A Soldier’s Story

M*A*S*H had several memorable characters.  Klinger dressed like a woman to get a discharge from the Army based on a Section 8.  Hawkeye used humor, usually bathed in sarcasm, as an emotional defense mechanism to protect his psyche from getting fully pummeled by the...

Late Night Gets Crowded

When Johnny Carson was in his golden years as the host of The Tonight Show, when Yo! MTV Raps introduced Hip-hop music to Generation X, when George Herbert Walker Bush started a potential presidential dynasty in his clan, comedian Arsenio Hall took on the challenge of...

Desperation in the Vast Wasteland

In 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow decried television as a vast wasteland.  Nearly a half-century later, Bill Carter analyzed the landscape, coalescing his findings into the 2006 book Desperate Networks. A television show reaching the prime time airwaves is a...

NYPD TV

The NYPD is a staple of television programming. Naked City.  NYPD Blue.  Law & Order.  Eischeid.  NYPD.  Cagney & Lacey.  Brooklyn South.  Barney Miller.  Car 54, Where Are You?  Blue Bloods.  Kojak.  McCloud.  Law & Order: SVU.  New York Undercover....

A Tinseltown Tragedy

In 1959, George Reeves committed suicide.  Or did he? The 2006 movie Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter, mixes fact with speculation about television’s Superman portrayer taking his own life in the home that he shared with Leonore Lemmon. Adrien Brody...

A Mad Man from the Reagan Era

Advertising has provided great fodder for prime television, including the characters Larry Tate of Bewitched, Kip Wilson and Henry Desmond of Bosom Buddies, Jack McLaren of The Closer, Mason McGuire and Conner of Trust Me, Ann Romano of One Day at a Time, and Don...