Friday, September 21, 2012

Dancing With the (Classic TV) Stars

 While most of my TV viewing time is devoted to shows that aired their last episode anywhere from 30-60 years ago, I do make time for some current series. One of them is Dancing With the Stars.

I’ve been a fan since the first season and have never missed an episode. It’s a beautiful show to watch in HD, with the elegant ballroom set and colorful costumes. And host Tom Bergeron is the best in the business – he has perfect live TV instincts and knows exactly how much to add to a moment while always keeping the focus on the performers.

The celebrities are ostensibly the primary draw, to see if they take to the samba like seasoned pros or get dragged around the floor like a wet sack of potatoes. But like many fans I am drawn more to their professional partners, who represent the apex of the species, and would easily sail past the cutline if eugenics ever made a comeback.

Ultimately, I am a fan because dancing is a beautiful thing to watch, especially when it is done well. It is an art form that elevates the spirit.

Of course, long before Dancing With the Stars there were memorable dance moments on television, dating back to Arthur Murray’s Dance Party in the 1950s.

These are a few of my favorites:

Happy Days (“They Shoot Fonzies, Don’t They?”)
This is the dance marathon episode, where Fonzie partners with Joanie even though he’s exhausted from pushing his bike 12 miles. At the climax, the Fonz performs a Russian folk dance called the Kazatsky with an athletic, showstopping virtuosity that is completely unexpected from the character or from Henry Winkler. Who else was shocked at how good he was? Plus you also get Charlene Tilton as a snotty cheerleader, so this is a win-win all around. 



 I Love Lucy (“Lucy Does the Tango”)
In its final season, I Love Lucy was still capable of comedy greatness. The scene in which Lucy and Ricky dance the tango, while Lucy has dozens of eggs hidden under her shirt, generates the longest sustained laugh in the series’ history – longer than the chocolate factory assembly line, Vitametavegamin or the grape stomping in Italy. 

The Monkees (“Everywhere a Sheik, Sheik”)
This is my favorite Monkees scene. It’s an ideal showcase for Davy Jones’ English dance hall panache, and it comes off as both polished and silly at the same time. The girl, by the way, is Anita Mann, an Emmy-winning choreographer who has worked on everything from Sesame Street to Solid Gold




Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Data’s Day”)
Dr. Crusher teaches Data how to tap dance. While the scene is mostly played for laughs, it is obvious that both Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden know what they’re doing.

Taxi (“Fantasy Borough: Part 2”)
I was never a big Taxi fan, to be honest, but even if it never quite connected with my personal taste I can certainly recognize its outstanding writing and remarkable cast. The series’ second season concluded with a big Broadway number performed to “Lullaby of Broadway.” Maybe the dancing here isn’t so precise, except for Broadway vet Marilu Henner, but the scene wins you over on enthusiasm alone. You can’t watch this and not smile. 



The Honeymooners (“Young At Heart”)
Jackie Gleason was a big guy who was remarkably light on his feet. Along with the golf lesson (“Hellooooo, ball!”) Ed Norton teaching Ralph to dance “The Hucklebuck” certainly ranks among the best moments in the classic 39. 



Frasier (“Moon Dance”)
Niles’ unrequited love for Daphne had percolated for more than a season, before the duo danced a sizzling tango that brought his hidden feelings to the surface – and crushed them moments later. Still, Daphne in that devastating red dress was a sight to behold.




Friends (“The One With the Routine”)
Siblings Ross and Monica get on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and introduce their “famous” brother-sister dance routine to a nationwide audience. It was a toss-up between this and Elaine’s dancing on Seinfeld for a best-of-the-worst dance moment. Friends rates the edge for the performance’s go-for-broke gusto, and for inspiring years of tributes at proms and weddings. 




Sunday, September 16, 2012

The 10 Biggest Emmy Acting Snubs

The Emmy Awards are this month, an annual tradition always followed by another tradition – criticizing the results of the Emmy Awards.

When compiling a list of the 10 biggest Emmy snubs, the challenge is not to find ten but to narrow a list down from 30 or 40. I’m sure you have your own Emmy outrages, and I’d love to hear about them. Here’s mine.

1. Jackie Gleason (The Honeymooners)
The only two shows from the 1950s still in daily syndication around the world are I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. As blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason created one of television’s most iconic characters, and with this series and his variety shows he was a staple of the medium for decades. But he never won an Emmy. 

2. Agnes Moorehead (Bewitched)
A four-time Academy Award nominee who played opposite Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, Agnes Moorehead always considered Bewitched to be a pleasant but hardly challenging endeavor. But her portrayal of Endora was sly and refined, particularly in the series’ first two seasons when the scripts were more sophisticated. Moorehead won an Emmy for a guest appearance on The Wild, Wild West, but was never so honored for Bewitched, though she was nominated six times. 


3. James Arness (Gunsmoke)
For 20 years and more than 600 episodes, Marshal Matt Dillon kept the streets of Dodge City safe on Gunsmoke. The challenge of keeping one character compelling to audiences for that length of time, particularly during the tumultuous period of history from 1955 to 1975, would be daunting for any actor. But while the outside world progressed from “Rock Around the Clock” to “The Hustle,” from Marilyn Monroe to Farrah Fawcett, Arness was a Gibraltar-like presence on television.

4. Patty Duke (The Patty Duke Show)
At age 16, Patty Duke was already an Oscar winner (for The Miracle Worker) when she began a three season run as “identical cousins” Patty and Cathy Lane. The dual-role bit has been done dozens of times on TV, but the subtleties Duke brings to how she varied her two roles went far beyond an accent and a change of hairstyle. Watch the dinner scenes, where she makes one cousin left-handed and one right-handed. When playing opposite herself, she collapses her posture as Patty, so Cathy actually appears taller. It’s an absolutely extraordinary performance on an otherwise lightweight sitcom. 


5. Andy Griffith (The Andy Griffith Show)
The recent passing of Andy Griffith was felt by generations of fans who grew up with his performance as Mayberry Sheriff Andy Taylor. The long-running series brought five Emmys for costar Don Knotts, but Griffith was not similarly honored. In fact, he was never even nominated. Watch his performance in the episode “Opie the Birdman,” then tell me why anyone still takes the Emmys seriously.

6. David Janssen (The Fugitive)
When the final episode of The Fugitive aired in 1967, it receiving an astonishing 75 share and was watched by 78 million people. That record stood for more than 10 years. That’s how invested viewers were in the fate of Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent man convicted of murder. And that’s a testament to the performance of David Janssen, who so thoroughly embodied Kimble’s haunted desperation for four seasons. 


7. Michael Landon (Little House on the Prairie)
From Bonanza to Little House to Highway to Heaven, Michael Landon was one of television’s most beloved leading men. Little House on the Prairie was probably his best chance at an Emmy win, but voters didn’t respond to the series’ homespun charms as much as the rest of the country.

8. Patrick Stewart (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Emmy looks at sci-fi shows as inferior to “real” television dramas, and ST:TNG also suffered by being a syndicated series in an era when the major networks had a near-monopoly on the nominations. Even Stewart’s Royal Shakespeare Company pedigree didn’t merit him serious consideration. During the series’ 1987-1994 run, Emmy nominations for Best Actor in a Drama Series went to the likes of Robert Loggia in Mancuso, F.B.I. and Kirk Douglas in an episode of Tales From the Crypt. But show me another actor who did more memorable work than Stewart’s performances in “The Inner Light,” “Chain of Command, Part 2” and “All Good Things.” 


9. Alexis Denisof (Angel)
As with Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel rarely received any Emmy attention outside of the technical categories. Fans could make a convincing case for any number of cast members, but I’ve singled out Alexis Denisof for creating a character that started as comic relief, and evolved into a dark, brooding authority on the paranormal. In “A Hole in the World,” Denisof’s Wesley has to confront the loss of his beloved colleague Winifred Burkle, and his performance helped inspire one of the most gripping hours of television I watched that year.

10. Lauren Graham (The Gilmore Girls)
I can’t even begin to explain this one. Gilmore Girls fans know it was one of the best shows of its era, and television critics were even more impressed. But during a seven-year run the series received just one Emmy nomination – for Best Makeup. At least it won. Yay. Meanwhile, Lauren Graham delivered Amy Sherman-Palladino’s sparkling rapid-fire dialogue with a virtuosity that would have crushed a lesser actress. The ignorance of Emmy voters takes nothing away from her current status as the Myrna Loy of her generation, smart, sexy and sassy, even in lesser material like Parenthood



Enjoy the Emmy Awards. I think I'll be watching some of these shows instead.  

Saturday, September 8, 2012

My Journey Was Beginning: Dark Shadows

 The first time I wrote a magazine article about television, the subject matter was Dark Shadows.

I was not of the generation that ran home from school to catch this groundbreaking gothic soap opera; in fact I had never watched an episode until the series debuted on home video back in the VHS era. It’s a testament to the show’s enduring popularity that all 1,200+ episodes were released on more than 200 sequential videocassettes. Nobody tried that with Search for Tomorrow.

Dark Shadows aired for five years, barely a blip by daytime drama standards where success is measured in decades. But its legacy is a powerful one, having inspired a prime-time series in the 1980s, a feature film earlier this year and a cult following that endures more than 45 years later. 



I was working at a radio station when a colleague suggested I check it out, and after Volume One of the tape series I was hooked. Distributor MPI Video wisely began the VHS series not with the first Dark Shadows episode in 1966, but with the story arc the following year that introduced vampire Barnabas Collins, so memorably played by Jonathan Frid. It was that story that revived the series’ dwindling ratings, and transformed Dark Shadows into a phenomenon (and had 40-something Frid sharing Tiger Beat covers with Davy Jones and Bobby Sherman).

Vampires are everywhere in pop culture these days, but long before Twilight and True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, and even before Buffy first picked up Mr. Pointy, Barnabas Collins became the most famous bloodsucker since Dracula.

The genius of Dark Shadows was its adaptation of classic gothic horror themes into a sophisticated modern setting that appealed to housewives, college students and even Jackie Kennedy, who was a big DS fan. Vampires, werewolves, mad scientists, witches, ghosts – Dark Shadows had them all. But these weren’t monsters to be vanquished – they were supernatural creatures with souls. As a reluctant vampire repulsed by his very nature, Frid established an archetype that was revived by David Boreanaz in Angel, and that sparkly Twilight dude.



As I neared the end of my first trek through the series, a new magazine debuted called Baby Boomer Collectibles. Its subject matter was all the stuff I already loved – classic TV, boomer era toys and collectibles and cult films. I pitched them on a Dark Shadows piece and they bought it.

I wanted to interview someone from the cast and figured the most accessible would be Kathryn Leigh Scott, who portrayed both Maggie Evans and Barnabas’s true love Josette DuPres. I selected Kathryn because she was one of my favorite actors on the show, and because she had written a book on the series, My Scrapbook Memories of Dark Shadows. I always like when I can acknowledge my appreciation for help with an article by offering something like a book plug in return.

Kathryn consented to the interview, which went very well. Still in my first flush of DS fandom, it was a real treat to speak with one of the stars that made such an indelible impression on generations of soap opera and horror fans.



The article was published a couple of months later – coincidentally, the same month that a Dark Shadows convention was scheduled at a Marriott in Los Angeles. I attended with the friend that introduced me to the show, and looked forward to meeting Ms. Scott and the rest of the cast in person.

The nice thing about Dark Shadows cons, as opposed to Star Trek cons, is that the atmosphere is more relaxed and informal. It’s much easier to have a conversation with the talent without obtaining a colored wristband, paying for the Deluxe Super Gold Convention Package, or being manhandled by the power-hungry morons usually entrusted with security at these affairs.

So it was that on the first Friday night of the con, I found Ms. Scott seated at a table outside one of the ballrooms where most of the attendees had gathered to watch video clips. I introduced myself and held up a copy of the article.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “How are you?” Then she paused and added, “There were a lot of typos in that piece, weren’t there?”

At the time, that felt like getting gut-punched by the head cheerleader just as you had worked up the courage to ask her out. But she was right – there were a lot of typos in there. That early dressing-down probably made me more conscientious about careful proofreading than any editor’s red pencil ever did. So thank you, Kathryn, for that.

I stayed with Baby Boomer Collectibles for the next three years, writing stories about the Adam West Batman series, Mission: Impossible, Bozo’s Circus, Rocky & Bullwinkle and several other shows. Kathryn and I stayed in touch after that first convention, and a few years later her publishing company, Pomegranate Press, published my book on Charlie’s Angels, which also began as a Boomer article. 


So in a way, much of my career as a TV historian and author actually began with that first episode of Dark Shadows. As Victoria Winters says in the series’ first episode, “My journey is beginning, a journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me, and link my past with my future.” My journey may have been less eventful than Victoria’s, but it’s been less stressful as well.

Monday, September 3, 2012

Labor Day Lost: The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon

 Growing up, Labor Day meant two things – the start of another dreaded school year was just around the corner, and I would get to stay up later than usual to watch the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon.

This past Sunday night, the Muscular Dystrophy Association broadcast a three-hour “Show of Strength” featuring pre-taped performances from a variety of entertainers, but there was no tote board, no phone banks and no Jerry Lewis, who was summarily discharged from his duties in 2011 after 45 years of service.

There’s no disputing that, in its last few years with Lewis as host, the telethons had become antiquated affairs. “Watching the stars come out,” meant performances from Charo and Norm Crosby, the same people who were there when I was still in high school. And Jerry Lewis was now turning in earlier than I used to, only to return at the end to unveil the final tote board and sing, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” as the last confetti fell. 



But even well past their prime, there was something comforting about these annual broadcasts, and how they conjured childhood memories of struggling against sleep after midnight, and surviving the boring local segments, which didn’t have the glitz and star power of the Las Vegas national telecast.

Back then there was something exciting about a television special being on all night, and I always vowed that one year I was going to be in for the duration, but I never made it. This was once a show millions of people actually looked forward to watching, despite the grim realities that inspired its creation. And whatever else one can say about Jerry Lewis, it was clear this was his personal crusade. He was strongly invested in every broadcast, and genuinely grateful for the support of the firefighters and the corporate and civic groups who made an annual pilgrimage to drop off a check, and then introduce a short film about their fundraising activities that was never very interesting.

Each year we looked forward to the same regular bits; the tympani roll as the tote board added another million, as the orchestra played "What the World Needs Now is Love"; Lewis receiving a seven-figure check and exclaiming, “Oh, yeah, Oh, YEAH!” in an exaggerated Brooklyn accent, sporting the same awestruck look that Taylor Swift has when she wins another country music award. Other Lewis traditions – banter with Ed McMahon, some good-natured jibes at the floor director, and his comedic orchestra conductor bit. And being Vegas there was usually an Elvis impersonator. In the earlier days it was a guy named Alan, who was actually booked as “Alan,” which may be one reason why he never went anywhere.

And then there were the personal stories of the families touched by neuromuscular disease. These were tougher to watch, but once again it was apparent that Jerry cared about “his kids,” and how much he enjoyed making each year’s “poster child” smile and laugh, while knowing there was a chance that child wouldn’t be around next year. 



When I was a kid, organizing MDA carnivals was a popular fundraising idea, and when I was 5 I held one in my front yard. My parents and I fashioned a few crude games and served refreshments, and had a pretty good turnout from the neighborhood, resulting in our largest ever donation – more than $100. A few years later, I went to Arlington Park racetrack on Labor Day, and said if I hit the Daily Double, I’d donate the winnings to Jerry’s Kids. I called both races correctly, and MDA received a $250 donation.

But telethons were not created for our more cynical times, and even I lost interest over the past decade. I might donate via the MDA website but wouldn’t manage more than an hour or two of the broadcast. Those annual Parade magazine covers of Jerry and the new poster child were now accompanied by stories of disgruntled adults who bristled at the condescension they heard in the “Jerry’s Kids” label, and viewed the telethon as shameless exploitation.

I also felt that after all these years (and more than $1.6 billion in donations), it would have been encouraging to see a little more progress on the treatment front. It’s comforting that our dollars went to buy wheelchairs and send kids to camp, but the goal of a cure seems no closer than when the telethon was visited by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. You can only hear about “promising gene therapies” so many years before wondering if that promise is ever going to be realized.

I can’t be angry at MDA for taking their show in another direction, but what they gained in higher-profile celebrities they lost in heart and sentiment. Whatever the cause of the falling out between Lewis, a still healthy 86, and the charity he served so well, there should have been a more gradual transition that allowed Jerry to step aside with dignity intact. 



But with the end of the traditional Jerry Lewis MDA Telethons, "broadcast across the Love Network," another example of Comfort TV slips away, never to return.