Mary Tyler Moore, WJM, and the NFL

Her smile turned the world on, her accessibility proved that love is all around, and her personality made nothing days worthwhile more suddenly than Marcia Brady saying something came up in order to break a date with nice guy Charlie for Doug Simpson, the big man on...

“Ball Four Goes Hollywood”

When Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four hit bookshelves in 1970, it exploded myths, revealed secrets, and offered tales of baseball, theretofore kept protected from the public.  If reporters knew about Mickey Mantle’s alcohol problem, for example, they...

148 Bonnie Meadow Road

Humor, it is often said, serves us best when it is grounded in reality.  The Dick Van Dyke Show espoused this theorem. Carl Reiner, formerly a writer and performer on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, starring television comedy pioneer Sid Caesar, created a...

Bicycles and Comedy

Double Rush was a short-lived situation comedy that aired on CBS in 1995.  Stephen Nathan and Diane English created Double Rush, using the setting of a bike messenger service in New York City for comedic effect.  The service, appropriately, was called Double Rush....

Television, Philadelphia Style

Philadelphia is a rich setting for prime time television shows. Angie aired on ABC in the late 1970s.  Donna Pescow starred in the title role, a working class waitress who falls in love with a doctor, played by Robert Hays of Airplane fame.  Doris Roberts, perhaps...