Jipijapa

I love the fact that both these guys are still acting in meaningful projects. Hats off to them.

This is another old show that holds up pretty darn good. It's because of the cast. You LIKE these guys (and of course, the fabulous Julie London - although "Girl Talk" keeps ringing in my ears when I see her). For some reason, Gage and DeSoto still come off as ordinary guys you would like to know, while the guys from CHiPS just seem like blowdried guys who aren't real. Plus, this show did something good and meaningful for society, while still being entertaining. Call me corny, but I approve of that. (I used to use the alert tones from this show as the sound that would play when weather alerts went to my phone. Used to scare the bejeezus out of everyone.)

I disliked the first movie, skipped the second, and went to this one because I wanted to see Robin Williams again :-( My expectations for the movie were a lot lower this time, and the movie met my lower expectations pleasantly enough. I'm guessing if people like Night at the Museum movies, they'll like this one. The funniest thing that happened? My friend, a huge Downton Abbey fan, didn't even recognize Dan Stevens. "Who is that guy?" she kept asking. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing.

Ooh. I'd forgotten about that, too. And thanks for the OLTL info...

Ooh, interesting. (Maverick can be purchased on a by-episode basis from ABC's stock of on-demand shows - on iTunes for instance - but at $2 per episode it's a bit rich for my blood.) MeTV does have a Saturday afternoon block of Westerns though - they're currently showing Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen, among others. Along those lines, it's occurred to me that now that rights owners have opted to sell so many of their movie and TV properties via in-demand -- which accounts for the wasteland that cable TV is these days -- we actually do have the "a la carte" pricing that people have always wanted, except viewers have to pay through the nose to 10 different stakeholders rather than just one (the cable company). I wish that MeTV would have a dedicated sci-fi block though... something more focused than the stuff they play on Saturday nights. I'd love to see Space: 1999 again.

As a teenybopper, I had a big crush on Brian Kerwin (when he was on Sherriff Lobo). Oh, the terrible NBC lineups I watched for my favorites... Was reminded of this when I saw him the other night in Murphy's Romance, where he was very cute and well-cast as the lovably immature ex-husband. Hasn't he been on a soap opera lately? Or am I mixing him up with someone else... The oddest thing about my TV star crushes is that, as a wee little dweeb, I invariably went for blue-eyed blondes. These days, I'm all about the tall dark ones.

My aunt claims that she's been seeing promos (or at least mentions) on MeTV for Maverick. Anybody else heered tell of Maverick coming to MeTV at some point later this year? (I think my aunt must have been mistaken, as I haven't heard any such thing lately)

Sounds like a decent strategy. My standard M.O. for beginning new shows, is to watch the first or second episode of the second season. By then, you can assume that the show has become what it is going to be (first seasons, and especially pilot episodes, are extremely misleading). If I enjoy watching the show, even if I don't know what is going on or who the characters are, I'll continue for a few more and see what develops. If I like the first few episodes of the second season, I'll backtrack and restart with the first season. As for current shows (which is maybe what you meant), I don't have any hard and fast "number of episodes rule," but if I find myself not watching the show one week or putting it on DVR, that usually means I'm done, and I don't fret about it, hoping it will get better. I dropped Sleepy Hollow this season and didn't look back. I honestly don't know why one would watch a pilot episode in order to see if one likes a show (unless it's a new show of course)... they're so often containing characters who aren't yet fully fleshed out, actors who haven't figured out their characters yet, cast members who don't wind up sticking around -- and the pilots are either better-made than the rest of the show, or more poorly-made. They mostly aren't representative of what the shows are going to become.

Bad acting or phone-it-in acting also makes a show seem old. You don't notice the bad acting at the time (and some of it may simply be poor ADR), but when the people on the show don't interest you years later (because the acting is bad), suddenly all the other old-fashioned things seem to be noticeably shoddy, too. The Rockford Files has a lot of the slow pacing you mention (endless car chases! constant squealing wheels! long leisurely establishing shots!), but the acting from top to bottom is lively - from regulars to guests to under-fives - and that, more than anything else, makes the show very rewatchable. There's also something about exceedingly formulaic shows - ones that followed a tight pattern from week to week - that paradoxically, makes them very rewatchable. I'm thinking of Columbo and Mission: Impossible. (And Lord knows, Law and Order lasted forever and a day...) When the show stays committed to its unique formula, that's a good thing. When a show starts to just slide into The Standard Formula Of All Shows, that's when it becomes mediocre and just doesn't have staying power.

Fringe survived where Firefly didn't, for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons is that the head of Fox at the time, Kevin Reilly, reportedly liked Fringe a lot. (Also, Reilly wasn't around when Firefly was on the schedule, I believe.) Fringe was always in danger of cancellation, but the relationship between Fringe's stakeholders (producers, fans, etc) and Fox was never a poor one. I can't think of another endangered show on the cancel bubble, where everyone involved did everything right. The fans trying to save the show had a very positive, creative, reality-based attitude. The writers and actors kept bringing their "A" game for the most part. Fox knew they had a ratings albatross on their hands, but still put effort into supporting the fanbase. At no time did anyone feel like Fox or Warner Bros. was treating the show like garbage. I guess Firefly fans had a different experience, but then again, I think they were dealing with a different regime at Fox, at the time.

Mario Cuomo's passing (not a celebrity, but still) helped me put my finger on why all these celebrity passings are bothering me this year. It's because these people were the famous "grownups" who were part of my world before *I* grew up. They were, in various ways, the adults who I accepted as being at the top of their games in their various fields (politics, acting, comedy, etc). They aren't my contemporaries, but rather they were the people who (for better or worse) I was supposed to look up to. Now the people who were grownups when I was a child, and were doing their best work, are hitting the age where old age takes its toll. Both my parents are still alive, but now I understand that I'm entering the life phase where it's getting closer and closer that *those* most important grownups in my life will also not be around forever. This is why Philip Seymour Hoffmann passing is a shame (he was my age), but Robin Williams and James Garner, et al, passing is a grief. (And I think I count Edward Herrmann among that group as well.) This probably sounds corny, but it makes me feel like I want to step up my own game, as a person and (hopefully) a grownup.

I disliked some of the gratuitous retconning of certain past events in the closing episodes of Fringe (which came awfully close to "messing with the warp core" if you ask me), but the final outcome -- -- felt correct. I would not have been satisfied with the ending if he hadn't reached some sort of apotheosis. ( ) As for the timey wimey contortions of timeline resets and such, I just gave it a lot of handwavium. No biggie. I didn't know that about the origins of Quantum Leap's last episode (recycled script?) which I suppose softens my disappointment at the last episode. However, the ending didn't spoil the show for me. Best show ending for me, at least recently? The Office. I hadn't watched the show for several seasons but came back for the end. When it was casually revealed that (which was all he ever really wanted), I actually cried. And I don't cry at TV. At all.

Yes, he was a great character actor. I associate him with being one of the leading 'Hey, It's That Guy"'s of the 70s and 80s. Wow, this year has just royally sucked for celebrity passings. And there are still a few hours to go...

Yeah, I forgot about Fat Albert. Somehow I never associated it with Cosby, although I know it was his. More shows that were all the rage once upon a time but seem to have few admirers today: Miami Vice. Moonlighting. Comedies that hold up tremendously well for me: Barney Miller and Frasier (Cheers, not so much).

Victor/Victoria was one of the first ones I checked out. (And my respect for Garner went up 100% when I read that he had originally wanted his character to kiss Julie Andrews' character before he knew she wasn't a man... but the studio was too chicken about it, I guess.) Edited to add: Not only that, but Garner actually wanted Robert Preston's part! (according to his autobiography, he was told that nobody would accept him as gay, but "I wanted to try it.")

I had a raging crush for Harrison Ford as a pre-teen. In fact, I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark 14 times in the theater. (That was back when home VHS was prohibitively expensive, so if you wanted to watch something over and over, you had to get your ass to the movie theater.) But the crush didn't last. I'm now largely immune to Harrison Ford. (Nothing to do with his age; he still looks OK.) I wonder why that happens. Lately I've been crushing on the late James Garner, especially when I realized I had seen almost nothing he had actually been in, save The Great Escape and many TV commercials. I've made it a personal mission to watch everything he appeared in. It's going to take a while.

Steve McQueen. Never got the appeal. I didn't like him in ANYTHING. I especially hate watching The Great Escape with my family and all of them rush into the room when McQueen is on his motorcycle. Because nearly any other actor in that movie is cooler and a better actor than McQueen... (not to mention, knowing the story of the making of the movie, how McQueen quit the movie in a whiny snit because he thought his character wasn't heroic enough, and he had to be talked back into it, and they put the motorcycle stunt in there to placate him). Don't even get me started on comic book movies, they have virtually driven me away from the movie theater. DC? Marvel? I don't fucking know or CARE. When did this stuff start taking over mainstream culture? I liked comic book nerds better when they were in their bedrooms being nerds, they were a lot sweeter and more polite. (Also, can you imagine the stars of years past being expected to play superheroes all the time?) When this genre finally dies out (for whatever economic reason), I will dance and spit on its grave. Daniel Craig is a good Bond, but his tenure has been overshadowed by the fact that all of his Bond movies have been absolutely horrible - increasingly so. Skyfall wasn't even a James Bond movie - it was more like Skyfall: The Adventures of MI6 featuring James Bond. As for E.T... I felt defective because I was the only one of my friends who didn't dissolve into a puddle of tears when we saw it in the theater (age 12-13 or so). But I thought it was good. When it came on TV a few years later, I was astonished at how boring it seemed. And, considering the massive success of the movie and what a cultural phenomenon it was, it's interesting to me how few people seem to treasure it today.

This must be the magic year when I finally turned old, because so many celebrity passings this year made an outsize impact on me. I mean, they're just celebrities right? Why should I give a crap? So explain to me why James Garner's death made me compulsively devour every episode of The Rockford Files... why I'm making a point of going to see Night at the Museum (a movie I ordinarily wouldn't care about) to see Mickey Rooney and Robin Williams... and why I postponed an entire Christmas shopping trip so I could sit and watch Bob Hoskins in some BBC remake of The Lost World this morning... I feel OLD and this HURTS!!! (and now Joe Cocker on top of it...)

I've never seen a single episode of The Big Bang Theory!

I don't think the rules ever involved something preposterous, but definitely he was not supposed to leap into famous people or outside of his own lifetime. And, coincidentally, this is when I stopped watching the show. I don't mind when a show violates its bible (ie, character backgrounds etc) or changes its mytharc... but when a showrunner says "there are rules," and then blatantly breaks them because they're running out of ideas, that's a dealbreaker for me. (And I still love QL, btw... but just refused to watch those episodes) My chief escape from the threat of fan Ho-Yay has always been the father-son, or even older man-younger man friendship... the age difference seems to scare off the ho-yay fangirls (and thank god the parental relationship usually does).

I think ho-yay is going the way of the dodo, however, because gay pairings are now more mainstream. Case in point... on Person of Interest, it's pretty much mainstream opinion now that Root and Shaw are the show's actual ship. There's no sense of nudge-nudge wink-wink about it, any more than the usual frisson that comes with a potential actual ship that hasn't come to fruition yet. (Actually, I always thought Root was computersexual, but...) What I can't stand about ho-yay is that very often, the actors don't play into it (or don't care, preferring to play the characters as written), but it becomes so real for the fandom that it takes over every effing discussion about the characters. It's such a cliche, and as such, is boring and unexciting to me. I don't understand the obsession with trying to make hetero characters gay when they clearly aren't written as gay. (Actual gay characters would be so much more satisfying...) That said, in recent years, show writers have been buying into ho-yay and writing it in, which I also find a bit tiresome in this modern age (come on, just make them openly gay or bi, already!), but not as tiresome as the obsessions that are made up of whole cloth. :-) But, it's a free country! Ho-yay away...

I never understood the appeal of the Cosby Show - even at the time. It just wasn't funny. I never laughed. It was like watered down milk. Yet it was so bloody popular. All Cosby news stuff aside, does anyone watch this show in reruns any more? Is it still funny for you? Help me understand. It's been odd to watch the original Star Trek over the years. It seems like original Trek either doesn't hold up, or doesn't get much respect any more. I was never a huge fan but I watched it in reruns along with everyone else, and the better episodes still hold up today. It just seems like the reputation of the show among SF fans has tanked over the last decade, and I'm not sure why. Geeks today are utterly uninterested in Spock. (I do know that I cannot stand the "special effects upgrades" on the episodes now.) This probably belongs in the "unpopular opinions" thread, but I don't think all 70s fashions were bad. Cheap 70s fashion was bad, sportswear was bad - but so it goes in every decade. There was tasteful stuff in the 70s too (Beth, the lawyer from the Rockford Files, had some nice outfits).

I'm also disappointed by the time slot for Carol Burnett...

I hate comic book TV and movies. HAAAAAAATE. I barely go to the movies any more because of them.

I was pleased to learn that the TV remake of The Rockford Files, which actually got as far as a pilot being shot, died a dog's death a few years ago. (All you had to tell me was "Not-James-Garner as Jim Rockford" and, urk...) Why do things have to be slavishly remade anyway? For instance, I'd love to see a *sequel* to the Rockford Files set in the present day. Call it "Paradise Cove," have it be about a private eye (or maybe even a few in competition with each other) who were mentored by old Jim Rockford (RIP, with a black and white photo of Garner visible on the desk of said P.I.), getting into Rockford-esque adventure, with the occasional end-of-episode beer where they sit around reminiscing about things that old Jim Rockford used to do and say. That might actually be a fun show. With new characters, with new names, who might remind us a bit of the old ones. But why just try to repeat old stuff?