You’ll probably want to wait until the weekend to crack open TV4u.  Before I realized it, I’d watched an entire episode of Highway Patrol.  21-50, bye.

While I’m on this subject, I really should link to

– Hulu (which offers, inter alia, dozens of complete episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ) and to

– the CBS classic TV page (which includes seasons 1-3 of The Twilight Zone and every episode (or nearly so) of the original Star Trek).

A show about the life and times of Supreme Court clerks? Apparently so. Professor Kerr seems to think the show isn’t going to be picked up, and one of VC’s readers claims to have read a copy of the script of the show. The consensus seems to be that “Supreme Courtships” will almost certainly be breathtakingly bad, and the VC reader’s summary of the script he read is cringe-inducing. But it is possible that the show is so awful that it ends up being must-see TV. I am sure that’s what Lat is praying for. :) 

Find out here. 

CNN has this report.

This left me speechless.

I invite you my friends to take time out and ponder something truly sublime.

I am referring, of course, to the old NBC Movie Mystery Wheel and George Peppard in his prime.

No, not The A-Team. Better, much better. Banacek, the solver of impossible crimes and the greatest Polish television character of all time.

After a great deal of pestering from me, occasional TAS contributor and full-time senior editor at the Heartland Institute S.T. Karnick, has finally written a blog post about Banacek and the Movie Mystery Wheel of which it was part.

In his Indianapolis home, Karnick guards his own full-run of the series on VHS from the potential threat of drainpipe climbers and other ne’er-do-wells who might wish to deprive a good man of his innocent pleasures.

Turner Classic Movies is scheduled to show a lengthy 1972 interview of Hitch by Dick Cavett, this evening at 7:00 and again at 10:00, Central Time.  In addition, TCM is showing Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, and North by Northwest.

For a very complete story on how Veggie Tales got to the inconceivable point of trying to remove all references to God and/or the Bible from the show to be aired on NBC, check out Phil Vischer’s blog.  He takes you all the way from the founding of the company in 1990 to bankruptcy due to lawsuit and then to where we are today.

For those outraged Veggie Tales fans, the short answer is that Phil Vischer no longer has any control over the show whatsoever and that clearly hurts.

Either way, it’s a happy coincidence (given my own post of last Thursday) to see that the GOP is thinking properly for once.  Here’s part of the web piece they’ve posted:

“The View’s” Rosie O’Donnell Claims Radical Christianity “Just As Threatening” As Radical Islam And Says U.S. “Bombing” Innocent People:

Rosie O’Donnell Has Contributed To Defeatocrat Candidates Across The Country:

(more…)

In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right.

But it looks like the upcoming HBO documentary about Barry Goldwater is not going to be a right-wing affair, or even balanced.  Check out the paragraph at the HBO site telling us who will be featured:

“Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater includes interviews with Senators Edward Kennedy, Hillary Rodham Clinton (a onetime “Goldwater Girl”) and John McCain (who succeeded Goldwater in Arizona); former TV anchorman Walter Cronkite, humorist Al Franken; TV correspondent Robert MacNeil; former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; author George Will; 60 Minutes Andy Rooney; CBS News’ Bob Schieffer; White House reporter Helen Thomas; political consultant James Carville; former White House Counsel John Dean . . .”

What’s missing from this list?  How about Bill Buckley?  How about William Rusher?  Pat Buchanan, maybe?  How about a few extra conservatives?  I’m predicting a screw-job along the lines of how the party has lost its way, unlike the pristine Dems, of course.

Rosie O’Donnell brought forth a nice round of applause from the live audience of The View when she proclaimed that “Radical Christianity is just as dangerous as Radical Islam!”

A few observations and questions here:

1. I’m guessing the network execs were thrilled. Insulting giant swaths of the potential viewing audience is always a great strategy. Is it just possible that the stay-at-home moms available to watch the show might be more likely a bit on the traditional side?

2. What does Rosie mean by “Radical Christianity”? I tend to think Mother Theresa. I mean, she was really sold out for the gospel and was really, really pro-life. Christians who would run around blowing up innocent people would qualify as bad Christians by virtually any standard. I don’t know enough about Islam to say the same about Muslims.

3. Is Rosie aiming for a political show in the timeslot behind Keith Olbermann? How can a man be so right about sports and so terribly, terribly wrong about politics and culture?

4. Rosie really needs a reality check. What comparable worldwide and organized group of Christians mirrors Al Qaeda? If she means something like the Family Research Council or Focus on the Family, then she’s comparing a group of polite lobbiers and letter writers with literal bomb throwers and head removers. Somehow, I just don’t think it’s apt.

According to this post on the Laissez-Faire Books blog, there are plans are afoot to make a movie version of the coolest British TV series ever.  I wish these people luck, and sincerely hope they can avoid a fate even remotely similar to that of the attempt to make a movie out of the second coolest British TV series ever.

I knew yesterday morning that the fuss over ABC’s 9-11 film was going to end up being overblown.  As I checked out with emergency baby supplies at Target, the elderly female cashier smiled and asked me if I’d be “watching the Mannings tonight?”

Based on the ratings, it looks like the Mannings were the overwhelming choice of viewers.  I was one of them.  For what it’s worth, Peyton is substantially better than little brother Eli at this point, but the Giants have a heckuva running game.  It’s hard to believe they lost given the way they were imposing their will on the ground.

My friend Tom Van Dyke over at Reform Club has a wonderful post on Bush, Iraq, and Tony Snow.  He sees Snow as a man on a rescue mission to help an administration that has sometimes been as inarticulate as its head man.

Back in his internet entrepeneur days, George Gilder wrote convincingly about narrowcasting rather than broadcasting and people tuning in to get the news they wanted from the source they wanted with the viewpoint they wanted.

Wow, was he right. We’ve seen a step in that direction with Fox News. More steps with all the political news sites and blogs on both sides of the aisle.

But I think Michelle Malkin has kicked the process further yet down the field. Check out her new internet television-style commentary site. It looks like television with television style graphics. Really quite impressive just from the standpoint of aesthetics.

One wonders whether she can keep this up on a regular basis (a question the boys at Powerline asked), but it is easy to imagine that small consortiums of the more successful bloggers could easily do something like this and get lots of eyeballs every day. If the blogworld ever develops the resources to do serious reporting, the broadcast medium will be absolutely dead.

The creator of one of the greatest comic characters in the history of television died yesterday in Beverly Hills, age 81.  No reaction yet on the websites of The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club or TV Land, although both will likely have something soon.  The Official Don Knotts Website is here.

Quite a few of the quotes on the IMDB page for the Griffith Show involve Deputy Fife.

how to clap.

Last night’s episode of Lost, as one Corner blogger already noted here, told through flashbacks, that the reason Sayid is a torturer today is not because he was a member of Saddam’s Republican Guard, but because the U.S. Army taught him to be. And it was not some rogue low-level soldiers. Well, I’m sorry, but I will no longer watch a show that defames the members of the armed services in time of war like this.

Update: After posting, I noticed that Warren Bell at the Corner provided an explanation for the story-line–it is the only way to make a torturer likeable. Actually, there was a much easier way to do that: He became a torturer after Saddam’s henchmen killed his family and threatened to kill someone else he loved.

I can remember when the NBA All-Star game was a great event. Certainly a can’t miss venture in the days of three stations and no remote control.

That is no longer the case. The game goes on, but with less interest than ever. Something more is needed to make things interesting and no, I’m not talking about gambling.

A friend of mine has come up with the answer. Click here to check it out if you are any kind of sports fan at all.

As noted below, Judge Pryor appeared on C-SPAN’s “America and the Courts” series this past Saturday. You can watch the interview by following this link rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/ac021106.rm (Realplayer required). If the link doesn’t launch Realplayer, then open Realplayer and use the File-open function and copy and paste the link. The interview begins at 43:10.

The incomparable S.T. Karnick has figured out what we should do to fix the boring SOTU’s:

For example, every good speech is easily livened up by a nice PowerPoint presentation. So, when the President says, “And we will be there until the people of Iraq are truly free!” (half of audience whoops madly, other half sits glumly and taps their fingertips together in sarcastic parody of applause), why not have a slide showing a graph of the amount of freedom in Iraq in 1988, 1994, 2000, 2006, etc., with the columns made up of, say, little inked fingerprints representing the will of the Iraqi people? Or, when the President says that we’ve given $X million dollars to help the people harmed by last fall’s hurricanes, he could click away at the screen, showing images of devastation and then noble federal officials helping out, and graphs in which the bars are composed of piles of dollar bills or loaves of bread or whatnot.

There are more ideas where that came from.  Read on.

Another SOTU, another one unwatched by me.

When I was director of public policy for an Atlanta group a few years back my boss asked me what I thought of the SOTU, I told him I hadn’t seen it. He was semi-irate. How could a person in my position not watch the speech? Don’t worry said I. It reads a lot faster.

Am I the only person who finds these speeches unwatchable? Even with a decent speaker the stupid dance of planned applause lines and the audience drives me insane. When did political speeches go this way? Surely there was a time when the speech was delivered with power as though written into the scene of a drama. Under those circumstances the hearers would only applaud when truly seized with emotion or appreciation. The speaker might even be a little tripped up by the unexpected (better still, unplanned) outpouring of approval.

Kill the applause line. It has already killed political speeches, so we’re just talking about revenge.

I rarely watch TV (except for sports).  However, I have been watching ABC’s Dancing with the Stars.  I have an interest in the show because I have been ballroom dancing for about 10 years.  I take one hour of group class per week, one hour of private lessons, and usually go to at least one dance per week.  In short, I like it.

For those of you who don’t know, the show takes B List “stars,” pairs them with pros, and the couples compete in various dances.  Judges vote on the couples and the masses have a vote as well via phone or internet.  Each week one couple gets kicked off.

One of the celebs was “Master P,” a rapper from the Big Easy. Master P finally got the ax last week, and the cry of racism has surfaced.  One person commented that P was voted off because “if Master P ends up winning this, the White people are gonna start a riot and get P killed.”

P was without question the worst dancer on the show.  He even refused to wear dance shoes, which have special soles and make dancing much easier.  He admitted that he put in about 1/5 of the time in practice that the other couples did.  He was bad, terrible, and didn’t even try.  Objectively, P did not belong on the show. 

What frustrates me is that the race issue even came up.  Even to the eyes of a non-dancer, there was no excuse for P’s failure of effort and inability to even do a basic step in the dances.  No one can defend him.  Yet, when he gets his just reward for virtually zero practice time, the race card surfaces.  I’m beginning to think there will never be a subject or time when race is not improperly put into play.  This silly Master P  business is but the lastest example of race popping up where it does not belong. 

The BBC made Charles Dickens’ lengthy novel into a lengthy  miniseries, which made its debut on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre last night.  If you missed the first installment (of 6 total), you can catch up on it here.  (Former X-Files junkies (male) not otherwise interested in Dickens should click here.)

From chapter 1, “In Chancery”:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking- horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.