by David Krell | Jun 3, 2015 | David Krell
Many a cop has said that Barney Miller is the most realist cop show of all time. Not Hill Street Blues. Not Naked City. Not Delvecchio. Not Dragnet. Not NYPD Blue. Not even any of the shows in the Law & Order family. On an episode of Jon Favreau’s...
by David Krell | Jun 2, 2015 | David Krell
When Broadcast News premiered in 1987, it revealed the harsh realities of the television network news business, beginning with the necessity of answering to the bottom line. Once upon a time, perhaps, a television network’s news division was prized for its...
by David Krell | May 25, 2015 | David Krell
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...
by David Krell | May 24, 2015 | David Krell
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...
by David Krell | May 19, 2015 | David Krell
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...
by David Krell | May 17, 2015 | David Krell
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...
by David Krell | May 16, 2015 | David Krell
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...
by David Krell | May 15, 2015 | David Krell
ER debuted in 1994 on NBC, trouncing every thing in its path. Like Mickey Mantle on a baseball diamond, Michael Jordan on a basketball court, or Wayne Gretzky on the ice, ER dominated the competition. And a familiar, if not famous, actor found his breakout role....
by David Krell | May 14, 2015 | David Krell
CSI, after 15 years, has been canceled. William Petersen starred in the show about Crime Scene Investigators in Las Vegas from its debut in 2000 until 2008 as Gil Grissom, the lead investigator of the night shift. Grissom was fascinated by the different aspects of...
by David Krell | May 13, 2015 | David Krell
In the summer of 2007, HBO aired The Ghosts of Flatbush, a documentary about one baseball’s most beloved teams. The Brooklyn Dodgers. This two-part documentary drilled into the passion, celebrity, and heartbreak surrounding the team that gave the borough an...
