What was the last TV show you watched?

[MisterCairo]

The last three nights have seen me watch Sharpe's Rifles, Sharpe's Eagle and Sharpe's Company. Thank you Jenn, for the lovely Christmas gift of the special boxed set...

 

[scottyrocks]

There have been some touching television episodes over the years. I was watching Barney Miller - 'Good-bye, Mr. Fish,' the last episode with Abe Vigoda as Sgt. Phillip K. Fish. Brings a tear to my eye every time I catch it, this scene in particular.

The episode is Season 4, Episode 2 - unusual in a TV show to 'retire' a major character so early in a season.

 

[Zombie_61]

There have been some touching television episodes over the years. I was watching Barney Miller - 'Good-bye, Mr. Fish,' the last episode with Abe Vigoda as Sgt. Phillip K. Fish. Brings a tear to my eye every time I catch it, this scene in particular.

The episode is Season 4, Episode 2 - unusual in a TV show to 'retire' a major character so early in a season.

"The rules say you have to retire at 63." Abe Vigoda was only 56 years old when that episode was filmed, but he was always one of those actors who looked older than he really was. Rumor has it some producers in the mid-1980s were heard to say something to the effect of "I need an Abe Vigoda type" because they thought he was dead, particularly after a magazine referred to him as "the late Abe vigoda" around the same time.

 

[Fading Fast]

The pilot for "The Deuce."

Having come into the city as a kid since the late '60s / '70s, I remember the show's '70s version of Time Square well as it captures the visual, the vibe and the characters powerfully accurately. From the pimped-up cars and out-there fashion amidst garbage-spewed streets to the constant sidewalk hustle and low-rent, street-level porn promotion just below the mass-market adverting signs, it was all almost too real - God the city was a mess.

It jarred out of my memory when people would pay young kids to "watch" their parked cars for them as they'd be vandalized otherwise (I assume the kids were working for older kids / adults who collected from the kids as there is no way those kids were old enough to provide any physical protections so they must have been just a link in the racket's chain, but they absolutely did exist).

The story and characters, like most ambitious pilots, are all over the map - trying to do, say, be too much too fast - with too much happening at once, but hopefully, it will settle down into a realistic pace. To be fair, life was amped up and ugly in Time Square in the '70s, so the amped-up pace of the show isn't really wrong, just not sustainable as week-to-week story telling.

And one more thought - we've come a long way as a culture as the arrantly graphic sexual activity of this 2017 HBO series would have qualified as hard-core porn in the time period - the '70s - the show is portraying. We've cleaned up the streets, but under the rubric of art, have moved much that was hidden in peep-show alleys to our mainstream TV viewing.

 

[Doctor Strange]

The two-hour pilot for Marvel's new Inhumans series. Wow, what a mess.

The old Kirby/Lee Inhumans royal family was never going to be a concept that really worked on TV or as a movie nowadays however they chose to spin it, but this is the first real embarrassment for the mostly successful MCU TV side. Besides seeming to come from left field after all the plots centered on Inhumans for several seasons now on Agents of SHIELD, its whole superior-bloodlines-of-the-royal-family concept is regressive, having a mute character at the center of the story is a challenge, the production design and effects are cheesy, and trotting out GoT's Ramsay Bolton as the villain is a cheap shot. And since all MCU projects take place in the same continuity (unlike the DC/WB approach), one immediately wonders why some of those banks of folks we know are monitoring the world at SHIELD and Avengers HQ aren't noticing news footage of a guy in Hawaii making a police car roll over several times just by whispering in its direction.

While there's some fun to be found for old-school Marvel fans (e.g., I never thought I'd see Crystal's costume depicted in live action pretty much exactly as Kirby drew it), it's likely to be a quick casualty of this era when there are way too many superhero projects.

 

[Benzadmiral]

They're doing a rerun of the 1965 TV SciFi show Lost In Space and I just watched the first episode where the Robinson family, their pilot, Major West, a robot and the bad guy, Dr. Smith, have left Earth (on 16th October, 1997!) to journey to a planet in the Alpha Centuri system. The plan is to eventually colonise the planet due to overpopulation on Earth. The bad guy, played by Johnathan Harris, sabotages the spaceship, the ship is hit by a meteor storm and the adventure really begins! Complete with bad acting (and some impressive overacting by Jonathan Harris) but some rather decent special effects.

The show makes a pleasant respite from modern SciFi shows and had I been a ten year old in 1965 I would have probably loved it.

I didn't see the original run of the show as I was born the same year it aired but I did catch some of the later color reruns back in the 1990s. However, when I was a teen I did read the Gold Key Lost In Space comics, so I was well aware of the characters (in fact, the comics first came out in the early 60s, before the TV show, and lasted well into the 70s).

Right, I recall the "Space Family Robinson" series -- that was what Dell/Gold Key called it, right?

 

[AmateisGal]

I binge-watched Netflix's The Travelers a few weeks ago. Humans from the future are able to make their conscious travel back in time and live in a new body because in the future, they know everyone's time of death. So, the new conscious replaces the conscious of the person who died. Their mission is to stop tragedies from happening in the 21st Century - nuclear waste spills, bombs, whatever - so that they can alter their future which is basically a nuclear wasteland. Quite intriguing.

Also been watching Drop Dead Diva, a show that was on Lifetime (yes, I originally thought, Lifetime? I will NOT like this) but it is surprisingly good. (Also on Netflix). A beautiful, aspiring model dies and is sent to heaven; she wants to go back and presses the "return" button on her angel's computer (yes, it's very hokey) and boom! She's back on Earth but in the body of a very successful female lawyer who is plus-sized. It's really well done.

And of course, Season 3 of Poldark started on Sunday! I'm loving it!

 

[HanauMan]

Right, I recall the "Space Family Robinson" series -- that was what Dell/Gold Key called it, right?

I believe that the comic started off just being called Space Family Robinson and then gained the extra Lost in Space after the TV show started.

 

[Doctor Strange]

They're doing a rerun of the 1965 TV SciFi show Lost In Space and I just watched the first episode where the Robinson family, their pilot, Major West, a robot and the bad guy, Dr. Smith, have left Earth (on 16th October, 1997!) to journey to a planet in the Alpha Centuri system. The plan is to eventually colonise the planet due to overpopulation on Earth. The bad guy, played by Johnathan Harris, sabotages the spaceship, the ship is hit by a meteor storm and the adventure really begins! Complete with bad acting (and some impressive overacting by Jonathan Harris) but some rather decent special effects.

The show makes a pleasant respite from modern SciFi shows and had I been a ten year old in 1965 I would have probably loved it.

I was 10 in 1965 and I did love it... until the next fall, when Star Trek premiered and demonstrated what a serious SF TV series could really be.

The thing that I find fascinating about Lost In Space now is that that pilot and some of the first season episodes are so dramatic (*) and serious (I mean, in the pilot Dr. Smith is a Russian agent sabotaging the mission!) The show very quickly devolved into a kiddie show, and by the second season - when it went from b/w to color (not that we had a color TV yet!) and was influenced by the camp of then-huge-hit Batman - it was a popular hit, but you couldn't take it seriously. Carrot-men, green girls floating in space, cowboys in spaceships, an intergalactic department store... Not to mention Dr. Smith's prissy character's idiotic dialog (e.g., to the Robot: "You bubble-headed booby!") Anyway, seeing what the show became for most of its run, the pilot is strikingly serious.

(* One of the standouts of the season is a two-parter called "The Keeper" with Michael Rennie as an interstellar zookeeper who wants to add the Robinsons to his menagerie. It aired over a year before Star Trek's classic "The Menagerie" two-parter.)

Other Irwin Allen-produced series followed similar trajectories... he had a genius for creating effects-heavy SF-lite shows that were initially cool, but quickly became dumb and formulaic. He was no Gene Roddenberry!

 

[Zombie_61]

...The thing that I find fascinating about Lost In Space now is that that pilot and some of the first season episodes are so dramatic (*) and serious (I mean, in the pilot Dr. Smith is a Russian agent sabotaging the mission!) The show very quickly devolved into a kiddie show, and by the second season - when it went from b/w to color (not that we had a color TV yet!) and was influenced by the camp of then-huge-hit Batman - it was a popular hit, but you couldn't take it seriously. Carrot-men, green girls floating in space, cowboys in spaceships, an intergalactic department store... Not to mention Dr. Smith's prissy character's idiotic dialog (e.g., to the Robot: "You bubble-headed booby!") Anyway, seeing what the show became for most of its run, the pilot is strikingly serious...

Surely you know this but, for anyone who doesn't, a long-standing rumor was that Dr. Smith was supposed to be a "temporary" villain who was going to be written out of the show after a handful of episodes, and that Smith's rather abrupt change in personality from "menacing" to "comedic" was due to Jonathan Harris wanting to make a memorable exit; this rumor was supported by the fact that Mr. Harris was billed as a "Special Guest Star". The reality was that Mr. Harris, known at the time for playing "outrageous" characters, grew bored with playing it straight and took it upon himself to give Dr. Smith more "presence".

The "Special Guest Star" billing was done at Mr. Harris' request. Dr. Smith was not in the original unaired pilot; the network's executives watched it, decided the show needed an antagonist, and Dr. Smith was created. By this point the other actors had already signed their contracts and Mr. Harris, an aging and egotistical actor, simply wanted his name to stand out. Mr. Harris was the first actor in television history to receive "Special Guest Star" billing, and that billing remained in place throughout the show's three-season run.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Yes, I actually did know most of that. But I agree it's worth mentioning for those who don't.

 

[MisterCairo]

Sharpe's Enemy and Sharpe's Honour. I had forgotten most of Honour, it was like watching it anew.

 

[Fading Fast]

Episodes 2 and 3 of HBO's "The Deuce."

The show's creators have captured Times Square's 1970s squalor and moral turpitude perfectly - visually it's just how I remember it as a kid. A lot of TV time-travel for me is to places I've never been - Atlantic City in the '20s, a small English village during WWII - but this one takes me back to a place I knew as a kid which is making it more real, more visceral and more interesting.

As the characters and stories develop, the business, cultural, political and social reasons for Times Square's '70s crazy are coming clear. Every thing - chaos include - has very rational reasons behind its existence, one just has to unravel the mix of parameters, limits, rules, regulations, cultural norms, etc., that drive the outcome.

The confluence of a steady supply of fresh hookers (Port Authority Terminal), brutally street-smart pimps (these guys are businessmen the way mobsters are businessmen - they understand markets, customers, employees, etc., but work outside or in partial tacit agreement with the law which requires their own enforcement methods to maintain order), a concentration of demand owing to a culture that still suppressed outlets for pornography and the sex-for-money trade, plus mob influence and police corruption - created a Time Square nexus of well-organized demimonde businesses and people that had a surface of crazy - and it was dangerous, ugly and vile - but an underlying, if brutal, logic.

I'm exhausted after each episode, but getting a closer look and better understanding of the completely out-there world I saw as a kid is fascinating.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Episode 4 of the 1963-1967 series The Fugitive. It turned out to be a two-parter, and I hope I managed to record part 2 last night. This is another of the stories in which Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse) appears, and he is not a 2-dimensional character or one who lives only for his work, exists in his two-room apartment eating TV dinners, and obsesses over closing the Kimble case. Far from it. Gerard is married to an attractive blonde lady, and they have a small son whom Gerard often takes fishing. In this story, he hears about a one-armed man who has been convicted of assaulting a woman in LA, and takes off to check out the possibility that this fellow could be the one-armed man Dr. Kimble insisted was running from the scene of Mrs. Kimble's murder.

The zinger: Kimble is working at a sailmaker for yachts and the like -- in nearby Santa Barbara! Lovely blonde Susan Oliver is in love with him (though co-worker Robert Duvall wishes Kimble would die in a fire), and he wishes he didn't have to move on. Then he sees the same story about the convicted one-armed man . . . and at the climax, we, the viewers, are treated to an edge-of-the seat sequence as we wonder when Gerard and Kimble will encounter each other in the LA courthouse.

 

[Zachary]

Election campaign here in Austria. I’m just watching a TV debate and feel totally fooled by this stupidness since no one talks about subject matters. Media tries hard to destroy the tiniest little rest of trust in politics.

Yes I know politics isn’t allowed here, so I quit this complaint now.

 

[DNO]

Sharpe's Enemy and Sharpe's Honour. I had forgotten most of Honour, it was like watching it anew.

In a similar vein, I just finished the 8 instalments in the Hornblower series staring Ioan Gruffudd. Sure wish they had made more.

 

[MisterCairo]

In a similar vein, I just finished the 8 instalments in the Hornblower series staring Ioan Gruffudd. Sure wish they had made more.

In a similar vein, I just finished the 8 instalments in the Hornblower series staring Ioan Gruffudd. Sure wish they had made more.

Yes, that is the French Imperial Eagle letter opener, and the 1814-15 campaign map reproduction:

 

[Benzadmiral]

In a similar vein, I just finished the 8 instalments in the Hornblower series staring Ioan Gruffudd. Sure wish they had made more.

Is that the Welsh (?) actor who was in Ringer a few years ago with Sarah Michelle Gellar?

 

[Fading Fast]

First episode of Ken Burns' "Vietnam." He has this documentary thing down and Peter Coyote has the narrator thing down. I've been burned out on Vietnam for over 25 years and I'll still watch all 700 hours of this - it's that well done so far.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I watched the entire thing. I didn't really plan to, but I got sucked in and watched almost all of it on the nights it premiered. It's outstanding. I didn't think I could stand 18 hours of Vietnam, but soon discovered it was necessary.

Having grown up in those days with news junkie parents, I recall a lot about how things unfolded... and seeing those events treated in comprehensive detail, with an objective approach from multiple viewpoints and well-observed hindsight, was quite moving for me.