Letterman, Leno, and Late Night

Tonight, the first full week without David Letterman in late night television begins. Letterman, the informal successor to Johnny Carson as the ruler of the late night kingdom, began his television talk show hosting career with a morning show in 1980.  It won two Emmy...

The Yellow Brick Road Goes Through Minneapolis

Take a sweet, innocent, and wide-eyed young woman from the Midwest and put her in an encounter with three men.  One is fairly wooden, showing emotions rarely.  One does not have much in the way of intelligence, common sense, or decorum.  One growls a lot, but is...

I’d Like to Buy Don Draper a Coke

With a final scene that rivals Bob Newhart waking up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette in Newhart, Hawkeye leaving the 4077th by helicopter and seeing that B.J. used rocks to spell out the word “Goodbye” in M*A*S*H, and the deaths of the major characters...

The Peacock Becomes a Phoenix

In the 1980s, NBC’s peacock rose like a phoenix after startling programming disasters, including Pink Lady and Jeff, Supertrain, and the departure of the original Not Ready for Prime Time cast of Saturday Night Live.  Under programming guru Brandon Tartikoff and...

The World of Howard Beale

In 1976, Americans were mad as hell.  And they didn’t want to take it anymore. The fury, of course, was depicted in an iconic scene from the movie Network.  Before FOX constituted a legitimate fourth television network in the 1980s, the triad of CBS, ABC, and...