Daily Archives: July 1, 2023

Lisa Marie’s Week In Television: 6/25/23 — 7/1/23

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As a part of my effort to get caught up with all of the potential Emmy nominees, I watched a lot of television this week.  This was a week of binging!  Here’s a few thoughts on what I watched:

1923 (Paramount Plus)

A western set in the 1920s, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren?  Seriously, what took so long?  Between watching Hot Fuzz last week and binging 1923 this week, I’ve also come to newly appreciate Timothy Dalton.

Are You Being Served? (Sunday Night, PBS)

The womenswear staff had to temporarily share space with the menswear staff!  No one got along but the audience loved it.  This show is single-handedly challenging all of my assumptions about the natural superiority of British humor.

The Bear (Hulu)

I was dreading watching The Bear because everything I read about it made it sound like the type of depressing show that I usually can’t stand but, having now binged the first season, I can now say that it was far better than I was expecting.  A lot of that was due to the steady and empathetic lead performance of Jeremy Allen White.  I’m looking forward to binging the second season.

Beavis and Butt-Head (Thursday, Paramount Plus)

Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head attempted to abduct Tom Anderson so that they could experiment on him.  Unfortunately, their anal prober broke down but luckily, Tom was able to repair it.  However, once he found out what it was for, he announced that he didn’t want to join the Elks that badly and he walked out of the flying saucer.  Meanwhile, teen Beavis and Butt-Head tried to convince Cody to let them play his video game.  Cody’s parents loved Beavis and Butt-Head.  Apparently, this week’s episode was the second season finale.  It was an okay wrap-up.  As always, I enjoyed the Tom Anderson stuff.  Cody and his parents were kind of boring but at least we got to watch Beavis and Butt-Head beat each other up while watching a relaxation video.

Dirty Pair Flash (YouTube)

On Friday night, I watched the fifth episode of Dirty Pair Flash.  Lilly and Yuri were supposed to go on a stakeout but Lilly had a date.  Yuri was not happy.  Personally, I was on Lilly’s side.  Just because you have a job, that doesn’t mean that you don’t get to have a life!

Fantasy Island (Tubi)

You can read my thoughts on Fantasy Island here!

Forgive or Forget (YouTube)

I watched an episode on Thursday.  Robin Givens was giving people paternity tests.  Robin yelled at all of her guests for being a bunch of cheaters.  I watched another episode on Friday, in which Robin was ordering even more cheating men to “get into the doghouse.”  Robin was very loud and very shrill and so was her audience.  Say what you will about Mother Love’s style of hosting, at least the sound of her voice didn’t induce migraines.

A Friend of the Family (Peacock)

I finally watched this miniseries about how Jan Broberg was abducted not once but twice by the same friend of the family and oh my God, was it ever creepy!  It’s easy to watch the Brobergs in this show and dismiss them as just being unbelievably naïve but, as the Jan mentioned in her introduction to the show, it was a different time.  This miniseries featured excellent performances from Jake Lacey, Colin Hanks, Anna Paquin, and McKenna Grace.

Jenny Jones (YouTube)

“Stop dissing my dreams!” children said to their parents, who refused to support their show business dreams.  A flustered Jenny Jones encouraged the parents to be more accepting of their kids.  The show that I watched on Thursday was over 20 years old and none of the kids became stars.  What a bunch of losers!  Shame on them for wasting everyone’s time.

King of the Hill (Weekday Afternoons, FXX)

I watched two episodes on Friday, both of which were personal favorites of mine.  First, Hank was happy that Bobby was getting into church until Hank discovered that Pastor K was a long-haired skater.  This episode featured the classic line, “Don’t you realize you’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock and roll worse!”  This was followed by the episode where Hank was excited that his new neighbor was a former Cowboy until he discovered that “Big Willy” Lane wasn’t the hero that he thought he was.  These were two excellent episodes, funny and heartfelt.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Prime)

The final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was brilliant, with the time jumps reminding us that the story isn’t ending even if the show is.  My main fear was that the show would do some sort of alternate history thing to save fan favorite Lenny Bruce but, though the temptation was undoubtedly there, the show didn’t.  If Midge watching Jeopardy with Susie in 2005 didn’t bring a tear to your eye, I don’t know what to tell you.

The Master (Tubi)

I wrote about The Master here!

Only Murders In The Building (Hulu)

I enjoyed the first season of Only Murders In The Building but, even during that season, I was aware that the show would probably end up becoming a bit too self-satisfied for its own good.  I could forsee a future of slumming stars stopping by to hang out with Steve Martin and Martin Short.

This week, I watched the second season with a bit of trepidation.  I did end up enjoying it, even if the second season didn’t quite have the thrill of discovery that made the first so likable and replacing Sting with Amy Schumer just confirmed my fear that the show is heading towards the trap of celebrity self-indulgence.  That said, Steven Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez continue to be delightful and hopefully, the show will survive season 3’s addition of Meryl Streep to the cast.  (Like many talented people, Meryl is at her worse whenever she’s slumming.)

Paul T. Goldman (Peacock)

I watched this non-fiction miniseries on Monday night.  It basically featured an apparently mentally disturbed man explaining his paranoid theories about why his marriage failed.  To be honest, it all felt a bit mean-spirited.  Paul T. Goldman didn’t seem to be in on the joke and he made some pretty serious accusations against people who weren’t there to defend themselves.  The whole thing held my interest but still felt pretty icky.

Perry Mason (HBO)

It’s a shame that HBO has cancelled Perry Mason.  I watched the second season this week and I found myself very much enjoying its stylish portrayal of 1930s Los Angeles.  The story itself didn’t do much for me but the show was such a visual treat and Matthew Rhys was so well-cast as Mason that it was still compulsively watchable.

Shrinking (AppleTV+)

This week, I finally caught up with Shrinking, which is a dramatic sitcom about therapists and their patients.  I laughed more than I was expecting to at the show’s dark humor but, to be honest, the main appeal of this show is watching Harrison Ford prove that he’s still one of our best actors.  Between this and 1923, it’s hard not to regret that Harrison Ford waited so long to start doing television.

Ted Lasso (AppleTV+)

It’s finally over!  I was never as huge a fan of Ted Lasso as some people were and the third and perhaps final season didn’t really hold my interest when I watched it this week.  (Admittedly, some of that could be because I felt a bit rushed with the Emmys coming up.)  Jason Sudeikis is a likable actor and, even if the show wasn’t my favorite, the final episode did warm my heart a bit.  I will say this: if this show was your  favorite, I understand why and I don’t think any less of you.

Wednesday (Netflix)

I enjoyed Wednesday more than I expected I would.  Netflix has a pretty uneven history when it comes to horror adaptations (remember when Case and I used to suffer through their Sabrina show?) but Wednesday was enjoyable and, of course, Jenna Ortega was perfectly cast in the lead role.

Welcome Back Kotter (Tubi)

I wrote about Welcome Back, Kotter here!

Yellowstone (Paramount Network)

This is another show that I meant to watch earlier but I only got around to the latest season this week.  I loved the mix of political melodrama and gorgeous scenery.

Yes, Minister (Monday Morning, PBS)

Jim Hacker made the mistake of thinking for himself during a television interview and talking about the need to cut back on wasteful government expenditures.  Fortunately, Sir Humphrey was able to remind Hacker of his proper place.

Retro Television Reviews: Welcome Back, Kotter 1.9 “Mr. Kotter, Teacher” and 1.10 “The Reunion”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC  from 1975 to 1979.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, Mr. Kotter fights for his job and, even worse, has to have to dinner with two old acquaintances from his high school days.

Episode 1.9 “Mr. Kotter, Teacher”

(Directed by Bob LaHendro, originally aired on November 4, 1975)

Gabe tells Julie a joke about two men who were both named Bernstein.  The punchline is, “You don’t want me, you want Bernstein the Spy on the second floor!”

At school, Gabe has got a problem!  When Woodman step into the room to observe Kotter’s teaching style, he’s stunned to discover that Kotter and the Sweathogs are sitting in a circle on the floor and that they’re talking about their future ambitions.  Freddie says he wants to own the world’s tallest building and call it the Boom Boom Building.  Barbarino says that he wants to be an actor like Marlon Brando and then he and Epstein act out a scene from The Godfather.  (Incidentally, John Travolta does a pretty good Brando.)  Gabe is amused but Woodman is not.  Woodman demands that Kotter teach from the textbook.  Kotter points out that the textbook is out-of-date and there’s nothing in it to which the Sweathogs can relate.  Woodman promptly suspends Gabe and orders him to attend a disciplinary hearing.

This episode suffers from a bit of early installment weirdness and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was originally meant to air earlier in the season.  For instance, Woodman is a lot meaner than usual.  Over the past eight episodes, Woodman has often gotten frustrated and annoyed with Kotter but there’s also been a grudging respect between the two.  That Woodman would be shocked by Kotter’s teaching methods and would try to get Kotter fired as a result doesn’t really fit in with what we’ve previously seen of Woodman.  In fact, when Woodman previously taught Gabe’s class, he revealed himself to be a good teacher who was willing to engage with the students on their level.  Previously, Woodman has been grumpy and eccentric but he’s never really been malicious.

As well, in this episode, Kotter’s suddenly gets a best friend named Charlie Piper (Arnold Soboloff).  Charlie is a science teacher who drinks alcohol from a beaker.  He attends Gabe’s disciplinary hearing as a character witness and, at one point, mentions that he’s known Gabe ever since the school year began …. four week ago.  Again, it’s hard to believe that the previous eight episodes all occurred over the span of just a month.

Fortunately, the Sweathogs sneak into the disciplinary hearing.  Eptein and Washington pretend to be window cleaners.  Horshack pretends to be a janitor.  Vinnie shows up dressed as a cleaning woman.  They all testify that Gabe is the best teacher that they’ve ever had.  The arbiter of the case, Ms. Riley (Hope Summers), is moved by their testimony and Gabe keeps his job, though he is told to start using the text book.  Gabe responds by putting the book on his head and teaching the Sweathogs about good posture.

Back at his apartment, Gabe tells Julie a joke about his grandmother and a cursed ring.

This episode wasn’t bad, it just felt out of place.  I appreciated Gabe’s defense of his students, in which he argued that they weren’t dumb but that they just needed a teacher willing to speak to them about their lives as opposed to someone just requiring them to memorize facts and figures.  But, as I said before, Woodman is a lot more effective as a half-crazed eccentric than as a flat-out villain.  Again, we’ll just describe this episode as being the result of early installment weirdness.

Episode 1.10 “The Reunion”

(Dir by Bob LaHendro, originally aired on November 18th, 1975)

Gabe asks Julie if he ever told her about the time that his Aunt Lucille took driving lessons.  “No,” Julie says, “but I think I’m going to hear about it.”  Not noticing that Julie doesn’t sound particularly enthused about hearing about any of this, Gabe explains that his Aunt Lucille had no idea how to signal when she was making a turn.  Julie gives him a pity laugh.

Despite all the jokes, Gabe is not in a good mood.  Two of his high school acquaintances, Lyle (Michael Taylor) and Mary Frances (Bridget Hanley), have invited themselves over for dinner.  Not only does Gabe resent the fact that Lyle and Mary Francis always seemed to be “perfect” in high school but Julie is also planning on cooking her tuna casserole!  In fact, Gabe seems to be more upset about the tuna casserole than about having to spend a night entertaining Lyle and Marcy Francis.

Naturally, after Gabe complains about the reunion during his social studies class, the Sweathogs put on their best suits and show up on Gabe’s fire escape while he’s entertaining Lyle and Mary Francis.  The Sweathogs even bring food because they somehow know how terrible Julie’s tuna casserole is.  Gabe confesses that he may not be as rich or as perfect as Lyle and Mary Francis but he’s happy because he’s getting to teach a great group of kids.  Lyle explains that he was always jealous of Gabe because Gabe got to have fun as a Sweathog while Lyle always had to be “perfect.”  Gabe learns that it was silly for him to be insecure and Lyle learns that there is more to life than just being fabulously wealthy.  Awwwwwww!

Later, Gabe tells Julie a joke about an Italian man singing opera while barbecuing.  The meat gets set on fire.

This episode wasn’t bad.  It was interesting to see Gabe revealing that he’s not always happy about being an underpaid teacher who is probably never going to be able to afford a big apartment and it was also kind of touching to see how much both Gabe and his students cared about each other.  Still, you do have to wonder why Julie keeps making the tuna casserole since literally no one in New York City is willing to eat it.

Next week: Vinnie gets a tutor!

WTF, Twitter!?

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

You know, I have really been pretty open-minded when it comes to Elon Musk’s twitter but the announcement, made about an hour ago, that there are going to “temporarily” be limits on the number of tweets that you can read during a day may be the announcement that breaks me.

I’m not going to share the tweet here because I’m not sure if someone seeing an embedded tweet on a website counts towards the new read limits but basically, Elon Musk announced that verified users are now limited to reading 6,000 tweets “a day”, unverified users (i.e., those of us who don’t want to spend money to do something that we spent 14 yeas doing for free) can read 600 tweets “a day,” and new users can only read 300.  Elon says that this is being done as a temporary measure to battle spam on the site.

(It is true that there is a lot of spam on twitter now.  Recently, a bunch of obvious bots — i.e., bios that read, “I’m just looking for love!” and such — lay siege to a live tweet that I was taking part in.  It got annoying pretty quickly.  That said, I’ve got a block button and I’ve got a mute button and that’s really pretty much all I need to battle them.)

Elon’s tweet was frustratingly vague.  How temporary is temporary?  By day, does he mean a day per sunrise to sunset or does he mean that you’ll be limited by the number of tweets that you looked at over the previous 24 hours?  If I scroll my timeline, does that count as reading every single tweet that shows up on it, regardless of whether I stopped to look at the tweet or not?  If I see a tweet embedded in a news story, does that count?  If I go back and read my own tweets, do those count?  If I re-read a tweet, does that count as two tweets?  If 600 strangers all reply to a tweet, does that mean that I’m screwed as soon as I click on my notifications?

It’s frustrating.  Hopefully, the backlash — and there is a big one — will lead to twitter backtracking.  Twitter’s habit of replying to the press with the poop emoji was cute at first but now, users have serious questions about their experience and Twitter’s refusal to be clear is no longer amusing.  This isn’t a case of some whiny reporter throwing a fit and demanding to know why Elon refuses to suspend anyone who tells them to learn to code.  This is a case of real users having legitimate questions about something that feels very arbitrary.

If this policy continues, it’ll be the death of live tweeting.  I’m going to continue to try to keep my live tweets going for as long as possible.  I don’t want to have to move everything over to Mastodon, where it seems like 90% of the users are competing to see who can virtue signal the loudest.  But, if it has to be done, it’ll be done.

For now, I will no longer be embedding tweets in my posts here at TSL.  I don’t want to accidentally send anyone over their limit.

Let’s hope this is resolved soon.

I miss the Fail Whale.

Scenes I Love: Julie Christie Meets Connie White In Nashville

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In this scene from Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece, Nashville, Julie Christie plays herself as a famous visitor to the city for which the film is named.  She is introduced to Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson), Haven’s lawyer, Delbert Reese (Ned Beatty), political advance man John Triplette (Michael Murphy), and country music star Connie White (Karen Black).  Julie Christie may be a star in Hollywood but Connie is the star of Nashville.

Karen Black, who was born on this date in 1939, improvised her dismissive line about Julie Christine not even being able to comb her hair.  It was a moment that reportedly shocked the rest of the cast and the crew but it was also a line that perfectly summed up both Connie as a character and Altman’s version of Nashville.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Sydney Pollack Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

88 years ago today, Sydney Pollack was born in Indiana.  Though Pollack got his start as an actor, he soon moved into directing and was one of the key television directors of the 1960s.  He eventually branched out into film, making a name for himself as a director of intelligent and sensitive comedies and dramas.  Though he only directed 21 films over the course of his career, his films received a total of 48 Oscar nominations and 11 wins.  1982’s Tootsie and 1985’s Out of Africa were both nominated for Best Picture.  Out of Africa won.

Pollack also returned to acting in the 90s, making a name for himself as a skilled character actor.  I’ll always remember him from Eyes Wide Shut, intimidating Tom Cruise while playing pool.

When he passed away in 2008, Pollack was remembered as one of the best directors of Hollywood’s second golden age.

In honor of Sydney Pollack, here are….

4 Shots From 4 Sydney Pollack Films

Jeremiah Johnson (1972, dir by Sydney Pollack, DP: Duke Callaghan)

Three Days of Condor (1975, dir by Sydney Pollack, DP: Owen Roizman)

Out of Africa (1985, dir by Sydney Pollack, DP: David Watkin)

The Firm (1993, dir by Sydney Pollack, DP: John Seale)

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Hell House LLC with #ScarySocial

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting 2015’s Hell House LLC!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag!  The film is available on Prime and Tubi.  I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well.  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Get In The Mood For The 4th With These Vintage Posters

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

The 4th of July is just a few days!  If you’re having trouble getting in the mood to celebrate America, I understand.  The past few years haven’t been easy and sometimes, we seem more divided as a country than we ever have.  But I have faith in us, as both a country and as a citizenry.  We’ve survived tough times before and we’ll survive them again in the future.

Here, to hopefully help get you in the mood for the 4th, is selection of patriotic posters from World War I and World War II.

Music Video of the Day: Circumstances by Rush (1978, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In honor of Canada Day, today’s music video of the day comes from Rush.

Circumstances was an autobiographical song, written by Neil Peart, about how he came to be disillusioned with pursuing a musical career in England.  (It was in England where Peart reportedly first came across the writings of Ayn Rand.)  Realizing that stardom waited for him not in London but instead back home, Peart returned to Canada, where he was eventually recruited to play drums in Rush.

Enjoy and Happy Canada Day!