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...

The World’s Most Famous Zip Code

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the premiere of Beverly Hills, 90210.  During its freshman season, 90210 added value to the nascent FOX network, which targeted a younger demographic with its programming, much like ABC did in the late 1960s and early 1970s with The...

NASA, Space, and Popular Culture

NASA’s Golden Age of Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo inspired television programmers and producers to use space as a theme in the 1960s. I Dream of Jeannie starred Larry Hagman as Tony Nelson, an astronaut living in Cocoa Beach, Florida.  Nelson lives in a...

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...

Parenting, Mayberry Style

In The Andy Griffith Show episode Opie the Birdman, a lesson in creative parenting is exhibited to great effect.  Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina foresees trouble if Opie, his son, uses a slingshot.  Hence, he orders Opie not to use it. Opie, in turn,...