By Steve Rhodes
Watching Patti Blagojevich try to eat a tarantula faster than Lou Diamond Phillips last night really made me question what I was doing with my life. A new low.
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Posted on June 2, 2009
Classic TV: Classic Drinking
What I Watched Last Night: Vortex 2
By David Hall
I’m a weather geek. Often I’ll just put The Weather Channel on as my background, because I’m interested in weather anywhere. I know I’m not alone; Tom Skilling has his following, more and more time is devoted in news broadcasts everywhere to talk about what’s going on and, heck, they even have “The Weather Channel!”
So, with the advent of the tornado season, Mike Bettes of TWC is joining with a team of more than 100 scientists and crew with an “armada” of mobile radar trucks, etc., to track tornadoes throughout “Tornado Alley” a strip of states including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and parts of a couple of others.
TWC has been promoting the living crap out of this series, which basically is the 6-9 pm window that usually is manned by Bettes, a determined no-nonsense type with television good looks and Stephanie Abrams, who is both exceedingly knowledgeable and more bubbly than a bottle of San Pellegrino. She talks very fast and because she knows so much and has so much to say, she sometimes stumbles over her words. She can be both annoying and endearing at the same time. Her fatal flaw? The tendency, in just a couple of hours to ask multiple times, “What are you doing now?”
Posted on May 14, 2009
And Then There Was Maude
By The Beachwood Bea Arthur Affairs Desk
One last tribute – in five video parts – to Bea Arthur. Plus, the complete listing of our very own Kathryn Ware’s brilliant episode-by episode recap of the debut season of Maude.
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1. Sniff Swig Puff with Rock Hudson*
* Via beckystinger
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Posted on April 29, 2009
Rockford’s Firebird
From The Beachwood Firebird Files
The passing of the Pontiac brand brought a lot of Firebird fans out of the woodwork to once again commemmorate the tan and gold Espirit model that private investigator James Rockford drove.
We join in the celebration/mourning with these videos that memorialize Rockford and his car.
1. The Rockford Spin
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Posted on April 29, 2009
Frontline: The Released
What Really Happens To Mentally Ill Offenders When They Leave Prison
By Frontline
Five years ago, Frontline’s groundbreaking film, The New Asylums, went deep inside the Ohio prison system as it struggled to provide care to thousands of mentally ill inmates. This year, Frontline filmmakers Karen O’Connor and Miri Navasky return to Ohio to tell the next chapter in this disturbing story: what happens to mentally ill offenders when they leave prison. The Released airing on Tuesday, April 28, at 9 P.M. on PBS, is an intimate look at the lives of the seriously mentally ill as they struggle to remain free.
As communities across the country face the largest exodus of prisoners in history, the issue has never been more pressing. This year alone, over 700,000 people will leave prison, more than half of them mentally ill. Typically, these offenders leave prison with a bus ticket, $75 in cash, and two weeks’ worth of medication. Studies show that within 18 months, nearly two-thirds of mentally ill offenders – often poor and cut off from friends and family – are re-arrested.
Posted on April 28, 2009
TVNotes: From The Wire To The Hills
By Steve Rhodes
Bill Moyers recently interviewed The Wire creator and former newspaper reporter David Simon. Every journalist in the land ought to be paying attention. Here are a few excerpts with some commentary thrown in. But you should also go read the whole transcript.
SIMON: To find out what’s going on in my own city I often find myself at a bar somewhere taking, writing stuff down on a cocktail napkin that a police lieutenant or some school teacher tells me. Because these institutions are no longer being covered by beat reporters who are looking for the systemic. It doesn’t exist anymore.
And this is not all the Internet. This was a – you know, there’s a lot of the general tone in journalism right now is that of martyrology.
MOYERS: Being martyrs, right.
SIMON: Yes, we were doing our job. Making the world safe for democracy. And all of a sudden, terra firma shifted, new technology. Who knew that the Internet was going to overwhelm us? I would buy that if I wasn’t in journalism for the years that immediately preceded the Internet because I took the third buyout from the Baltimore Sun. I was about reporter number 80 or 90 who left, in 1995. Long before the Internet had had its impact. I left at a time – those buyouts happened when the Baltimore Sun was earning 37 percent profits.You know, we now know this because it’s in bankruptcy and the books are open. Thirty-percent profits.
Posted on April 22, 2009
Down For The Countess
Real Housewife will apparently keep her title.
Posted on April 2, 2009
24 Hours With The Hallmark Channel
By The Beachwood Greeting Card TV Affairs Desk
Not recommended for, um, mature viewers.
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6:30 a.m.: Paid Programming
7 a.m.: Golden Girls
7:30 a.m.: Golden Girls
8 a.m.: Golden Girls
8:30 a.m.: Golden Girls
Posted on April 1, 2009
What I Watched Last Night: Jockeys Joke
By Thomas Chambers
Years ago, perhaps before reality shows even existed, Homer Simpson was accused of sexually harassing the babysitter after he couldn’t resist peeling the gummi Venus de Milo off her rear end. He went on the Rock Bottom show to explain, apologize and defend himself, doing a rather good job. But when the show aired, it was so heavily edited and cut, Homer looked like a guilty personification of evil. The clock on the wall in the background jumps to all different times to show how hacked the editing was. Funny. Or was it?
And so it is with Jockeys, the “reality” show that mercifully came to its season end last week. The show has jumped the shark like Willy the Whale over Navy Pier.
Posted on March 20, 2009