All articles filed in television

It’s morning in America, and you turn on the TV. Today, the mornings are populated with a plethora of news and talk shows. But just imagine a time when, at 8:00 every weekday morning, there was an hour-long children’s show. With a genial host. And cute puppets. And entertaining and informative short segments. Welcome to…

Don’t get me wrong. I do enjoy watching Star Trek: Discovery, even though I would swear that every episode lately featured a character named Deuce X. Machina. You know, the crew of the Discovery are in the middle of a perilous plot, and suddenly the solution will come from some previously unidentified source. That kind…

It is a very, very rare moment when I will willingly sit in front of the TV set and watch a Lifetime motion picture. And by “willingly,” I mean by myself, with no one else in the room. Now, in the past, I have chosen to watch a Lifetime film. The biography of the Clark…

I would argue that if a TV show doesn’t have a cool intro to it – with great visuals, a catchy song and decent actor credits, then it loses some of its luster. But what’s even more fun is when some enterprising young soul takes the theme from one TV show and tries to interpret…

From the mid-1930’s to the late 1950’s, Paramount Studios, through first its Fleischer Studios and later Famous Studios companies, produced hundreds of animated episodes of Popeye the Sailor. The character was part of the King Features Syndicate of newspaper cartoon characters, and when new Popeye the Sailor cartoons were commissioned in the early 1960’s, King…

Yeah, I’ll admit it. I got hooked on the History Channel competition series Forged in Fire a few years ago. If you haven’t seen the show, think of it as Chopped with bladesmiths. Contestants are challenged to make specific types of knives in a short period of time, and then after the knives are tested…

Back in 1987, the Fox television network put together a weekend broadcast package of nine different TV shows. Some of them lasted for years (Married … With Children, 21 Jump Street), others spawned shows that are still in production today (The Tracey Ullman Show helped spin off The Simpsons), while other programs died a quick,…

I’ve been hooked on the Disney+ show Star Wars: The Mandalorian for the past year and a half. I enjoy this “Spaghetti Western” in space, and really packs a lot of action into every hour. I dig the main character, who is essentially the equivalent of the 1960’s “Man with No Name” that Clint Eastwood…

The show only aired on network television for one season, on CBS in 1963-64, and is largely forgotten. But if you ever see it… you will certainly remember the show. Welcome to East Side West Side, an extremely gritty drama about life in New York City, as told through the eyes of crusading social worker…

Last week I played this game of “Spectrum Roulette,” where I went through all the cable channels on the upper band of my Spectrum cable service. You know, the ones that just show vintage TV series and the like – GET TV, ME TV, COMET TV, etc. Oh, the Decades channel is running one of…