bmasters9

Just completed Arthur Hailey's Overload from 1979; as I read it, I kept thinking of, had it been a miniseries or other adaptation for television, who would have played some of the main characters... --Barry Newman and Susan Howard of Petrocelli as Nim and Ruth Goldman --Raymond Burr as Justice Paul Sherman Yale --Barbara Hale as Laura Bo Carmichael --Lloyd Bochner as Georgos Winslow Archambault (Bochner usually played bad guys effectively) --Dana Elcar as Harry London --Jack Lemmon as Ray Paulsen --Kevin Tighe (or maybe even Ron Pinkard) from Emergency! as engineer Bob Ostrander, who gave the fateful order to shut down the trips that ultimately led to Karen Sloan's demise

Indeed, which always makes me miss the days of far shorter ones (like this one from NBC, for Super Bowl XV between Oakland and Philly in 1981 [the first one of three that NBC did w/the 1979 peacock; had to show as link because of being blocked by the league from showing on forums]): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5AaqPEH3H8&pp=ygUVU3VwZXIgQm93bCBYViBwcmVnYW1l

Which is why the original ABC 60s Addams Family (from what I've seen) was far funnier then in B/W (IMO) than many 90s and 2000s and 2010s "comedies" are these days in color-- if that Addams Family were made these days, there'd be a lot of infighting, and Morticia and Gomez would be probably hurling insults at each other, and it probably wouldn't have lasted very long (unless of course it got an audience who loved that kind of stuff, as Everybody Loves Raymond did in the 90s and 2000s on CBS).

Me too on that score! The one thing I don't like, however, is the presentation on DVD (though I'm learning to live with it)-- 9 double-sided discs in three volumes (the first disc in the second volume is hard to keep on its hub).

Bumping this up: halfway through that short-lived 60s ABC Gothic hit comedy The Addams Famlly on DVD (just started the second and final season), and I've now added Gomez and Morticia Addams to my favorites (the players, John Astin and the late Carolyn Jones, played them quite well, and the show itself is far funnier than its CBS competitor The Munsters).

Arthur Hailey's The Moneychangers (50 years old this month; first published in Feb. 1975 [halfway through this old copy that I got from EBay])

Purchased from EBay, and just received and just started: Overload by Arthur Hailey, from 1979 (about the power industry in California, and a fictional power company there)

Another Michael Palmer medical novel, Extreme Measures, from 1991

Michael Palmer's first major medical thriller, The Sisterhood, from 1982 (having finished five of them, thought I'd like to go back to the roots and enjoy his first one)

Murder Off Mike: A Talk Radio Mystery by Joyce Krieg (an interesting idea for a whodunnit, set inside one of America's biggest forms of entertainment)

And here's what, IINM, may have been his first studio-host gig on CBS-- that of the last season of what was then The Prudential College Football Report (1989); I say that because it would be the last season for CBS' halftime studio college gridiron coverage under that name (Jim Nantz had four previous seasons [1985-88] under that name, the first thing he ever did for CBS Sports)...

IMO, so did Dragnet, especially the 60s ones that were all about the "message" (I don't recall "messages" preached in the old B/W 50s ones).

Why don't you like Adam-12?

And a long time ago, Thom McKee on Tic Tac Dough won $312,700 in cash and prizes in 1980, and among what he won was 8 cars (he got one for winning every 5 games; he won 43 games, so he got 8 cars), and he had a good line about how bad game show taxes are and have been in the 1988 book Come on Down! by Jefferson Graham (it's on page 104). He stated, "I pity the people who win on [the daytime] Wheel of Fortune. They only get merchandise--no cash to pay off the taxes. We had to pay the government $70,000. I kept saying, 'What did the government ever do to help me win this?'" Also among Thom's winnings were quite a few trips (far as I recall, he couldn't take any of them owing to his military obligations [he was in the Navy]).

When it comes to game shows, that (IMO) it's actually a good thing if you lose out on a certain prize, like cars on TPIR. Why do I think this? Taxes. What I mean is that, because taxes on big-ticket prizes like cars, motorhomes, boats and the like are unreasonably onerous (they must be paid to California and your home state, and to Washington as federal income tax), a loss of a pricing game that has a car or similar prize in it may be a financial lifesaver (of course, you'll probably still have to pay taxes on what you won in the bidding before you went on to play that game for that car/similar prize, but those, because they are smaller than cars or motorhomes, would probably have less expensive taxes than would be for a car or motorhome; prize values fluctuate on those things, too, so you never know at any one time how much you're out if you win one). Of course, you could always go on Jeopardy!, which only has cash, and then you'd know how much you're out, because cash hardly fluctuates in value, and your taxes are cut out (withheld) from what you get.