By Kathryn Ware

Our look back on the debut season of Ironside continues.
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Episode: Light at the End of the Journey
Airdate: 9 November 1967
Plot: Shortly before he’s to meet his old buddy Ironside for a rib dinner, private investigator Ted Bartlett is gunned down waiting for a hotel elevator. Not even a blind witness is enough to stop Ironside from getting his man. As the cop says to the coroner, “If you were going to kill someone, would you kill a friend of Robert T. Ironside?” Only if you had a death wish!

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Posted on October 27, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

1. If you, like me, watch The Hills – don’t be afraid to admit it – you will love The Hills According To Me, which must be a total mindfuck to LC, Audrina and the gang, seeing as how it is MTV itself viciously satirizing its own show, as well as an example of the meta-meta media universe we now live in.
Here’s a sample:

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Posted on October 20, 2008

By Kathryn Ware

Our look back on the debut season of Ironside continues.
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Episode: Let My Brother Go
Airdate: 2 November 1967
Plot: What, no murder to solve? This week’s episode casts Ironside as a tough-hearted Mother Teresa. The Chief is having trouble getting his Big Brother program for at-risk youth off the ground. It seems the boys in the hood would rather make zip guns than play touch football in the park with a bunch of off-duty cops. Sheeze, kids.

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Posted on October 15, 2008

By Kathryn Ware

Our look back on the debut season of Ironside continues.
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Episode: Tagged for Murder
Airdate: 26 October 1967
Plot: Detective Ed Brown catches what seems to be an open-and-shut case of accidental death. But Ed’s no dummy and he smells a murder. After all, he’s been training under San Francisco’s finest sleuth, Chief Robert T. Ironside. Connecting the dots from a wristwatch to Army dog tags to a Swiss bank account, Ironside and his team take on a murder investigation that spans from the Italian campaign of WWII all the way to a “present day” San Francisco cable car barn.

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Posted on October 6, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Recent observations from more TV viewing than should be allowed even in a democracy.
1. After an uneven season opener, Mad Men has only gotten better. I mean, it’s downright gripping. Deep and layered with loads of potential plot and character development ahead of us. Yay, Mad Men! Here’s the show’s official blog.
2. Audrina Patridge: Not a smart girl. But smart enough to know she had to patch things up with Lo or risk drifting off the show. Also, does everyone betray LC?
3. Watching old episodes of Soul Train is one of the joys of staying in on Saturdays.

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Posted on September 23, 2008

By Kathryn Ware

Our look back on the debut season of Ironside continues.
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Episode 7: An Inside Job
Airdate: 19 October 1967
Plot: Using a concealed knife, two convicts jump their jailers and spring free from a holding cell in police headquarters. Trapped in a building of wall-to-wall cops, the “birds” sneak into Ironside’s quarters looking for a way out. It’s their lucky day when they realize they’ve got the former Chief of Detectives as their hostage. When Eve joins the hostage pool, the stakes are raised and Ironside is compelled to use his master criminal mind to devise a foolproof escape plan – proof that Ironside will do anything to get out of writing a speech.

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Posted on September 19, 2008

By Scott Buckner

After years of searching, I’ve finally discovered the location of the top-secret farm that grows the world’s crop of smokin’-hot pole-dancing strippers and tavern beer-poster models. It’s Telemundo’s hour-long music video dance party Descontrol, airing Saturdays at noon on our city’s very own WSNS-TV/Channel 44.
If American farming techniques were this good, we’d have ears of corn the size of train locomotives.

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Posted on September 15, 2008

By Kathryn Ware

Our look back on the debut season of Ironside continues.
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Episode 6: The Taker
Airdate: 12 October 1967
Plot: It’s a foggy day in Frisco Town when a fedora-sporting cop named Andrew Anderson is gunned down by an acquaintance on a deserted street. After an incriminating amount of cash is found on his body and certain improper relationships come to light, it appears as if Anderson was on the take. The police commissioner is hoping to keep the crooked cop story under wraps and the best way to do that is to keep Ironside, the force’s best detective, off the case. Fat chance.

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Posted on September 10, 2008

By Scott Buckner

For years, I thought that one of this country’s major exports to Third World nations was championship T-shirts printed for losing sports teams. This is how we end up with all those photos of children from countries ravaged by war, cyclones, or abject poverty who will grow up believing the Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XLI. But thanks to last Saturday afternoon’s segment of The Woodwright’s Shop on Chicago’s WYCC-TV/Channel 20, I learned that an even more humanitarian American export is technology that hasn’t been used since George Armstrong Custer was recruited to make Montana the happiest place on earth by killing every Native American in sight.
Every weekend, Woodwright and cheerful host Roy Underhill celebrate the world of hand tools and construction methods using those tools popular among our settler ancestors when they weren’t too busy with other popular activities of the day, like dropping dead from cholera. Basically, Roy and Woodwright is what Norm Abrams and This Old House would be if nobody ever bothered to discover electricity. Sure, Roy looks Howdy Doody-ish in his tweed cabbie hat and suspenders. Sure, some of his guests can be a lot like those socially off-kilter railroad buffs able to recite the arrival and departure schedule for every train in the history of the Monon Railroad. But believe me, when the planet is a smoking cinder on Armageddon Day and the rest of us are worrying about how we’re going to survive without cell phones and Internet porn, Roy’s going to be the only guy around able to build a two-seat outhouse without even using nails.

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Posted on September 9, 2008

By Scott Buckner

As the late Bernie Mac might say: Go ahead, America. Spend a 10-day vacation with nowhere to go, nothing to do, no money to do it with, and nobody to spend it with except plain old local TV from stupid-ass rabbit ears antennae that only works when you hang it off a nail next to the window. Even then, you still never get Channel 2. Kids today don’t know TV hardship until they have to flip the channel with a pair of pliers because the selector dial disappeared.
But old-school’s luster only goes so far, so sooner or later, you start forming opinions about daytime TV that have nothing to do with Jerry Springer. This is especially true if you somehow manage to avoid a single encounter with Jerry Springer without having to rent anything from Blockbuster or bend over and grab your ankles for what Comcast charges these days for basic cable.

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Posted on September 3, 2008