All articles filed in television

Imagine producing an animated children’s TV show in the late 1950’s. You don’t have the same budget to make the theatrical cartoons that Disney and Warner Bros. and MGM had. You have to cut corners. You have to be creative. And from this, I bring you Cambria Studios and their budget-basement invention. Synchro-Vox. Synchro-Vox gave…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I binge-watched the first three seasons of the modern Western drama Yellowstone. The show’s good, I’ll give you that. It’s got sweeping cinematic vistas, it’s got complicated storylines straight out of Dallas or Dynasty or Empire, and Kevin Costner chews the scenery every time he’s on camera. Oh yeah, and because…

For a while, the A&E network had a series of slice-of-life reality shows that were, by its very existence, quite popular for a time. There was Storage Wars, where people would bid on the contents of storage lockers (which expanded into Storage Wars: Texas and Storage Wars: New York and a few other international editions).…

If you’re a fan of the show The Office, you are clearly aware that the program you’ve enjoyed on NBC for many years was an American reinterpretation of the British sitcom of the same name. This is not an unusual situation. Many successful sitcoms in one country get re-interpreted and re-cast for overseas distribution. But…

There is an old TV drama plotline that gets recycled every now and again. I’ve seen it on M*A*S*H* and I’ve seen it on The Simpsons. The idea is that after some climatic battle or major event, the people who fought in that event will find a bottle of champagne or some other potent potable,…

Game shows can be fun. They can be challenging, like Jeopardy! or Millionaire. They can be exciting, like Press Your Luck or The Price is RIght. And they can be downright hilarious, like Match Game or The Gong Show. Then there are the game shows that are just straight up silly. This Japanese game show…

I used to enjoy watching Bar Rescue, the reality TV series in which bar consultant Jon Taffer visits various failing taverns and bars across the country and converts them into successful eateries. Notice that I said “used to enjoy.” Because here’s the thing. Most of the episodes featured Taffer yelling at bar owners about the…

Okay. We need to talk. Seriously, we need to talk. In the 1960’s, Hanna-Barbera created several seminal cartoon characters. You know them. Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quick Draw McGraw, Magilla Gorilla, all of them. And they appeared on network and syndicated TV broadcasts for ages. In 1971, the Hanna-Barbera characters appeared in a special…

Originally published in Animato! in 1997, updated in 2007 The Atlanta Flames hockey game just entered its first intermission period, and the television commentators discussed the early action. Most viewers took that cue to head for the fridge, the bathroom, the wrestling match on another station. A few moments later, the next picture the home…