All articles filed in television

There are TV shows from my youth that, for better or for worse, I will always have a cultural memory associated with same.  That feeling of getting up at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning to fill my brain with animated mush and Froot Loops for hours.  Fun stuff. One of those Saturday morning programs only…

Last year, I got hooked on the new CBS All Access iteration of the classic Star Trek series, a show called Star Trek: Discovery.  The program had its quirks – the storty seemed more episodic rather than self-contained, some plotlines required an intense knowledge of Trekkie history, and the show’s characters – while themselves the…

Way back in ancient times – when my cable company was called Capital Cablevision and I had this device called a video cassette recorder to watch shows at a later time – I loved a TV show called Murphy Brown.  It starred Candice Bergen as a hard-driven but kind-hearted investigative reporter, who worked with a…

There are very few examples of the Vietnam War used as a backdrop for prime time episodic television.  I know of two instances from American prime time TV shows in the late 1980’s / early 1990’s – the action drama Tour of Duty, and the emotional war drama China Beach. Recently, I came across an…

Follow me on this.  You may need a WABAC machine or a TARDIS or an air-guitar-powered phone booth. In 2016, the prime time networks aired four different time travel programs.  ABC’s Time After Time, based on the 1979 sci-fi drama that saw H.G. Wells chase Jack the Ripper through modern-day America … failed after five…

I tell you, every time I turn on the news, it’s another embarrassment from our President and from his hand-picked cronies.  Even today’s news just makes my blood boil.  What’s today’s scandal, you say?  Doesn’t matter… just know that there’s one.  It’s as bad as you think it is … and then some. Which is…

I do enjoy the Star Trek franchise.  I really do.  Although there are parts of it that I really haven’t focused on, I do appreciate this whole overall concept. What’s harder to grasp, for me, is the position where the new Star Trek iteration, Star Trek: Discovery, fits into everything.  The show purports to take…

Of late, I’ve been watching more and more of MSNBC.  I don’t know what it is … perhaps I’m looking for intelligent discourse on the day’s news, and the newscasters, anchorpeople and political pundits at MSNBC seem to fit my interests. By 9:00 p.m., as I’m winding down my day, I’ve got Rachel Maddow on…

Imagine, if you dare, that the two most dominant superpowers finally came to a head.  Would there be rampant nuclear destruction, billions of lives lost, tragedy on a totally unimaginable scale? I don’t know.  But in 1987, we got a glimpse of what could happen if the Russians actually defeated the United States, and annexed…