absurd speculation used to impeach her in the movie based on "facts not in evidence". But aside from that, it was still a very flawed and pretentious Reginald Rose script giving me a reminder of why I have no desire to ever see an episode of "The Defenders" if that ever makes it to DVD. Robert Cummings is more halting and hesitant and not the perfect saint who believes he is without sin and can cast all the stones he likes as Fonda comes off as in the movie, but his arguments for swaying the jury again come off less rooted in the reality of what "reasonable doubt" really means and more through methods that in a real jury proceeding would have resulted in either a mistrial or at the very least Cummings/Fonda being taken out and replaced by an alternate because I still maintain that the minute that "second knife" was produced out of the blue, the entire process from that point on was tainted. Jurors are told *not* to do investigating of their own but here was a guy who went out and did that and produced a knife identical to the murder weapon that he said could be bought anywhere but how do we know that? Maybe the store he got them at only got a new stock *after* the murder? This is introducing new "evidence" in the wrong place that we are not allowed to cross-examine or judge properly. I frankly sometimes get the impression that perhaps Cummings/Fonda is trying to purposefully sabotage a conviction because of his personal feelings about the death penalty and maybe if the charge the kid faced was second degree murder we wouldn't see these shenanigans.

-Granted we learn a lot of prejudices the jurors have but they are also totally irrelevant to judging the facts. I also don't find it convincing when the "old man" witness is discredited by some speculative idiocy about "he wants attention" that is not rooted on any factual understanding. This in fact smacks heavily of the kind of junk one hears when witnesses get discouraged from testifying or coming forward because suddenly their motives are going to get impugned out of the blue. Likewise the idea that the knife wasn't held properly is absurd because when is it an exact science that murders are *only* committed in that fashion with a knife? If the remote "possible" arguments Cummings/Fonda employs at so many junctures (one in a million possibilities actually) are supposed to be given credence why not with regard to how the stabbing took place when any alternate explanation of the facts would from a "reasonable" standpoint MAKE NO SENSE! Frankly, Cummings/Fonda comes off more like a guy pushing for a grassy knoll gunman than a person whose reasonably thought out the evidence. On that basis alone, I have to give the TV script as well as the movie, a giant thumbs down for its false and misleading depiction of what the process is supposed to be like. The real danger again is that too many people have bought into this notion of what "reasonable doubt" means and if that standard were really applied we might never see any convictions.

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#97 Post by Eric Paddon »

The Law And Order franchise

-The only "prestige" TV show post-1990 I have in my collection are much of the various Law And Order franchises. I have the boxed set of all 20 seasons of the original, the first six years each for SVU and Criminal Intent and the short lived "Trial By Jury." I have what I have to confess is something of what can at times be a love-hate relationship with these series in which the things I love about them make me keep watching the episodes I enjoy or discover but when it slips up, boy can it leave me angry. And there are a number of episodes I refuse to watch the instant I check the synopses and discover what the subject is about (any episodes dealing with abortion or gay issues are an automatic no-watch. That means I will never see the episode where Chris Noth's Detective Logan slugged the homophobe council member and brought an end to his first stint with the franchise). So with that said, what is it I do watch and enjoy?

The Good
-The procedural format. The franchise is a throwback to the Jack Webb style of cop/law shows where we see things unfold and play out and are more importantly not driven by ongoing storyline serials that mandate watching a season's worth of episodes. I can go back and forth from a Season 7 Law and Order to a Season 2 or 3 SVU to a Season 1 Criminal Intent to a Season 1 or 2 Law and Order with the original group any time and it doesn't matter. That makes for a much more relaxed viewing schedule.

-Some solid performers in the regular and semi-regular category over the years. Dann Florek's Captain Cragen, who I wish had never been jettisoned from the "mother ship" in 1993 due to PC complaints about lack of women regulars in the cast. I was glad he came back to the fold on SVU where he, along with Hargitay and Meloni, my favorite detective pairings in the entire franchise helped make SVU more palatable to follow. Also, Steven Hill (erasing the memory of his firing from "Mission: Impossible" as the defining moment of his career) and Fred Thompson as the DA's over the years. Dianne Wiest was the one weak-link in that period. After Thompson was gone and Waterston promoted, the show entered its unwatchable on all levels phase for me.


The Bad

-I have never liked Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy. He has always had a quality about him in this role that I never liked in contrast to Michael Moriarty in the first four seasons. If Florek's removal after S3 was unfortunate (I had nothing against Merkerson's Van Buren, I just didn't think the change was necessary) Moriarty's departure IMO was even more so.

-The over-reliance on "ripped from the headlines" cases which too often become an occasion to soapbox on some social issue. Frankly, the shows would have a lot more "realism" if we saw more crimes of the kind that generally *do* happen and are not from the sensationalized mode.

-Detective Goren. I'm sorry but Criminal Intent made a wrong turn when it decided almost immediately to be not about what the show was supposed to be about, which was exploring more things from the criminal's side, and in the end more about giving D'Onofrio a five to eight minute monologue (often in the presence of the criminal's lawyer who for some inane reason will just sit there passively like a wax figure instead of declaring that the proceedings are over) at the end of each show to the detriment of letting the process part of the episode unfold or exploring more the criminals *before* they get found out. Then on top of that as time went on we had to be introduced to Goren's troubled past etc. which I had no more interest in than all the silly stuff about Logan, Briscoe (I liked Jerry Orbach more in his "Harry McGraw" role than I did here), Curtis etc. that had to intrude on the show over the years. Criminal Intent is one of those shows that I can handle more in spite of the lead and this quirk of bringing things to a halt in the final act so we can hear an overly long monologue.

-And the ugly category for me was when Richard Brooks, who had been so good in the original ensemble of S1-3, returned to the show in which the previously likeable character of Paul Robinette was now an Al Sharpton style attorney spewing absolute garbage about the evilness of interracial adoption, and yet the tone of the script was supposed to make us think the guy had progressed forward from his earlier days.

In the end I've found if I can find 40 to 50% of the episodes worth watching over collectively 30 plus seasons of material that's enough to keep me satisfied thanks to the strength of the episodes that are good. If only this format had been devised a few decades earlier! (the only thing close was the 1963 series "Arrest And Trial" which made the mistake of having the second half be done from the perspective of having the defense attorney defending the character arrested in the first half).

User avatar
AndyDursin
Posts: 34185
Joined: Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:45 pm
Location: RI

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#98 Post by AndyDursin »

That's a good summation of L&O Eric, and I agree with the majority of your points. Truthfully I never really got into SVU or Criminal Intent, though the fact that D'Onofrio's massive ego dictated he receive that kind of showcase monologue doesn't surprise me in the least.

It's also a show where I, too, like the fact you can drop in and drop out without a serialized storyline mandating you begin at a certain point -- mainly because the show was always about the specific cases, never about the characters. There was never any need to dive into serialized storytelling since the characters' personal lives had scarcely anything to do with the show. I remember the one time they tried to do "something different" one week -- can't recall what year it was, it must have been during the Noth/Orbach era -- and simply show the various characters without a case, and it backfired spectacularly. It just wasn't what the show was about.

Just to be clear -- my hang-up with, say, a lot of episodic dramatic TV in the 70s and 80s is the characters seldom advanced beyond a certain point in every episode. I don't need LOST every week but the limited dramatic depth of those shows is something that puts me off from watching them to a great degree, as they would settle into a formula, wrap it all up by the end and the characters would be right back where they started. I do generally prefer series with character progression, unless it's something like DRAGNET, COLUMBO or LAW AND ORDER where it's tidy storytelling driven by individual cases/investigations and not so much character-motivated.

As far as the certain casts go, I always liked Jill Hennessy. Always preferred Moriarty over Waterston, though I guess I liked him overall more than you did. I liked the Sorvino/North pairing the best though Orbach was very good. D'zunda's shows I generally missed -- maybe I ought to just go back to them and check them out. Agreed too on Brooks, who I liked when he was on the series as a regular, but that return episode was laughable.

Our next door neighbor, Mark Kiely, was also a guest star on an episode. He's back here in RI, teaching swimming at a local high school, but he played a rapist in the episode "Out of Control" which the IMDB states was from '91 --

http://lawandorder.wikia.com/wiki/Out_of_Control

It's funny you wrote that up considering NBC is planning on bringing L&O back as a 10-episode series with cast members from "the early years" possibly as early as next season --

http://deadline.com/2015/02/law-and-ord ... 201367497/

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#99 Post by Eric Paddon »

I'll give your neighbor's episode a visit soon. :)

Probably the one other complaint I would have about the show regarding its formula is that too often, they would fall into a rut where the most damning evidence against the suspect uncovered by the cops in the first half of the show inevitably gets tossed out by the judge. You could do a drinking game based on a variant of the phrases, "Motion to suppress," and a judge going, "The confession is out.....the tapes that show him doing it are out......" The problem with overdoing this chestnut is that you're making the cops look stupid in the process.

And yes, I do agree with your point about character stagnation on some of the older programs which to me could apply to shows like "Bonanza" which I could never watch all episodes of even if you paid me to try! "The FBI" I also agree wore out its welcome after nine years by stagnating. But many more shows I think did show sufficient levels of momentum in other areas. This is why I'm not among those who think it was a bad move for there to be marriages on "Get Smart" and "I Dream Of Jeannie" because at least it meant they realized that the old formulas had been beaten to death and they needed to try a fresher approach.

One time Law And Order tried to be "different" was the Season 6 finale where Orbach-Bratt-Waterston-Hennesy witness an execution by lethal injection in the opening scene and the rest of the episode is them reacting emotionally to it. Along the way we get the unwelcome distractions of Orbach falling off the wagon, Bratt for no reason deciding to cheat on his wife with grad student Jennifer Garner and then at episode's end we have Hennessy killed off in a car wreck with Orbach as a passenger. First off, what was so idiotic about this episode is that it recycled one of the worst clichés from 1950s-60s shows that tackled the death penalty by having the law people witness an execution and be traumatized by it. I'm not buying the idea that cops like Orbach and Bratt who show up at grisly murder scenes and constantly make light of the situation with morbid jokes while looking at the corpse of the victim would EVER feel so haunted by the sight of something far less grisly ultimately and to someone who deserved it. This was a piece of bad "Hill Street Blues" style writing that didn't belong. And one reason why I preferred Dzunda and Sorvino to Orbach is that the former two were playing solid family men with no clichéd demons like alcoholism (Florek's Cragen was already established as having been an alcoholic so why did we need that with Briscoe?) and bad marriages etc. in the past. Inevitably alas, it seemed like everyone in the whole franchise who was first established as having been married had to go through marital difficulties later on (I don't have the last decade of SVU but I assume that eventually happens to Meloni as well) and that Dzunda and Sorvino were spared this only because of their short time on the series. Frequently I get the picture that Hollywood writers honestly don't know how to write characters who don't have these demons to battle in life because they wouldn't know the first thing about a stable home life (which contrary to myth is what most honest working people do have in their lives). When these problems creep into the stories that's when I'm grateful that "Dragnet" and "Adam-12" never fell into that problem (what they did to poor Detective Profaci in the not very good one-off movie "Exiled" during Season 9 was another unwelcome development).

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#100 Post by Eric Paddon »

Watching vintage 50s-70s TV is always great for those "before they were stars" appearances that inevitably happen like Harrison Ford in a number of back-end of credits parts in some late 60s shows. But just now I saw the one that really tops the list for surrealness. One of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first acting roles (and his first starring one) on "The Streets Of San Francisco", 1977. He plays what else, a down on his luck bodybuilder with a bad temper that stems from being laughed at by those who find the sight of bodybuilding poses amusing. This leads to tragedy in the first act when a young grad student who has coaxed him into her apartment for an interview starts laughing when he poses, he flies into a rage and tosses her across the room breaking her neck.

Karl Malden and his new partner Richard Hatch must track him down and the rest of the way we see Ah-nuld getting fired from his job lifting crates because his strength makes him so good and efficient it makes his slow-moving colleagues look too bad by comparison. Ah-nuld then lands a gig posing for art class students, one of whom is rich divorcee Diana Muldaur who takes a fancy to him and ends up winning the distinction of being the first to kiss the future governor on-camera!

But needless to say Dr. Miranda Jones/Anne Mulhall's efforts to get Arnold to believe in himself etc. come to naught when Arnold has another implausible Hulk-out moment of anger in the climactic scene in Muldaur's home (and for the most contrived of reasons) that fortunately ends with the safe arrival of Lieutenant Stone and Inspector Robbins who promise not to laugh at him and get him the help he needs since they know Arnold is a decent guy who didn't mean to kill the poor girl (just like he felt sorry about previous assault cases he'd had in the Army!).

You watch this and you think you're just seeing a one-shot stunt-casting gimmick like when Johnny Cash played a variant of himself as a killer on "Columbo". Little would *anyone* think of the future Arnold would have in the business after seeing this. Which is what makes it fascinating and a reminder that even if it is an episode loaded with unintentional hiliarity it's one of those reasons why I love vintage TV to see these unlikely bridging of generations in entertainment history.

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#101 Post by Eric Paddon »

My Leonard Nimoy tribute yesterday consisted of the following:

Columbo: A Stitch In Crime
-One of Nimoy's best non-Trek roles as a coldly, calculating doctor who first attempts to kill his partner in a research project, Will Geer, through a heart operation where something will go wrong days later. When nurse Anne Francis suspects something isn't right, he beats her to death and then tries to frame a reformed drug addict she once helped and who he eventually kills as well (the ex-addict is played by Jared Martin, who was later the Spock like character on the short lived "Fantastic Journey" and star of the "War Of The Worlds" TV series). Nimoy ends up being one of the few killers Lieutenant Columbo drops the façade of politeness with at one point, showing just how Nimoy could bring the characteristics of cold logic to a completely different kind of role.

Baffled
-Nimoy did this TV-movie at the same time he did the "Columbo" (a year after leaving "Mission: Impossible") that seems like a failed series pilot as well. The gimmick of ESP/Psychic vision phenomena was quite in fashion at the time and having Nimoy play a race car driver with these gifts that let him see visions of people in potential danger works okay for the TV movie but I think it wouldn't have worked as a series. He does have good chemistry with co-star Susan Hampshire.

Get Smart!
-After he had done both Trek pilots, Nimoy appeared in a Season 1 episode of the classic sitcom as a humorless KAOS killer. It's a surreal moment of an actor taking a job while waiting for the biggest break of his life to come through. I think he also did a "Gunsmoke" this season of waiting as well that I need to look up.

And finally three Trek episodes:

Journey To Babel
The Cloud Minders
All Our Yesterdays

I hadn't seen "Journey" in many years. It's a great episode for Nimoy in showing the troubled but believable dynamics of his family relationships and requires perfect restraint from Nimoy in that moment when his mother slaps him and storms out. He communicates what's inside him the way he then puts his hand against the door and we see him from behind only. The one thing though that doesn't work about the episode is its action dimension because I can't figure out exactly why these renegade Orions would have bothered to have a spy on board to commit murder and sow discord when one of their own ships is trying to destroy the Enterprise. Not enough thought was given to this part of the plot and it comes off sloppy when you analyze it too much, but obviously the focus was to show Spock's family relationship first so I'm willing to cut it some slack there.

"Cloud Minders" IMO gets dumped on too much because David Gerrold wanted a proletariat revolution message that would have been much too over the top for 60s TV and also inappropriate. The episode has a lot of pacing problems and gaps in logic, but IMO the thing it gets assailed for most, which is Spock's fascination with the lovely Droxine (whatever became of Diana Ewing???) is not valid criticism. I think if you watch this episode after "Journey" and consider the dynamic established of how Spock's father came to marry a non-Vulcan woman, then what follows in "Cloud Minders" is a perfectly logical example of Spock showing what he's inherited from his father as far as believable interest in non-Vulcan woman and in a Vulcan context is concerned (in contrast to what emerges in "This Side of Paradise" or "All Our Yesterdays").

"All Our Yesterdays" remains a favorite of mine. Mariette Hartley was probably the first crush of my life and IMO she is one of the most fully-dimensional female guest characters on Trek. Not just because she looks breathtaking in her cavegirl costume but she also comes off as a woman of substance. IMO the Spock-Zarabeth romance here is better and more tragic than even Kirk's and Edith's in "City" because in "City" you never had Edith showing the same level of reciprocal love for Kirk that he felt for her. This would have been the perfect episode to end the series on as opposed to the insufferably awful and sexist "Turnabout Intruder".

Eric Paddon
Posts: 8592
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2005 5:49 pm

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#102 Post by Eric Paddon »

For about the last month or so, I've been doing a kind of experiment in watching vintage TV that more than anything else brings back the entire culture of an era to the forefront as I experience the programs. This started as a project of watching the baseball games I have preserved from the 1978 season (you can guess why, Andy!). But then when I reached September 1978 I decided to turn this into something different. I would start watching EVERY program I have from every genre in sequence in the order of its original broadcast dates. This meant I was mixing in a lot of commercially released DVD shows with some old vintage 1978 off-air recordings with the commercials and also including the baseball, football, Johnny Carson, news and game shows I had from the beginning of September 1978 to when the Yankees won the World Series in mid-October 1978. And along the way here is what I discovered about TV in this era as a whole.

1-ABC in its final year as the #1 network was making the more interesting to watch programs. Even though some returning shows were out of gas and giving us some dreadful episodes as their final seasons began ("Welcome Back Kotter", "What's Happening", "Starsky And Hutch"), they also debuted the best new sitcom of the year in "Taxi" and also terrific returning fare in "Barney Miller" while the second seasons of "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" were proving why they defined escapist fun on a Saturday night.

2-I have always defended "Battlestar Galactica" over the years but getting a chance to experience the pilot and opening episodes in the broader context of what was on the air at the time really makes the show seem even better to me IMO. Amidst some bad formula shows all-around, I really see my point vindicated how Galactica did not go for the low common denominator of "cheesy" but told its stories seriously and dramatically with a truly epic quality that was far ahead of the previous sci-fi series of the 70s. It brought Star Wars style storytelling to TV and IMO raised the bar immensely for TV sci-fi in ways that are still not appreciated alas as all the revisionists think the show was like the following year's "Buck Rogers" which is simply not true.

3-NBC was a disaster zone. My viewing of NBC programs for this period consisted of the returning "Project UFO" which had lost its lead actor from Season 1 and been made over into a show that wasn't as fun as its first season and returning standbys, "Rockford Files" and "Quincy M.E." The former was in decline while the latter was becoming more and more an annoying soapbox program.

4-CBS was better. "The Paper Chase" was a solid new drama that couldn't last opposite "Happy Days". "MASH" I was able to rediscover and see as a funny show when it wasn't going on a soapbox. "All In The Family" was beginning a misguided final season without Meathead and Gloria and the show is just not funny at all. "Wonder Woman" with Lynda Carter in its final year, demonstrated how mind-numbingly BORING the contemporary shows were compared to the WW2 shows from two years before on ABC.

5-Donny And Marie, the last of the variety shows to air weekly on network TV demonstrated why the genre was about to die forever. The shows were universally awful.

6-When you watch a number of different shows in airdate sequence you also start to learn more about the work habits of certain character actors when they pop up quickly on other shows in guest roles. Lance LeGault for instance appeared on "Wonder Woman" and "Incredible Hulk" the same night and a week later on "Battlestar Galactica". And also, crazy fads of the era like disco suddenly come back into focus when you see almost every show keyed into the fad and also get to see some shows with old commercials reflecting it.

7-It's fascinating to watch game shows in sequence in relation to when other programs aired and for the first time realize that when Loni Anderson is appearing on Match Game, the show hasn't debuted yet and she hasn't become a phenom.

8-Sports wise, baseball had fought back to parity with the NFL and even in some areas had gone back ahead. The NFL Studio shows were devoting all kinds of time to the baseball pennant races and post-season, including CBS which didn't even broadcast baseball! NBC even dumped a number of Sunday afternoon NFL games from their schedule so Game 5 of the Dodgers-Yankees World Series could air in the daytime at 4 PM. Just try and imagine that happening today.

9-And in the news, I got to watch stories about Camp David (interrupting the Galactica premiere), the sudden death of a new Pope and the election of John Paul II.

Cultural history revisited for a two month span that was fascinating but I'll never do anything like that again!

jkholm
Posts: 610
Joined: Sun Oct 07, 2012 7:24 pm
Location: Texas

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#103 Post by jkholm »

That's very impressive, Eric. It's one thing to watch several movies made in the same year or listen to songs from the same year, but TV shows and sports and game shows? It sounds like something I would like to do but I don't have the resources. I'll just enjoy what you wrote as a proxy.

User avatar
AndyDursin
Posts: 34185
Joined: Tue Oct 05, 2004 8:45 pm
Location: RI

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#104 Post by AndyDursin »

Pretty soon I expect Eric will talk about his lifelong weekend hobby -- a time machine that he's been working on, enabling him to literally transport himself back to 1978! :D

User avatar
Paul MacLean
Posts: 7031
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 10:26 pm
Location: New York

Re: Rate The Last TV Show Episode You Watched

#105 Post by Paul MacLean »

Eric Paddon wrote: "All Our Yesterdays" remains a favorite of mine. Mariette Hartley was probably the first crush of my life and IMO she is one of the most fully-dimensional female guest characters on Trek. Not just because she looks breathtaking in her cavegirl costume but she also comes off as a woman of substance. IMO the Spock-Zarabeth romance here is better and more tragic than even Kirk's and Edith's in "City" because in "City" you never had Edith showing the same level of reciprocal love for Kirk that he felt for her. This would have been the perfect episode to end the series on as opposed to the insufferably awful and sexist "Turnabout Intruder".
This episode gets points from me for being very well-acted, from Ian Wolfe as the benevolent but exasperated Mr. Atoz (who can't get it through his head that the Enterprise landing party is not from his world), while Kermit Murdoch is terrific as the buffoon-ish Prosecutor (who is also a secret refugee from the future). Johnny Haymer (who was later better-known for his semi-regular role as Sgt. Zale on M*A*S*H) is also very good as the constable ("...he did call him 'Bones'!").

There are also some things that bug me though, like why this alien planet had an era that was identical to 17th century England (and the fact that the historic images Captain Kirk views on the disc are stock footage of a production set in the 18th century!). Implausibly, Kirk is a better swordsman than his opponent -- who as a native to that time period would certainly be better practiced in fencing.

Mr. Spock's phaser is rendered unusable, presumably because phasers didn't exist in the time period into which he and McCoy were thrust -- yet McCoy's phaser worked fine in The City on the Edge of Forever. Music placement in this episode is also less-than-subtle, with overwrought "stings" from previous episodes accenting Spock as he succumbs to the primitive nature of his ancestors.

The concept of a race that chooses to escape certain doom by fleeing into their history is an interesting concept, but I find it implausible that a society that could solve the problem of time travel hasn't been able to achieve manned spaceflight (also, how do they insure that billions of people going back in time won't detrimentally alter later time periods?).

Oh well, as you say, it does have Mariette Hartley in a cave girl costume. Can't carp about that!

Post Reply